Page 3 of Wicked Sin

My boss gives me a serene look and nods. “Aren’t we all, Vasquez?”

I walked right into that life lesson like a pro. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You want to go undercover, you need to stop fitting people into boxes. That’s not how life works. Sometimes people make choices for reasons we don’t understand, but they always have a reason.”

Yeah. And my task for the next few days—hopefully just the next few hours—is to figure out the right angle to not turn a nothing crank complaint into a big-fucking-deal investigation when the Blow Job Princess has proven she couldn’t care less about destroying someone’s reputation.

I’m going to have to make her trust me when she doesn’t trust anyone in a uniform. Maybe anyone with a dick, for all I know.

“Go talk to her. With an open mind,” the captain says, again reminding me not to pre-judge this situation. Whatever the fuck it is.

“You think this is a false report?”

“Almost certainly. Why report drugs to the Secret Service?”

I crack my jaw back and forth. Right.Fuck. This could get sticky at the highest levels.

“So, I need to do due diligence, but also make this go away if at all possible?”

“Something like that. I didn’t ask any questions. I thought I’d leave that to you to figure out after you talk to her and get a sense of the situation.”

“This is highly irregular.”

Her brows pull together in a tight frown. “Sure is.”

“I don’t understand why the feds are okay with us messing in their sandbox.”

“Gives them plausible deniability.”

I groan. Right. “If this turns into a PR nightmare, we’ll wear that, not them.”

“Try not to turn it into a PR nightmare, then.” She smiles. “Play nice with the woman.”

“Of course.” I wink. “And I’ll get my vacation after this? Maybe a few extra days for the trouble?”

“Don’t push your luck.”

I smirk. “You can come dancing too, Captain.”

She grins. “Get out of my office.”

2

Taylor

“I should have known,”my client says. Four soft, broken words.

First rule of peer counseling—it’s not about me. Curiosity and comparison have no place in the kind of support we offer. We offer the kind of support survivors of sexual violence have trouble finding anywhere else.

But deep in the back of my mind, the comparison whirls anyway.

I know how you feel, I want to say. I don’t. Of course, I don’t. Just like nobody can truly know howIfeel about how I was raised.

I was twenty-seven when I realized I’d been groomed by my mother to use sex and beauty to control men. That in the process, she’d let men useme, long before I could consent.

It took me another year—three hundred and sixty-five days—to do anything about that.

Another three to get to this side of the counseling table, here in this cozy, warm space in a security-monitored building on the other side of the continent from my family.

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