Page 14 of Beware of Dog (Lean Dogs Legacy #6)

Two days passed uneventfully. Cass went to class, she called her sister, as instructed, though Raven had little to no time to talk and sounded exhausted besides.

She tried to be there for Jamie, who woke Cass multiple times whimpering and crying in her sleep.

She added layers and extra shading to her Comics project, and wondered again and again why she’d styled Frank Castle to look like Frank Shepherd.

The realization that she wanted him to kiss her plagued her, as expected.

In class, walking across campus, when she was trying to study.

Crushing on a Lean Dog was not a new phenomenon.

When Raven took her to Baskerville Hall as a little girl, she’d been awestruck by the men, their leather, and their rings, and the smoke wreathing their heads.

There’d been a prospect in London when she was eleven, young and tow-headed, who’d smiled at her, and her stomach had filled with butterflies.

He’d disappeared, and when she asked Phillip about him, he’d said, simply, “He’s gone.

Don’t think of him anymore.” (She now suspected that Phillip kicked him out of the club before he’d even patched because of those smiles.)

Then there was Reese. And even Toly, briefly. Warm sensations in her chest, bursts of shyness, the relentless tug of her attention. She’d wanted to study them, trace them with an artist’s eye, and then sketch them…which she’d done. Shamefully. Secrets buried in the back of an old sketchbook.

But those crushes had felt so tame. Warm, and desperate, yes, but chaste, too. She’d thought they were beautiful. Untouchable.

But when she thought of Shep, she wondered if her nails would press dents into the muscles of his back.

Wondered how hot his breath would feel against her throat…

her chest…everywhere. There was a rough realness to him that the others lacked.

Fantasies of them had been just that: fantasy.

Impossible dreams that left her heart aching.

Shep, by contrast, was so solid. Up close and tangible. She had the sense that if she pushed him at all, he’d snap, and eat her up, and that she’d enjoy it.

Needless to say, she didn’t get much work done in those two days.

And then Melissa arrested Sig, and all hell broke loose.

~*~

Cass didn’t have class on Friday, but Jamie did, so Cass usually spent her mornings working on her various projects on the top floor of the gallery building, where long, heavy tables were scrubbed clean by the light that poured in through four walls of windows.

At nine, she was one of only a handful of students present, the lofty space filled with the quiet rustle of paper and scratch of pencil and charcoal.

Cass had her project laid out before her, choosing Prisma color pencils for her original character—a young woman she refused to see as a self-portrait—when her phone vibrated across the table.

It was Melissa. “Hey,” Cass whispered when she answered, and earned dirty looks from the neighboring tables.

“This is a heads-up call,” Melissa said, all business straight away. “We’re on our way to pick up Sig.”

“Shit,” Cass breathed. It wasn’t that she’d doubted Melissa, per se, but a part of her had thought he’d never face any consequences. “Here at the school?”

“Yeah. He’s supposed to have a free period right now, and a witness says he likes to hang out on the third floor of the library.”

Cass knew the spot, its well-loved corduroy chairs, its window view of a courtyard below, the nearby study tables, and a section of Civil War tomes on the shelves that no one ever checked out, and which offered a sense of privacy.

“Wait,” she said, realization slamming into her. “You said ‘witness.’ Did someone else come forward?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“Aw, boo.”

“Where are you and where is Jamie?” Melissa asked. The whir of an engine sounded in the background, and her voice was clipped, tight with readiness.

“I’m working on a project,” Cass said, pulse picking up as understanding dawned. She pinched the phone between her cheek and shoulder and started packing up. “Jamie’s in class, but I can head her way now.”

“Do,” Melissa said. “We’re going to do this as quickly and quietly as possible, but there’s a good chance Sig will make a fuss, and then we’ll have a scene on our hands.”

“Okay. Understood.”

“Cass,” Melissa said, when Cass started to hang up. “Be careful.” It was a serious warning, and not the idle advice of an adult doing her rote duty.

“Yeah. I will be.”

She shoved her phone in her pocket, gathered up her portfolio, and hustled toward the stairwell. Once she was inside it, away from the hushed environs of the art room, she broke into a jog, sneaker soles slapping loudly off each concrete step.

When she hit the bottom floor, she tried calling Jamie, but she was in Art History, and it went straight to voicemail.

Okay. That was fine. It would take Melissa and her partner, Rob, time to park, to walk across campus, to get up to the third floor of the library. She had time.

She hurried, though.

She usually carried her portfolio by its twin suitcase handles, but today she ducked her head through the shoulder strap and let it bounce against her hip as she jogged down the familiar cobbled sidewalks.

It was a bright day, but sharply cold, the wind scoring her cheeks, and funneling down into the neck of the insufficient hoodie she’d worn instead of a proper jacket.

She rounded a corner and almost crashed into a group of slow-walking guys. “Shit! Sorry!” She ducked between them amidst their protests and kept going.

Before she reached Jamie’s building, she had to pass the library. She could tell, even from a distance, that she wouldn’t be able to keep jogging. In fact, she was forced to grind to a halt, and then had to wend and thread her way through a growing crowd.

