Page 15

“You don’t have to do this,” Bruce said outside the interrogation room. “This isn’t your case. We have other ways to get him to talk.”

“It’s fine,” Calix reassured, smiling lightly at the chief. “I want to help you.”

“Did you hear the good news? That Quentin kid’s been going around clearing your name.” He clapped him on the back. “Seems like now’s a great time for me to ask you to come back and join the force.”

It’d been a few days since Cal had run into Nero. Since then, he’d gone around telling all their old classmates that Calix had been right in the past, and he was glad the judge had found him not guilty. A few of those people had reached out since, mostly on Inspire, by liking one of Cal’s photos or leaving a generic comment or two. He hadn’t gotten any real apologies, but then, he hadn’t expected any.

Knowing that Nero didn’t like any of those people either, that he’d seen them all for who they truly were, gave Cal the confidence not to reply to any of them. In the past, he might have simply out of concern they’d get upset all over again if he ignored them, but not any longer.

It wasn’t just because of Nero either.

Aodhan and he hadn’t slept together again, but they’d met up a couple of times at the hospital, usually under the guise of meeting for the case. They ate together and chatted, and it was starting to feel a lot like the two of them were becoming real friends.

Friends who had sex and made sexual innuendos during office hours, but still just friends.

Because Calix wasn’t planning on sticking around.

Everyone knew that.

“I’m serious,” Bruce insisted when Cal merely chuckled. “A good agent like you would be wasted if you didn’t stick with enforcing the law. What’s the plan anyway, kid? Retire from the I.P.F. and, what? Go fish on some water planet? You’re twenty-six, not sixty-two. You’ve got to make something of your life before you give up on it, and you’ve got plenty of that left.”

“I’m not giving up on myself,” he said. On the contrary, he was finally allowing himself to be free, but the chief wouldn’t understand that, so he didn’t bother trying to explain. It didn’t matter anyway; he’d already made up his mind.

Calix was going to start over somewhere fresh. In a galaxy where no one knew his name, and no one knew the things he’d done, be that the incident in high school or the merits he’d achieved in the I.P.F. Hell, maybe he’d even change his name, ensure it really was a clean break.

“There aren’t many people that I’ll miss,” he ended up saying, “but I will miss you, Bruce.”

He huffed. “I’m not giving up on you, but all right, all right. We’ll let it rest for now.” He glanced at the closed door separating them from the prisoner concealed inside. “Do you need me to go in with you? Aodhan wouldn’t say what your injuries were the night of the reunion, but it must have been bad if he’d felt the need to rush you to the ER. He’s not the worrying sort, looks at everything very rationally, that one.”

Cal had long since realized everyone had a different opinion when it came to the doctor, but no matter what words they used to describe him, it always boiled down to one thing. “You like him a lot, don’t you.”

“Of course,” Bruce agreed, even though it had been rhetorical. “I tried to set him up with my oldest once, but he politely declined. I’m not the only parent to try it. People come in with their sons and daughters all the time, playing it off like they’re visiting with them after surgery or whatever. Aodhan never gives any of them the time of day—He’s polite and charming, sure, but he draws a clear line. He’s married to his work. Very dedicated.”

Calix felt a rush of self-satisfaction, which he quickly dashed away. There was nothing to be proud of. They’d slept together one time. It didn’t mean the doctor had chosen him when he’d seemingly turned down everyone else.

“I’ll try and get him to talk,” Cal said, putting an end to the conversation before his mind could get further carried away with itself. He opened the door and entered the small room, ignoring the two-way mirror as he took the empty metal seat across from the man cuffed to the other side of the table. “I heard you wanted to speak to me?”

Heathe rattled the short chains around his wrists when he leaned forward, staring wildly at Cal. “You’ve got to get me out of here! It wasn’t my fault!”

Calix pressed his thumb to the table, accessing the built-in holographic screen, which switched on. A projection of data flooded the surface area before him, and he shook his head as he read. “Says here you hit your girlfriend on the back of the head with a hammer. That’s not exactly an ‘Oops, I slipped’ sort of accident.”

