Page 88 of Stay in Your Lane!

Evidently he was, because he ended that call a moment later.

“Now.” He looked right at Officer Hansen as he took a pair of cuffs out of his pocket. “How about we do this the easy way and not make a scene here in the hospital?”

Hansen glanced at the cuffs, then at my dad. With a sigh of defeat, he turned around with his hands behind his back.

I never thought I’d be so grateful to be on a hospital gurney. I didn’t even think it was the concussion making the room sway. I just… couldn’t fucking believe this. My dad had heard. He was taking charge and arresting Hansen and Reardon.

And Everett was being released. Not just released, but watched like a hawk by a sergeant who I knew Dad trusted with his life. Colin was being released, too.

Was it over? Was it really, really over?

Probably not. But immediate danger was over. The fire was out. I could breathe.

Dad glanced at me. “I need to take him downtown. Will you be okay here on your own?”

Nodding, I croaked, “Y-yeah. I can, uh… I can get an Uber or something. I want to see Everett.”

Dad grunted. “I’ll have your brother come pick you up.”

That sounded even better. “Okay.”

He gave my arm a squeeze. “You did good, son. We’ll get this all straightened out.”

And with that, he left, frog-marching Officer Hansen out of the emergency room in handcuffs for all to see.

Closing my eyes, I pressed back against the pillows.

This wasn’t over yet. But in some ways—in the most pressing and important ways…

It was.

CHAPTER 25

EVERETT

Well.

That had been a fucked up twenty-four hours.

I didn’t havegetting arrested by SWAT after a literal firefight in Waffles?on my BINGO card before yesterday. I also didn’t have burning my fingers on a stupid fire extinguisher while smothering a grease fire or doing my best not to freak out while my boyfriend bled from hisears, holy shit, but those things happened too, so maybe now was a good time for me to do something else that would normally be bizarre and/or life-threatening, because clearly the odds were in my favor. Maybe I should take the hearse drag racing, or stick my hand in the fish tank.

I eyed Steve from where Kyle and I were collapsed together on the couch. He was swimming back and forth in a very deliberate, almost taunting manner, his beady eyes trained on me as he did tight little laps of the plant at the front of the tank. Hmm, nope. I didn’t trust my luckthatfar.

Somehow I’d gone from“number one suspect, armed and dangerous, throw him in the holding cell”to a free man just a handful of hours after I was arrested. I don’t think I’d everridden the edge of a panic attack so intensely in my life. Even when we were under fire at the safehouse and Waffles?, the immediacy of the shitstorm we were in kept me from actually feelinganxiousabout it. Adrenaline was a hell of a drug.

But being in a cell, watched by cops who had no reason to think I was anything other than the kind of criminal dumb enough to take on a SWAT team—that was a whole new level of tension.

At least I hadn’t talked to them. They’d tried to threaten me into it, coerce me into it, even coax me into it, but apart from knowing I shouldn’t speak without a lawyer present, my jaw had been clenched so tight I was sure I was losing enamel. I couldn’t even relax long enough to sip from a bottle of water, which they kept telling me meant for sure I was guilty and they were gonna throw away the key and more, and then…

Sergeant Gonzales was a heavyset man with a truly magnificent moustache who’d cleared a path to my holding cell and, without ceremony, guided me out and to an actual office where I could sit instead of standing. Every question thrown his way by the other cops was redirected, and nobody was interested in telling him he couldn’t do what he was doing, which—win! That was the first moment I thought I might get through this.

“Detective Bowman says you’re all right, then you’re all right,” he told me as he sat down across from me. “You don’t need to tell me anything, just wait for your lawyer to get here. I’ll make sure you have privacy when they arrive.”

“I…haven’t got a lawyer,” I stammered, finally unlocking my jaw.

He’d smirked. “Oh, you do. He’s making a stink at HQ right now, but he’ll be here soon enough.”

Weird.I let it pass in favor of asking a way more important question. “Is Kyle okay? Kyle Bowman, he was with me at Waffles?, he was taken away in an ambulance.”

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