Forbidden With Me - Leigh Lennon Page 0,6

matter of fact, I’m joining them for the evening activities. How are you feeling?

I hate lying to my aunt, especially as she has a strain of the flu she’s not been able to shake. She’s been my number one in my life since she drove through the night to get to me after the phone call she received from child protective services changed her life. She’s been with me every step of the way, letting me sleep in her bed for a long time, and with every transition, she’s helped me heal—well, heal as much as I could have.

Shelling out money of her own that the state wouldn’t cover, she’s had me in the best treatments money could buy. And for this reason, her paid-off farm is mortgaged as much as it can be. But she’s never made it a secret that she’d do anything and everything to heal my brokenness. She had her own grief to sift through, losing her twin sister, nieces, a nephew, and a brother-in-law. If it weren’t for these two important people in my life, my aunt and my police angel, it would have turned out so much different.

Georgia sidles up next to me, bumping her hips with mine. “Did you see him?” she whispers, her fire-red hair falling into her face.

“Yeah, and thanks for covering for me,” I begin, offering her every bit of my gratitude as I bring her in for a hug. I can feel my face redden with the thoughts of his large, imposing body so close to mine as he helped me into one of his jackets. I could almost sense his breath on my neck.

“Okay, so don’t leave out anything. I need to know it all, every little detail.” There isn’t much to tell except I saw all I needed today. He’s still the handsome man I’d remembered from my dreams. And the dreams I had of him kept the nightmares about my family’s murders at bay. He had my pictures in his house. He didn’t hate me. No, my police angel is a man of honor, of integrity, and one day, he will be mine. I just know it.

Chapter 3

Eleven years after the murders

Present

Wells

My desk stays cluttered. The second I file a report, another one appears on it. For fourteen years, I’ve been doing this job. My space is filled with crumpled-up papers, and coffee stains surrounding the wood of this desk I swear is older than me, along with the leftovers in the trash can next to my workspace which fill my immediate area with the stale smell of day-old Chinese food.

With every report and every case I close, there will always be that one unsolved case. It’s been with me since before I’d been given a desk, hell, before I’d become a detective. It still sits with me as a reminder of the massacre I’ll never forget. It has been engrained in my memory from the moment I found the sweet little girl in the pantry and shielded her face from the memories of her family slain across the floor. Her nightmares have to be worse than mine, and this sweetheart has never strayed from both my heart and soul.

I still can’t drink milk to this day, not when I saw it smeared and mixed with the blood of the victims. The amount of blood that had been smeared across the kitchen floor from the father alone is something I’ll never get out of my head.

How do you tell a little girl, only nine at the time, that her entire family was murdered? It wasn’t something I could have ever equipped myself for and didn’t have to. She wouldn’t let go of me, not when the social worker pulled up in her minivan and not when Jules came running from her home to care for Malia, who’d been stripped of her father, mother, and three siblings in a matter of seconds.

Malia was smart, fucking smart, to wedge herself into a cupboard I called a pantry, but it couldn’t have held much. It was always my educated assumption that the dad shoved her in there before he was viciously stabbed twenty-eight times, due to the fact that Malia showed no signs of blood on her when she leaped to me.

The calendar, marked up with as much coffee stains as my desk, screams at me. It’s not Friday yet. It’s the day I have set aside to check Malia on social media even though she’s been inactive for