Page 4 of Beware of Dog (Lean Dogs Legacy #6)

There were clothes waiting for her on the closed toilet lid when she stepped out of the shower: a pair of his dark blue sweatpants, a t-shirt, and hoodie, all of which swallowed her up and made her look like a little kid.

She tied her hair up in a messy knot with an elastic she found in the drawer; Toly must have left it at some point, because he was the only one with long hair in New York.

When she went back out into the living room, she found her dress, shoes, and jacket waiting in the recliner.

“Aw. You went all the way down the garbage chute for me?”

He sent her a withering look and passed over a backpack and a spare helmet. “I called Toly. They’re up.”

She made a face. “What time is it?”

“Ten.”

Which meant they’d been up for a while, and would be fully alert and armed with questions for her.

“What did you tell them?” she asked, dreading the answer.

He let them out into the hall and locked up the apartment.

He’d changed into jeans and boots, and added a Lean Dogs hoodie, leather jacket, and his cut to the ensemble.

He smelled good, like laundry detergent and bacon.

“I said you wanted me to pick you up from a friend’s, and that I’d bring you by when you got out of the shower. ”

“Oh.” She hadn’t expected that answer. “You didn’t say I was drugged? Or that…” She trailed off when he shook his head and sent her another come on glance.

“I’m not your dad. Tell them whatever you want.” He paused halfway to the elevator, so fast she bumped into his back. When he glanced back over his shoulder, his expression was serious. “But you gotta promise me something.”

She would have promised many things in the face of his stare. “Okay.”

“If you’re ever in that kind of situation again—and you better not be, that was stupid”—so much for not being her dad—“then you call me. Understand? Any time, from anywhere. Don’t stick it out. Call me, like you did, and I’ll come get you.”

In the early days, he’d bitched long and loud about being stuck on babysitting duty. His words now were not insignificant, and she didn’t treat them as such.

She nodded. “I promise.”

He watched her another moment, a calculating side-eye, then turned and continued to the elevator.

~*~

Cass loved the freedom that dorm life offered.

For the first time ever, she could keep her own schedule and didn’t have Raven or some other self-appointed parental figure peeking in her door and masking suspicion with a smile.

But small, cramped, and crowded with her and her roommate’s belongings, everything cheaply-made and slap-dash in its composition, the dorm didn’t feel like home the way Raven’s flat did.

Even the elevator was fancy, and she supposed that made her a spoiled brat, the way she’d grown used to the luxuries of life.

The club flat wasn’t fancy, though, and that felt like a second home. A fact she found herself pondering more and more of late.

Natalia’s squalls reached them when they were halfway down the hall.

“Ah, Jesus,” Shep muttered, lip curled. “Does that thing ever shut up?”

“Rarely.” Cass grimaced as she fished out her keys. “For, like, whole minutes at a time. But there’s a lot of this.” She gestured to the door, then braced herself, unlocked it, and let them in.

“There’s gotta be something wrong with it,” Shep muttered as they trooped into the foyer and toed off their shoes.

“ She not it , you jerk,” Cass reminded. “And if there’s something wrong with her, why don’t you tell us what it is? You’re the doctor.”

“Medic.”

“Same diff.”

“Hm, not really. Stick to art school if you think that.”

She stuck her tongue out at him, and then led the way deeper into the flat.

Morning sun gleamed in the long bank of windows that led out onto the rooftop terrace, gilding the kitchen fixtures and highlighting the deep bags under Toly’s eyes.

He stood at the island, stirring sugar into a giant mug of coffee, dressed in pajama pants and a white wifebeater that showed off the bratva ink he should have covered or converted long ago.

His normally-coiled posture was more of a slump, and his hair was wild and finger-combed.

When he glanced up at their entrance, his usually-sharp gaze was flat.

Cass made a split-second decision to pretend that everything was fine. “Morning,” she said, brightly, crossing the kitchen. “Is there more coffee?”

Toly hooked a thumb toward the pot and she went to pour herself a mug, heart hammering with nerves. Shep hadn’t ratted her out, so if she could play things cool, and if Natalia kept screaming, Raven and Toly wouldn’t poke too hard at her story.

As if to spite her, Natalia’s cries cut off.

The ensuing silence had a low buzz.

“So. Fatherhood,” Shep said behind her. “All you hoped it would be?”

When she turned, she saw that Shep had slid onto one of the stools across the island from Toly. Toly shot him the bird, and Shep bared his teeth in a not-nice grin.

“Hey, you asked for it.”

“No one asked for it,” Raven said, striding in from the hall.

She was still beautiful, because she simply was, at all times, no matter her dress, and she’d lost the baby weight with alacrity.

