May Contain Wine (SWAT Generation 2.0 5)

The thing was, she had a very, very good reason for keeping it all secret.

One that I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone—not Louis or her father or even my family.

When she’d said that it was that important that I didn’t, I’d requested that she didn’t tell me at all.

I loved Beckham, she was one of my best friends, but the problem was that I loved her dad and brother just as much. It was a hard place to be, that was for sure.

There was one point over the Christmas holidays that the family was supposed to meet her baby daddy and everyone had liked him. Then something had come up, and baby daddy had disappeared.

Though, Beckham had been privy to where he’d disappeared to.

But what it looked like to Beckham’s family was that he was a runner and a terrible father.

Needless to say, all I’d ever really gotten out of Beckham was a picture of him, and that was it.

“I don’t want to know,” Bennett said as he scrubbed his hand over his face. “Just… you should clear this up with your dad. He hates this guy. If he ever sees him…”

If he ever sees him, he’s going to kick the guy’s ass.

At least, that was what it felt like he was going to say.

“Yeah,” Beckham said softly. “I’m ready. I’ll drive behind y’all.”

Dad’s eyes met mine. “Ready, Freddy? I’ll explain what’s going on during the ride.”

I nodded, snatched the keys that Louis had given me on the way out the door today, and headed out with them.

Beckham veered off toward a brand-new Audi that made my eyebrows climb to the top of my hairline, and got in.

It started up with a purr, and both my dad and I looked at each other with surprise.

“I feel like there’s so much that I don’t know,” I murmured. “When do you think I’ll know?”

“I don’t think that Foster’s going to be able to let it lie much longer,” he admitted. “With her here…”

With her here, he’d be unable to help himself. Unwilling to let it go any longer because it was breaking everybody’s hearts.

“Louis hasn’t talked about it at all. It’s like he’s ignoring it,” I murmured.

“Louis is pissed that she’s shutting him out,” Dad said as we got into his old truck. “It’s easier for him to ignore it and not talk about it, than to admit that it hurts that his best friend and sister isn’t telling him something that’s hurting her.”

I buckled my seatbelt and looked over at my dad as he scanned his surroundings before backing out of the driveway.

“Tell me what’s going on,” I ordered.

Dad sighed.

Then he went about telling me exactly what had been on my front porch that Louis had kept me from seeing.

I felt immediately sickened.

“We found the kid. Romeo,” he murmured. “Watched it all happen on your camera. It was… there was so much rage in that kid.”

I scrubbed my hand down my face.

“What a nightmare,” I murmured. “Is there… can they even do anything?”

I wasn’t sure about the law when it came to animals. I knew there was an animal cruelty law that prevented the inhumane treatment of animals. I also knew that there were very few that they could charge him with.

And God, I wanted to throw up at the photo that my father had painted.

God, that poor dog.

To think about what it went through made my heart shatter into a million tiny pieces.

“We’ll find something to pin on him,” Dad promised.

That didn’t make me feel better. It just made me feel sad.

Why would someone do something like this? And what had I ever done to deserve it?

“Did Louis tell you about the cat that I found, too?” I asked.

“He did,” Dad confirmed. “The boy is being brought in for questioning. Might already be there.”

I groaned. “That kid really does give me the creeps.”

“Your sixth sense has gotten you out of a lot of sticky situations,” he said. “You’ve always been like that, you know.”

I had.

There had been times over my life that I’d just had bad feelings about people.

One time, my father had brought one of his friends by the house. I’d been around ten or eleven at the time and had been fairly convinced that this guy wasn’t the kind of guy that my father would normally bring around us. There’d been something about him that had just given me the creeps.

So I’d stayed away from them and would leave the room every time we’d run into that particular man.

My father, having sensed my discomfort around the man, had stopped bringing him around us.

It was years later that we found out that that man had been involved in some heavy-duty drugs.

It hadn’t been anything overtly terrible to anyone but himself, but my dad had been flabbergasted that he’d been bad. Normally my father’s judgment had been on point.