Scott looked at me when he answered.
“You know we were surveilling you. You and Kirk were tight. We didn’t know the extent of your knowledge. We couldn’t approach you in case you knew what he was doing and disregarded it, or you could have told him we were onto him. It was discussed, but in the end, what he was doing had to be stopped and we couldn’t endanger that by showing our hand to you.”
“Just so you know,” I said quietly, holding his eyes, “I wouldn’t have helped you.”
Scott’s lips thinned.
I kept talking.
“But I would have left him. If you told me what he was doing, just knowing he was stealing from those people, I would have left him. It wasn’t about him cheating on me. That just made it worse. But I would have left him, and if you’d told me, it would have saved me from what happened after. And I would never have told him about you.”
“We couldn’t know that,” he replied, just as quietly.
“Now you do,” Buck put in.
Scott didn’t tear his focus from me when he said, “You got a chance to turn that around. To do good for people. To change your reputation. And you’re sayin’ you’re not gonna take that chance?”
I felt Buck’s body get tighter and tighter as Scott spoke, and when Scott was done, Buck growled, “You’re fuckin’ shittin’ me.”
“Man, she does,” Scott clipped at him.
“Yes, you’re right, I do.” I butted in. “And I choose me. One thing I learned from all this is to keep my eyes open and put myself first.”
Scott looked at me, clearly incredulous. “And you got your eyes open, hookin’ your star to the Aces High MC?”
“No one else was there to pick me up and take me to the doctor when Esposito’s boys tossed me, bleeding and beaten, from a moving vehicle,” I replied.
I saw immediately that he took my point.
Then I said what I felt, for some reason, I had to say.
“I know you were just doing your job and I know your job is a good one, what you do is important. But you should know that I loved him. You may think it makes me a fool, but he treated me great. He acted like I was precious. When he was with me, I felt like I was the most important person in the world. And I’d never felt that before. If you investigated me, you know why. So maybe I was blind and maybe that made me stupid, but when someone loves you like that, why on earth would you question it?”
He closed his eyes.
But I kept speaking, so he opened them again and focused on me.
“He had to pay for what he did to those people, but what I want to know is, why did I have to pay such a harsh punishment when I didn’t do a darn thing wrong? It’s not your job to look out for people like me, but that doesn’t change the fact that you left me to the wolves. You exposed him, which meant you turned me out, and they chewed me up. And you all knew, you knew what that was doing to me, and not one of you made even the remotest effort.”
I’d been talking a lot, and I stopped to take in a breath.
Scott didn’t fill the silence.
So I did.
“There are a lot of different kinds of victims to crime and I was one of them. You serve and protect, but no one was there to protect me. Now you want me to do something for you that puts me out there again. But you have not shown even an ounce of compassion for me. So yes, I’m hooking my star to the Aces High MC because, quite frankly, from experience, Detective Scott, I don’t trust you to look out for me.”
“Clara, if you had—” he started.
“What?” I cut him off. “Asked?”
“Yes,” he gritted out.
“Did Nora Finnegan ask you for the escort to the courthouse? I remember, Detective Scott, struggling through the reporters closing in and shouting questions at me. I remember seeing you personally pushing your way through them, helping her get inside. She got paid to sleep with my husband. She also got paid to give all those interviews and write that book afterward. Did she ask for your protection? Is that why she got it?”
Scott didn’t answer.
“I didn’t think so,” I whispered.
“We arrived at the same time,” he told me.
“Obviously, so did I,” I returned.
He stared into my eyes then he said quietly, “I lost sleep over you.”
“I did too.”
“I’m still losin’ sleep over you,” he went on.
“I am too.”
His eyes didn’t leave mine, but he leaned forward a bit when he stated, “You don’t get me, Clara, you are not makin’ the right choices.”
Buck’s tight body got tighter.