But her hair was in a falling-down bun, and her Chanel track suit had a smudge of what might be baby puke on the shoulder, and she carried a squirming Natalia with an air of exhaustion.

“Clearly, the Devin Green curse skips a generation.”

Shep gave her an up-and-down look. “Does it?”

Raven smiled, and it was a lethal expression even with eyes puffy from sleeplessness. “Shepherd. Be a dear and get bent .”

“Nah, I let other people do that for me.”

“God,” Raven muttered. “It’s too early for you. It’s too early for anyone. Darling…” She turned to Toly, who set down his coffee and took the baby. “Bless you. I need to shower before my meeting.”

Natalia squirmed and fussed and kicked until Toly tucked her up onto his shoulder, and then she calmed, staring at Cass with her huge dark eyes. She looked like Raven, except when she stared; then, she was all Toly.

Cass reached to press the tip of her nose like a button, and Nat smiled. “Hello, bug.”

Toly angled his body back toward the island, and then toward Cass, holding Nat secure with one hand while he lifted his coffee with the other. He sent her a tired version of his usual hooded, information-seeking gaze. “A friend’s house?”

Oh, shit.

She kicked her chin up. “Yes.” Sipped her coffee, trying to make her face do Raven things.

Perhaps not the best strategy, given Toly was married to Raven and had never been buffaloed by her haughtiness.

“Which friend?”

“Jamie.”

“Your roommate Jamie?”

Damn him. “Yes.”

“You were at her house?”

“Yes. She and her mom got in a huge fight, and it was awkward, so I called Shep to come and get me. I didn’t call Raven because I was trying to be kind and not wake Natalia. Was that wrong of me?”

His gaze narrowed, the effect only a little ruined by the hair sticking up from the side of his head.

She took his judgy silence as answer enough, and headed around the island toward her room. She hadn’t had space to take any of her furniture to the dorm, so it still very much felt like hers . When she got there, she shut the door firmly and sank down on the edge of her bed.

Alone for the first time all morning, the weight of last night settled across her fully; bowled her over, actually, and she flopped back across the mattress and stared up at the smooth plaster ceiling.

She knew Shep was right: she’d been drugged. Which meant someone she’d been partying with last night, who went to class with her, had wanted her unconscious.

There was no way to spin that in a positive light.

~*~

Shep expected an interrogation, and wasn’t disappointed.

The second they heard a door click shut down the hall, Toly turned to him, eyes nothing but dark slits, jaw set at a tense angle.

The whole effect was ruined by the squirming baby on his shoulder and the disaster of his hair, but Shep was going to enjoy that rather than point it out.

“Where was she?”

“Sounding awful fatherly there, Moscow,” Shep drawled.

Toly exhaled forcefully and didn’t deign to repeat himself. He was serious, Shep saw, and he could respect that; in this case, he was serious, too.

He dropped the asshole act. “Big white townhouse on the UWS. She was sitting on the sidewalk when I got there, halfway to hypothermic, and some little punkass was trying to give her something in a Solo cup.” His hand clenched on empty air at the memory of seeing her like that, clearly incapacitated, weaving where she sat in an inelegant heap on the cold concrete, some chinless little shit looming in her face and waving around more drugs in a cup.

“When she called, she was slurring and out of it. She said she only had three sips and shouldn’t have been drunk. ”

Toly’s expression darkened. “And you believed her?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“She just lied straight to my face.”

“Yeah, well, she doesn’t lie to me .”

Toly opened his mouth…and then closed it. A groove appeared between his black brows.

Shep found that he didn’t want to backtrack or otherwise diffuse the statement.

It was true, and he liked that it was. In fact, it felt satisfying to define it out loud that way.

Maybe she was a little shit, but she didn’t feed him fibs the way she did other people.

He got the truth; it almost felt, strangely, satisfyingly, like he’d earned that truth.

“Her pupils were big as quarters,” he explained. “Someone in that house dosed her, and thank God she had the sense to get out of there and call somebody she trusted.”

Toly’s brows flew up. “Dosed with what?”

“Can’t be sure without a tox screen, but somebody had some very bad intentions, and she’s lucky she’s as smart as she is.”

Toly sipped his coffee and mulled that over. “Raven wouldn’t take this well.”

“Yeah, I didn’t figure. It’s up to you if you tell her.”

Toly frowned. “If it happened once, it can happen again.”

“Nah. I’ll make sure it doesn’t.” He rapped his knuckles on the island and slid off the stool.

Toly sent him an oddly appraising look. “Don’t get arrested.”

“Never have, never will. Enjoy the diapers.”

Toly had too much coffee and baby in his arms to shoot him another bird, and Shep laughed his way to the door.