“No, I—” He growled, clearly frustrated. “I did do that, okay? But I didn’t mean to! I don’t know. It just happened. One second, we were talking just fine, and in the next, I was so angry for no reason. She wouldn’t shut up when I told her I needed a minute. And the next thing I knew…”

“So you couldn’t control your temper,” Calix drawled, “killed your girlfriend, and then after you realized the mistake you’d made, you tried covering it up?”

“I’m telling you, something came over me. Like it took over my body! I wasn’t in my right mind!”

“Are you trying to plead insanity? Because that’s not my wheelhouse, Heathe. There’s nothing I can do for you aside from getting your account of the events as they accurately took place.” He tapped the screen to enlarge a quote. “You told one of the officers there was someone else there? You heard them on the stairs?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t matter,” he stated. “That officer already told me as much.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m still the one who killed Molly. If anything, whoever was there listening to us, if found, would only hurt my case.”

“That’s why you stopped mentioning them?” Calix’s colleagues were hoping to get more of a lead on this mystery person. If they could find them and their theories of that day’s events could be corroborated, the case would be open and shut.

Of course, having realized this, Heathe had stopped talking about the person he’d sworn was present, and after a week of being pushed, had finally agreed to talk, but only to Cal.

Technically, this wasn’t his problem, but he’d been curious and had wanted to make things easier on Bruce if at all possible. Things with his own case were going nowhere, so it wasn’t like he was super busy or anything, either. On the contrary, they’d hit another dead end. All they had to go on was Aodhan’s comment about a potential female suspect, and that wasn’t much.

Especially when taking into account the gruesome ways in which the victims of the serial murderer had been killed. Calix one hundred percent believed a woman could have it in her. But some of the coroner reports had come back indicating they’d been beheaded in one stroke. That seemed rather difficult for an Emergence female to pull off, but what did he know.

There were stranger things.

Like the beloved, Prince-Charming-type doctor being into kink play and bloodletting.

Now that he was aware of it, Cal shifted in the chair, even though the capital A Aodhan had carved into his ass cheek that night had already healed. There was a very fine scar left behind, one Calix had caught himself staring at in the bathroom mirror before and after a shower one too many times. A twisted part of himself didn’t want the mark to disappear, as if being branded with a scalpel had some romantic connotation to it that eluded the average person.

Cal had always thought there was something wrong with him, something dark. The things he was into, the things that he fantasized about…They certainly weren’t the types of things a boy who’d been raised at Safe Divinity Orphanage by someone as faithful to Light as Sister Grace should be attracted to.

In only a handful of hours, Aodhan had shown him maybe he wasn’t so abnormal after all. Everyone adored the doctor. Sung his praises and thought he could do no wrong. He’d saved more people in his line of work than Cal had managed to save in his own, and he was practically revered for it. A guy like that couldn’t be flawed, surely, someone would have noticed by now.

If Aodhan didn’t think there was anything wrong with his sexual proclivities, then that had to mean Calix’s guilt and misgivings were misplaced, right? They were two consenting adults, after all.

He pressed down into the seat, wishing the wound hadn’t already healed so he could feel the comforting sting where the A had been carved into his flesh.

Not deep enough. Not nearly.

Cal wondered…would Aodhan think it was too far if he asked him to do it again, only deeper this time? Would that be enough to push the doctor away and make him call Calix a freak?

With an internal grimace, he realized he was already starting to lose faith in the doctor and that night. If he wasn’t careful, he’d lose his grasp on this newfound confidence and string of self-acceptance before it was able to fully set in. Years of trying to stay under the radar and keep his head down had clearly affected him if, in the span of ten minutes, he could go from confident to doubtful.

“Look, the reason I asked to see you specifically is because you’ll understand where I’m coming from,” Heathe said, dragging Cal out of his tumultuous thoughts.

He frowned. “How so?”

“Because you’ve been here before. You know what it’s like to be accused of something you didn’t do.”

“But you did do it.” Calix shut the screen down. “You did kill her, Heathe.”

“Yeah, and you crippled Nero,” he snapped, “but it was an accident!”