“Excuse me…excuse me…shit, watch where you’re going.” She got elbowed, elbowed back, earned a nasty curse for it, and ducked beneath a tall guy’s arm to emerge in a clear space in front of the main library doors.

Melissa stood with her hands up, motioning onlookers back. She held her badge up with one hand, and despite her small size looked authoritative in her leather jacket, black pants, and low-heeled boots. “Everyone, give us some space! Back up! Get back!”

Rob had hold of Sig, one hand at the small of his back, where his wrists were cuffed together, the other gripped tight in his hood, steering him forward when Sig stumbled.

Sig himself walked with his head high, gaze roving the crowd, fine features set in a portrait of bored disgust. His usual beanie was gone, the hair beneath mussed, and Cass wondered if there’d been a scuffle, or if Melissa had snatched it off him to try and get a rise out of him.

Cass felt a pulse of triumph. Ha. Serves you right, you bastard. How’s it feel to be the one who’s not in control?

Then Sig’s gaze landed on Cass, and one corner of his mouth lifted in the tiniest of smirks. He opened his mouth and bellowed, “The NYPD is rife with corruption!”

A cheer went up from the crowd, raucous and immediate, and Cass’s triumph shriveled up in her chest.

“They’re in bed with criminals!” Sig shouted, turning to address the group amidst more cheers. “With corrupt politicians! With powerful oligarchs who oppose our artistic expression!”

“Yeah!” several people shouted.

And, “Sig, what happened?!”

“Why are you under arrest?”

“Let him go!”

“Free Sig!”

Rob shoved him hard, and then caught him before he could go down to his knees.

“Police brutality!” someone yelled.

“False imprisonment!”

“Fuck the police!”

Creativity notwithstanding, they were starting to get rowdy, and Melissa’s expression was taut with anger.

“Get back!” she shouted again, and her free hand went to her gun.

Several students fell back, shouting, the girls screaming. The accusations rose to an indecipherable crescendo, one voice stark in the chaos: “Shoot me! Shoot me! Shoot me! Police brutality!”

They made their shuffling way forward, the two detectives and Sig, and then the crowd swallowed them.

Cass hoped they would make it to the car unmolested, but there was nothing she could do. She dove back into the fray, and worked her way upstream toward Jamie’s building.

~*~

It took less than half an hour for the student body to figure out why Sig had been arrested, and who had accused him of such a crime. Cass managed to get Jamie back to their dorm, but then…

“You stupid slut!” a female voice called through the door, and then the pounding started again. “He didn’t touch you! You’re lying!”

Jamie was sitting at the head of her bed, a quilt wrapped around her shoulders, cowering and shivering like a struck dog. “Who is that?” she asked, voice tremulous.

By Cass’s count, no less than fifteen of their fellow dorm residents had come by to pound on the door, shout at them, and, in one case, slide a threatening note under the door. Sig was popular , and the ladies of NYU were not happy about his charges.

“I don’t know,” she said, distractedly, “some bitch.” She stalked over to the door and pounded back on her side of it. “Stick it in your hole!” she shouted.

The girl on the other side called her a name and stormed off, heels clacking loudly over the tiles.

Cass turned around and put her back to the door.

Jamie sniffled and wiped her nose with a corner of her quilt, and Cass knew they couldn’t stay here all night.

Jamie had already confessed that she hadn’t yet told her parents about the rape, and that she didn’t want to upset them, so that ruled out Brooklyn.

Likewise, Raven and Toly’s flat wasn’t the place to take a hyperventilating rape victim in bad need of a Valium.

Speaking of drugs…

Decision made, Cass fired off a quick text, then went to drag her overnight bag out from under her bed.

“W-what are you doing?”

“Packing. We’re getting out of here, so you should pack, too.”

“But…”

The door rattled on its hinges.

Cass tipped her head toward it. “You want to listen to that all night?”

Jamie was silent a beat, then the quilt rustled as she uncocooned herself and found her own bag.

When they were both ready, Jamie looked at her with red-rimmed eyes and a deathly pale face. “How are we going to get out of here?”

“We’re going to walk out the door,” Cass said, “and I’m going to deck anyone who tries to stop us.” She fished into her bag and came out with a small keychain cannister of pepper spray. “Also, I have this.”

“Oh my God.”

“I’m not going to use it .” Unless she needed to. “Come on, let’s go.”

“Cass,” Jamie said, pleading.

“Stay behind me. Don’t respond to anyone.” Cass positioned herself in front of the door, Jamie at her back, pepper spray in her right hand, left on the doorknob. “Ready?”

Jamie whimpered.

“Good enough.”

Cass didn’t open the door—she snatched it open. Two girls—her fellow students, fellow dorm residents—stumbled and nearly fell into her, clutching at the door frame to keep from face-planting. Their eyes and mouths sprang open in shock.

“Hello, girls.” Cass brandished her pepper spray. “We were just leaving, and you weren’t going to cause us any trouble, were you?”

They looked at one another, then at the spray cannister.

“N-no,” one of them stammered.

Cass smiled at them. “Good. I thought not.”