Page 72 of Cage

In fact, he’d gone into work many times over the years feeling like absolute trash. Determined not to miss a single morning. Cage had even cancelled tooth surgery to avoid missing a shift.

Taking a slight step back from work didn’t come easy to him.

Far from it.

But it was a little bit easier now he was with Katie.

It was like he had a concrete reason to put at least some of his energies into something other than solving cases and grinding away at his enormous backlog of police work.

‘Okay, I’m going for the donut, screw it,’ Cage said, laughing with a colleague as the pair of them each grabbed two donuts each and emptied the box. ‘One of the new guys can haul ass and re-fill these later.’

Cage walked back to his desk.

After munching down the donuts, he found it a struggle to keep his head in the work. It might have been the gargantuan stack of paperwork to his right, or the similarly large stack of work to his left, but he just couldnotfocus.

The aircon was also struggling to maintain any kind of consistency. And what made it worse was that not only was it not cooling the office, but it was also making intermittent loud thudding and whirring noises.

‘Shut that fucking thing up!’ Detective Kal Brasenose shouted.

Kal was sitting a few desks away from Cage.

They weren’t exactly best buddies, but on the subject of the faltering aircon both could agree that something needed to be done.

‘I hear that,’ Cage replied, his frustration growing.

Deep down, Cage knew that he didn’t want to be in work at all.

Faulty aircon or not.

Where he wanted to be was with Katie.

But there was work to be done at the station. There was no getting around that. Cage began to slowly plough his way through the outstanding paperwork.

Progress was slow.

Cage even decided to put in his special noise cancelling earbuds. This wasn’t something he liked to do often, and it was definitely frowned upon by his boss who saw it as very anti-social.

But if there was any hope of Cage concentrating, he knew he would need to cancel out as much of the surrounding distractions as possible.

The earbuds worked for a while.

But it wasn’t long before Cage’s mind began to wander again.

Cage couldn’t help but think back to his old partner, Nicki.

It had been a vice bust. Nothing out of the ordinary. Or so they thought. But when Nicki and Cage were ambushed, it turned into a total nightmare. One that sadly Nicki would never wake from.

Despite managing to escape the ambush, Nicki had taken several bullets. She managed to cling on to life for long enough for Cage to get them both to the hospital and into the emergency operating theater.

After that, everything went downhill.

Nicki’s body just couldn’t handle the trauma.

As she passed away in the early hours of that morning, something in Cage changed.

Changed forever.

Up until that point, Cage had been utterly fearless and relentless. He had no fear of any situation on the tough streets. Cage had taken down more bad guys in hand-to-hand combat than he could count.

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