but told him, “I think I need to process this.”
He studied me a moment before his eyes warmed, his voice dropped and he ordered, “Then come here and process it closer.”
My throat clogged. I shook my head, but swallowed and forced out, “I think this is the kind of processing you need to process alone.”
A look that was hard to witness moved over his face.
He understood me.
That killed too.
“Hanna, come here,” he whispered.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Why not?
“Raiden, you just told me you’re a criminal and I’m not sure I’m down with that or if I’ll ever be.”
And I wasn’t.
And that’s why this was killing me.
“I’m not a criminal.”
“You participate in criminal activities,” I pointed out. “With understanding and intent.”
“I do shit that’s considered illegal,” he amended.
“It isn’t considered illegal, Raiden. It just is,” I told him.
“And who do I hurt?” he shot back, and my mouth clamped shut because that was actually a good question. “Who do I hurt, Hanna?” he pushed.
I said nothing.
What I did was push back into the couch when Raiden leaned toward me, putting his elbows to his thighs and kept talking.
“I don’t push dope. I don’t run guns. I don’t pimp women. I don’t steal. I don’t con. I don’t blackmail. I don’t squeeze people for protection money. I do not act as an enforcer. My business never touches the lives of honest citizens. The people I deal with made their choices, the wrong ones, and I’m a consequence of those choices. I didn’t force their choices. I do not do one fuckin’ thing that contributes to their business or the shit they do. They fuck up and wander into the real world where there’s a possibility that they can make decisions that will put good people doin’ their best to live decent lives in jeopardy, I reel them back in so that shit does not happen. I’m not tryin’ to convince you that that shit always bleeds. Sometimes it’s contained, but there’s always the possibility that someone could get tweaked, panicked, do something entirely fucked up where someone innocent pays, and what I do stops that before it could even start.”
He was scaring me. All of this was, but still, I found the courage to note, “Raiden, it’s clear you’re determined to do what you do and you have your reasons, but, honestly some of it sounds like rationalizations.”
“Yeah?” he asked. “You stopped Bodhi and Heather from fuckin’ you up the ass. You let that play out, I would have stopped those shipments from goin’ out with your afghans and I would have eventually traced all that shit back to the man who’s instigating it. Now he’s gonna find another Bodhi and Heather who will likely find another Hanna Boudreaux they can fuck up the ass and she might not be as lucky as you.”
Oh my God.
That totally made sense.
“People do a lot of shit,” Raiden told me. “You’re so insulated by family, friends and Willow, thank Christ, you’ll never know all the seriously jacked up shit people can get up to. And I didn’t tell you that about Bodhi and Heather to make you think I’m on a crusade to shut down drug dealers or any kinds of other scum. The men I work for, I don’t make judgments and I don’t get involved. But when shit bleeds and I staunch the flow, that jacks up job satisfaction and it does it huge. You want it straight up, odds are Bodhi and Heather were good people who got caught up in something they couldn’t control. They were squeezed. They were forced to make a choice. I don’t know what happened and I don’t give a fuck, but I’ve seen a lot of people, and those two do not have black souls. But they jacked up somewhere along the way, felt the consequences and that’s fair. What isn’t fair is they roped you into that shit and I don’t get to feel good about disentangling people like you often. It happens enough that I like what I do enough to keep doin’ it until I have the money to quit doin’ it, kick back and have a decent life where I answer to no one and I can just breathe.”
He stopped speaking and I said nothing.
We held each other’s eyes.
This went on a good, long while as my mind turned over what he said, everything he said, and a lot of things he didn’t say.
I had to admit, all of it made sense. It was