Page 29 of Queen's Ransom

At the door, she glanced back over her shoulder. “Thank you, Chief.”

“Of course,” he said. “I’m sorry I broke up the party.”

“Which you were invited to,” Helena said.

Hand to her shoulder, Celia redirected her gaze and lowered her voice. “Go easy on him.” At Helena’s creased brow, Celia chuckled. “I meant Brax.”

“No promises.”

She leaned in and kissed Helena’s cheek, right where her hand had been earlier, a reminder for them both. “Try harder.”

Chapter Twelve

Helena pretended not to notice the curious looks she and Chris garnered as they followed Brax around the outside of the bullpen toward the hall of interrogation rooms. After six years doing criminal defense work, thirty-plus years existing as a Madigan in San Francisco, and eighteen years since she’d thrown her first knife, she was used to the stares and glares from police, used to pretending she was any other attorney visiting a client at the station and not the target of periodic SFPD investigations. Folks didn’t know what to make of her, a suspected criminal and a criminal defense attorney, or of the Madigans, pillars of the city and of its criminal underbelly. At least there weren’t as many sets of eyeballs on them on a Sunday afternoon.

“You want to tell me what happened between you and Celia at the bakery?” Chris asked, distracting her from their audience.

Did she want to tell her future brother-in-law, the brother of the woman who’d seduced her this afternoon, about the frosting-tinged kiss that had gone from sweet to heat with a single flick of Celia’s talented tongue? “Nope.”

“You want to tell Dex, though, don’t you?” he said with a sideways grin.

Fucker knew her too well already. “I do,” she confessed. “But I won’t out her to that asshole. She deserves that satisfaction.”

Chris chuckled as they turned the corner into the hall of interrogation rooms, and Helena was not surprised to see Hawes and Jax, who had not walked across the open bullpen with them, slip into the hallway from the stairwell at the other end.

Brax didn’t seem the least bit surprised either. “I can buy you twenty minutes.”

“Probably only need five,” Helena said.

He opened the observation-side door for Hawes, who asked Brax, “You gonna watch too?”

“Fuck no.”

Chris followed Hawes and Jax into the room, and Brax turned on his heel, back toward the bullpen. Helena caught up to him after a step, grasping his biceps. “After, I want a word.”

“If I’m still here.”

“Bullshit, we both know you’ll still be here. Where else are you gonna go? Home alone.” She used his arm to pull him far enough around to catch his gaze. “You made me a promise. You made him a promise.”

“I’m fucking keeping it.” The sudden vehemence in Brax’s voice—more life than she’d seen in him in months—was enough of a surprise that she loosened her grasp, and he wrenched his arm free.

“You better be at the wedding,” she called after his retreating back.

He rounded the corner, but she didn’t suspect he went far. Whatever stick was up his ass, she knew he’d still protect them. Promises and all that.

She leaned in the observation room door. “You set?”

Jax was plugging what looked like a flash drive into the small control box by the observation window. “We’re set.”

Chris stole a kiss from his fiancé, then met Helena in the hallway. “Are you ready?”

“I don’t want to be in there any longer than I have to be,” she said, confessing another truth.

“You and me both.”

Chris turned the knob on the interrogation room door and held it open for her to enter. Dexter Russo was handcuffed to the table, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that hugged his muscular frame, his dark hair askew but in that way that on some guys was always sexy. Ditto the blue eyes, despite the bags he couldn’t hide beneath them. Marco and Mia came by it honestly with two good-looking parents. She could see why Celia would have fancied him at first, before he got his hooks into her and showed her his evil side.

Just like the asshole he was, he barely took notice of her, swinging his faux big-dick energy Chris’s direction instead. “Well, look who it is. The prodigal son returned.”

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