Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 122242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 611(@200wpm)___ 489(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 611(@200wpm)___ 489(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
She nods.
"I'm sorry you lost your father so young, Faith."
"Me too." She bites her lip. "I'm sorry you lost your family too."
"So am I."
"Can…can I ask you something?"
"Anything."
"What happened to your sister?" she whispers.
"I don't know." I glance away from her for a moment, steeling myself against the inevitable rush of memories her question brings roaring to the surface. "Alivia was ten years older than me, but we were always close. When she left home for college, she decided to stay on campus with friends. She started dating a guy her junior year, but no one knew much about him. He didn't attend school with them. They thought he was involved in the mafia, but she swore he wasn't. She left campus to meet him one night and never returned."
"Oh no," Faith whispers, her honey eyes swimming with sympathy. "Did…did you ever find her?"
"No." I shake my head. "I believe the man she was seeing was one of Nikolai Tarasova's men."
Faith's stricken eyes widen.
"I tracked her to their territory, but no one was willing to talk with the threat of Tarasova hanging like a sword over their heads. Leads dried up from there." I scrub a hand through my hair, expelling a heavy breath. "I accepted long ago that I'd never know what happened to her."
It's not hard to guess though. They either killed her or sold her into slavery. It's a horrible thing to hope your own sister is dead, but for her sake, I do hope it. It's been twenty years. God only knows the horrors she would have lived as one of Tarasova's sex slaves in that amount of time. I would wish that kind of pain on no one.
"What happened to your parents?" Faith asks.
"My mom had a fatal heart attack when I was nineteen. My father had a stroke three years later. He passed not long after." I was a surprise baby, born late in life. Losing Alivia aged my parents considerably. They were never the same after she vanished. They never recovered. Eventually, the grief of loss and the pain of not knowing took them both.
"I'm so sorry, Octavio," Faith whispers.
"No more than I am."
"Was your dad a cop too?"
"No. He worked in the IT field. My mom was a pediatric nurse."
"Is your sister the reason you went into law enforcement?"
"Yeah. I wanted to find out what happened to her, and I guess I wanted to help make sure no one else ever had to go through what my family went through."
"That's why you want me to help you with Tarasova, isn't it?"
"I can't bring her back, but I've spent my whole career trying to bring him down," I say softly. "It'll never change what they did to her, but…I owe my parents that much. I owe her that much." I glance at the file in front of me before flipping it closed with a heavy sigh.
As Franklin suspected, our tipster might not have been wrong about Kincaid. I'm not sure where that leaves me, or what I'm going to do about it. Kincaid is a damn good cop, one Roman trusts. Hauling him in on charges is going to cause a lot of problems for this city, and I don't know what to do about that. We need him on the streets…but can I really leave him there if he murdered three people?
"Can I ask you a question now?" I ask Faith.
"Yes."
"If a good cop did something wrong years ago to avenge his family and you found out about it, what would you do?"
She tilts her head to the side, studying me. "How wrong?"
"He may have killed the people who murdered his family."
"Was his family innocent?"
I nod.
She thinks over my question for a moment, considering it carefully. "I don't know what I would do," she admits, "but I think what you're really asking is what you should do."
I sigh. "I have no fucking clue what to do. If I pursue this case against him, a lot of people are going to get hurt. Including some that mean a lot to me. If I don't pursue it, I'm essentially looking the other way when my instincts are telling me there's something here."
"You pride yourself on doing the right thing."
"I took an oath to uphold the law and do the right thing, even if doing it isn't the easy thing." I scrub a hand through my hair, truly baffled. The world isn't black and white, not even when murder is involved. I know that. I accept it. But this case has so many shades of gray I don't know what the right thing to do is. "If I pursue this case and find out that he did it, I'm not jeopardizing just his future. Roman believes we need him to help keep our gangs in line, and I don't necessarily disagree with him."