“Was it?” He held his gaze, the corner of his mouth twitching upward when Heathe instantly quieted. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. That’s not what you said the night of the reunion either.” It was on the tip of his tongue to mention what’d been done to him, but this interview was being monitored and recorded.

“That?” Heathe made a face like he couldn’t believe that was being brought up. “So I drugged you and had a little fun, so what? My best friend is Nero’s older cousin. He found out you were going to be there and couldn’t make it, so asked me for a favor.”

So it really hadn’t been Nero? Huh.

“What’s the big deal?” Heathe asked, sounding like he really didn’t understand and found this whole thing tedious. “You work for the I.P.F., you see worse shit than what I did to you every day.”

“Yeah,” he drawled, hand fisting on the table as he struggled to keep his composure, “like assholes bludgeoning their girlfriends to death.”

“All I did was knock you out and—” Heathe went oddly silent for a moment, a far-off look entering his eyes a moment before all hell broke loose.

Calix jolted back from the table when the other man suddenly lunged for him. The cuffs kept him locked into place, but Heathe practically leapt out of his chair, tugging on his arms as though the metal digging into his wrists didn’t hurt.

“Asshole! You’re a psycho! I know what you did!” Heathe screamed, completely unhinged, his anger only seeming to grow with each passing second. “Yeah, I killed her, so what?! You’re worse than I am! At least I admitted it! At least I confessed! You—”

The door slammed open, and Bruce pulled Cal out, two cops rushing in once they’d cleared the way.

“Are you okay? Good Light!” Bruce moved them partially down the hall to where the adjoined room was located. He’d left the door there open when he’d rushed to save Calix, and the other occupants could be spotted within.

Calix frowned before he could help it. “What are you doing here, Director?”

Titus was standing by the counter, clearly having been watching the scene through the two-way mirror. Which meant he’d just witnessed all of that. Had heard…

It didn’t matter. The guy was eerily attractive but made Cal uncomfortable as all hell.

“I’ve got to take care of this,” Bruce excused himself and went after the cops as they dragged Heathe back to his cell.

“I remembered something and decided to stop by on my way to the hospital,” Titus answered his question and stepped out of the room, slowly closing the door behind him so the officers within couldn’t overhear. “Is there somewhere we could go to speak more privately?”

“If it’s about the case, it’s all right to talk about it here,” Cal replied.

Titus tipped his head. He wasn’t wearing his glasses today, those bright green eyes of his seemingly peering directly into Cal’s soul. It was off-putting, to say the least.

“You don’t like me very much, do you, Detective?” the director asked.

“That’s not true,” he played it off.

“Are you sure? I get the feeling you’re uncomfortable being alone with me.” Titus slipped his hands into the front pockets of his black dress pants. “Is it because I was a part of the medical staff six years ago?”

“I…” He cleared his throat and shook his head with a little more force than necessary. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not the one being ridiculous here,” his tone took on an almost scolding edge that had Calix’s spine instantly stiffening. “I’m telling you I have information, and you’re allowing personal feelings to influence your judgment in regards to this case.”

“I apologize.” Wait, what? Why’d he just say that? Shit. Now he couldn’t continue to deny it. “Let’s use one of the conference rooms.”

Calix frowned at himself as he led the director to an empty room in another part of the station. The walk over gave him time to collect himself, though he wasn’t entirely sure why he’d reacted so strongly to Titus’s tone. It had to be because of the first time he’d seen the older man when he’d been a teen. A lot had gone on back then, but obviously Cal hadn’t forgotten his instant attraction to the director like he’d thought.

In the past, once he’d managed to clear his name and make it off the planet, a large part of his fantasies had featured Titus Mercer.

And they’d been black from the start.

Fantasies of him using that same clipped voice he’d used in the courtroom to order Cal to do all sorts of deplorable and depraved things. Really, he either owed a lot to the older man, or he needed to find a way to get back at him, because it was Titus’s fault that Calix had realized what he was into in the bedroom.

He’d been a sexual awakening for him of sorts, one that had haunted him all throughout his training at the Academy and his time working as a detective. Cal may not have thought specifically about Titus in years, but that didn’t change the fact that he was at the heart of his problems.

All of them.

