Page 109 of Stella
Cash glances up as Tag wraps his knuckle against the door.
“Boss,” Tag says.
“Thanks, Tag.” Cash waves him off. “You can go, this won’t take very long.”
He humphs, but doesn’t protest.
I stand there long after Tag has disappeared.
“Is everything okay?” I am barely hanging in there with suspense. “Tag didn’t say anything.”
“That’s because he doesn’t know anything,” Cash says as he stares at me for a moment, then he does the unthinkable. He tilts his screen to face me, and I see image after image of me and Cale embracing. Similar photos to the ones I was sent, but us kissing at his door? Oh, holy shit. I swallow hard, my entire life up to this point flashing between my eyes as I come up blank. No words come out. Nada.
“So,prospect.Would you care to explain why there were multiple images emailed to me of you in the arms of Cale Callaghan; the number one enemy of this MC?”
I’m so fucked.
24
CALE
Two hours earlier
I toldWillow just about everything — keeping the parts about me and Stella out of it — and she suggested we dig deeper. I didn’t know how deep this chain of command ran until we looked up Razor’s file and found nothing. Frowning, I checked up on Carlo Caruso’s file, then Forger; using his real name. Nothing in the system. I worked on both of those cases. I was there to witness the carnage.
Willow passes me a coffee as she sits back on the other side of the desk, her laptop open. It’s late, and we’ve been here for hours.
“So we’re piecing all of this together, but finding nothing,” she says. “We need to go back to basics.”
“I’m racking my brain trying to think of what I’ve missed,” I admit. “But whoever this is just wants to mess with me, get inside my head.”
“I get that, but it makes no sense. You’ve nothing to do with the Rebels aside from hating them, and having the hots for Stella.”
I ignore that last part. “It’s a game to them, to make me doubt myself, to make me doubt every single thing I’ve ever known.”
She looks at me quizzically. “What are you talking about?”
“Never mind,” I mutter.
“Cale, if we’re breaking into classified police files, you’ve gotta give me the whole truth.”
“I am,” I say, though that’s not true. “You don’t think it’s weird that ever since Seymour Montgomery took over, all of these cases involving the Rebels have mysteriously disappeared.”
“How do they just disappear?” She shakes her head.
“I’ve no fucking clue, but this shit is fucked up. There’s nothing. No evidence that anything took place in any of those cases. I’ll bet if we go back far enough we’ll find a lot more mysterious shit going on.”
“So we have corrupt cops, all stations have them, the question is what can we do right now, and what does any of it mean?”
I sigh, not wanting to go into my personal life because I’ve never told anyone too much about my earlier life. “Years ago, my grandparents said something to me about my mom hanging with an MC called the Devil’s Ink,” I say. “When she was alive, my mom was wild and reckless. She ended up a junkie, and she’d do anything for a hit. I was only a baby when she surrendered me to my grandparents. She’d come and go, sometimes taking me with her, but more often than not, she’d leave me for long bouts at a time. One day my grandparents told her no. She wasn’t gonna keep taking me away when I needed a stable home.” My jaw tightens when I think about how irresponsible she was. I get she was fucked up, but I was a baby, and she didn’t care.
“They did the right thing,” Willow says. “I’m guessing you’re not sorry about that part?”
I shake my head. “I started thinking about it as the years went on. About her hanging with the Devil's Ink, hell, I even thought the man who impregnated her was a biker, but she never told my grandparents who the father was.”
Willow’s voice drops to a whisper. “You think it was Razor?”
“I never really thought about it, but by association, yeah, I guess it crossed my mind that it could’ve been. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I did a little digging, looking up any intel I could find about my mom, and if any of what my grandpa said was true.” I palm the back of my neck, not wanting to say this next part. “I found this.”
