“She picked a sorry time to fall off the wagon,” Mick returned.

“She’d been visited by her father that day,” Reece told him and watched him suck in a hissing breath. “Yeah. I can see you can imagine that visit was cheery.”

Mick’s brows went up. “He take his hands to her?”

“That ass**le who, according to him, has done no wrong in his life visiting his unmarried, ex-junkie pregnant daughter? Yeah, Mick, he took his hand to her. She was a vegetable lyin’ in that bed but I still saw the bruise on her cheek. If you saw her, you couldn’t have missed it.”

“I thought she got that from getting hit by the car,” Mick muttered.

“She got it when her father planted his fist in his nine-months pregnant daughter’s face. After his visit, Xenia called Zara, lettin’ her know that shit went down and Zara spent the day with her sister, talkin’ her down from doin’ somethin’ stupid. But Zara had to go to work and Xenia did somethin’ stupid.”

Mick nodded.

Reece kept going.

“You don’t hit kids, you don’t hit women, and you only hit men when they give you call to do it. What would move a man to strike a pregnant woman is beyond me but he did it. Then again, he did the same to his baby girls and we could argue all day which one of those is more twisted with no answers since they’re equally f**ked up.”

“This is true,” Mick murmured.

Reece went on. “Xenia told Zara she got flashbacks, terrified of the state of her life, havin’ a kid, not breakin’ that cycle, not able to get away from that motherfucker. Zara left, shit kept twisting in Xenia’s brain, and she made very wrong decisions that means she’s been alive for a long time, same time she was good as dead. Think she paid a high price for her dick of a father bein’ an ass**le so, due respect, maybe you’ll have a care, shiftin’ blame to a dead woman.”

Mick lifted his chin to acknowledge the rebuke but stated, “We’re goin’ over history.”

“History doesn’t live and breathe and that boy is doin’ both one county over,” Reece fired back.

Shaughnessy locked eyes with him.

Reece kept talking.

“Zara was in no place financially to fight them for custody. She was twenty-fuckin’-four years old and workin’ nights, waitin’ tables at a bar. She’d started with nothin’ and worked her ass off since she was eighteen for everything she had. Not to mention, she had their promise that they’d find a good home for her sister’s son.”

“Not sure what either you or I can do about that. We can’t rewrite history,” Mick noted.

Reece stood and looked down at the man. “Yeah. You’re absolutely right. But we can write the future and that chapter’s gonna be written in blood.”

Mick stood too and warned softly, “Son, you’re talkin’ to an officer of the law.”

“Then you want this to go smooth, you start pokin’ around, ’cause Zander Cinders is gonna be livin’ with his aunt as soon’s I can pull that shit off and it’d help if you did what you could do to see that kid out of that viper’s den,” Reece returned, putting his mug down on Shaughnessy’s desk. “Obliged for the coffee,” he muttered. Turning on his boot, he stalked out of his office.

When he left the station, he didn’t go to his truck. He walked down the boardwalk, fury and adrenalin coursing energy through his frame that he had to burn off because it felt like his f**king head was going to explode.

His thoughts were assaulting him, an onslaught that caused a piercing pain to shoot through his right eye.

Zara was going to lose her mind when she found out her nephew was that close, being raised by a Cinders. He’d just guided her to getting it all together and now, f**k it, it was going to come flying apart.

He hated that for his girl but that wasn’t what sent that pain stabbing through his eye.

He’d left her.

Back then, after that shit went down and he got her to the other side, he’d left.

Because of his own f**ked-up history, his vow not to get tied to another woman, not to get tied to anything, he’d walked away from her.

He knew he’d go back. Even at that age, Zara was the kind of woman you went back to. Hell, even back then, Reece knew she was the kind of woman you stuck to. He just wasn’t that kind of man back then and that was why he let her go, so she could have a man like that.

But he never knew he’d be where he was right then and go back.

It was no consolation that the baby had been taken by C-section by that time. The deal struck. Zara getting out of her end the knowledge her nephew would go to a couple who wanted a child desperately and couldn’t have one so they’d treat the one they got right and a promise from her father and mother that she’d never see or speak to them again.

He’d had no idea that baby was handed off to an aunt.

He’d just taken Zara’s pulse, saw she was moving on, healing, and he’d left.

He’d f**king left.

He could see it in his head, the image burning deep, that first good-bye, standing by his truck, her in his arms, smiling her sweet smile, her pretty brown eyes sad that he was going but understanding that was him. Giving him that. Giving him up. Letting him be who he was and taking him as he came.

He’d been her one. It took him years to realize she was his.

And she’d let him go so he could be who he had to be.

And he’d let her go so he could be a motherfucking ass**le.

His girl, his cookie, abused by her father for as long as she could remember, having a mother who was so checked out, it was a wonder that bitch wasn’t in a coma, too. Zara had broken away, forged a life for herself. Then when her sister essentially bites it, the baby Zara was looking forward to helping Xenia raise gone, she found it in her to move on and start to heal.

He told himself he could go. She was strong.

What really happened was he told himself what he had to hear so he could cover his own ass, deny the depth of feeling he had for a woman, and run away from history so he wouldn’t have to learn one day she was a bitch like all the rest.

Even if she had given him no indication whatsoever she would be. There were no signs. No red flags.

Nothing.

He just left her.

The fury not subsiding, he wanted to punch something, and on that thought, mindlessly scanning as he beat back the pain in his head and tried to breathe through the weight in his chest, his eyes fell on a sign.