“I’d like to request you not bring up the past like that again,” Calix stated as soon as the door shut behind them. Titus had already moved to take a seat at the long table, and he did the same, choosing the corner while the other man had taken the head.

He chose not to point out how their spots should probably be reversed, given their roles here. As the detective in charge, Cal was in charge of leading this discussion, not the other way around.

“I wasn’t sure you remembered me when we ran into each other at the hospital,” Titus said smoothly, crossing his legs and resting his folded hands in his lap. “I see my fears were for nought.”

“That was a different time,” he told him. “I was a different person back then.”

“Were you?”

“Yes.” Pointedly, he opened a new page in the notebook app on his multi-slate. “You mentioned there was something you needed to tell me? What is it?”

“Very well, we’ll do things your way, Detective.” Titus licked his lips and got down to business. “I recalled something recently that may be of interest. There’ve been…problems with one of the orderlies in the past.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Behavioral. Rhett Elliot has been reprimanded more than a few times for the way he speaks to patients' families. He tends to find fault in the way they’re treating their sick loved one. On more than one occasion, he’s even taken it as far as to file reports against them for endangerment and abuse. Since I’ve never worked with him personally, it completely slipped my mind, but I went over the names of the victims and at least two of them are people I recall Rhett having a problem with.”

Cal entered his name, typing as the director spoke.

“Here’s a signed recount of events from the doctor who’s been working closely with Rhett for the past year.” Titus brought his multi-slate close to Cal’s and synced them long enough to send over the document. “I had him write down everything he remembered about those two incidents with the family members.”

He scrolled through, wondering why they hadn’t been told any of this before. Cal supposed it was probably minor enough that people had forgotten all about it. The issues Rhett had supposedly taken problem with were serious, though, like accusing the daughter of a man for never getting off her device, leaving her mute father lying in his own filth for hours, even though she was seated right next to him.

The daughter wasn’t one of the victims who’d lost their head, but her boyfriend was.

“This could be something,” Calix said. “I’ll look into it.”

“I’m glad to be of service.”

Cal finished writing his notes and then paused, glancing up to find Titus watching him closely. “Is there something else, Director?”

“I was curious if you still have that scar,” Titus asked, and for a split second, Cal’s mind went straight to the A carved into his ass before he clarified, “The one behind your right ear? How did you say you got it again?”

Absently, he reached up to the spot in question. “One of the other kids at the orphanage.”

“Right,” he hummed. “He hit you with…?”

“A rock.” Calix bristled. “Is there something you’re getting at?”

“Still as paranoid as ever, Detective. You were like that when you were eighteen as well. And here I thought you’d claimed you were no longer the same person.”

A tingle of dread coursed through him and Cal struggled to maintain his composure. “You’re playing with me,” he blurted, the accusation springing forth even though he knew better than to allow it to. “Just like you did back then.”

Titus smiled at him, but it lacked any sort of kindness or warmth. “I had a feeling you felt that way.”

“Because it’s the truth.”

“So certain?”

“Yes.”

“As certain as you are that you didn’t mean to hit Nero Quentin with your car that day?”

Calix clamped his mouth shut, unwilling to push things too far.

“That’s old too,” Titus said, and he almost sounded pleased all of a sudden. “You’ve always liked to take risks, but you understand there are lines that should be drawn. You have good instincts, Calix.”

“Even if my instincts are telling me it’s feeling more and more likely that you are capable of cutting off someone else’s head?”

He grunted. “Those aren’t instincts, that’s anger. You don’t have much pride, but you certainly get defensive when triggered.”

“We don’t know each other.”

“See?” If he’d been wearing his glasses, there was little doubt in Cal’s mind that Titus would have adjusted them as he said that. “Defensive.”

“What exactly is it you want, Director?”

“I just came to give you information, Calix.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“It’s your name.”

“We aren’t on a first-name basis.”

“I’m older than you are, I get to decide that.” Titus rose from his seat, peering down his nose at him. “If the things Heathe said start to get to you, the hospital has a fantastic psychologist I can recommend.”

“I don’t need to see a psych.”

“Very well.” He bowed his head ever so slightly. “Until next time, Detective .”