Brawler Read Free

she starts. “Never mind, listen … Macy is an independent woman, yeah? She looks girly and stuff, but she isn’t, and you need to remember that. You have a way of making her feel like she can’t take care of herself, and that will get you tazed again.”
    “What’s wrong with me wanting to take care of her?” I ask.
    “It’s not wrong,” she says. “She’s a part of this team, too, and you need to treat her like you’d treat me when we’re working.”
    “Not possible,” I say. “You two are not even in the same league.”
    “Actually,” she says, “We are, you just refuse to see her any other way. Listen, Rafe, she’s weary of cops as it is, yeah? Since I turned eighteen, it’s just been the two of us. When I tell you Macy has had shit luck with men in the past, it’s because she’s had men that pretended to be one way and ended up another. She is tough and capable; she just prefers to avoid confrontation. But when she’s forced to …”
    “Okay?” I ask. “What are you telling me?”
    “To be yourself,” she says. Like that helps? “If you show her the real you and she still doesn’t feel the same, then you can say you tried, yeah? Macy is the best person I know, Rafe, but you have to let Macy be Macy, and believe me, she’ll want the same from you.”
    “I don’t think the real me is going to get me any oral favors here, Venessa,” I say.
    “Let me put it to you this way,” she says, laughing, although I don’t know what’s funny. “You get her into you by being phony and she finds out you played her? Shit, Rafe, it doesn’t even bear thinking about! She will flat out kill you, and I’ll YouTube it.”
    “Be myself,” I say. “Shit.”
    “I have to scratch Boner,” she says, disconnecting.
    What is it with those two and boners? Fucking weird.
    Be myself, fine.
    Shit.
    We are meeting over at Russell tomorrow, where Venessa trains, to get some time in as a unit and plan our next move.  I’ll impress her with my skills and show her I can complete a sentence and flex my muscles at the same time. Chicks dig multitaskers.
     
     

 

    L ast night I didn’t sleep for shit. I didn’t finish updating any of my research, either. I took a leave of absence from the hospital to get Shadow Squad up and running, wrap up my own work for school, and get focused. I need to win the board over so I can get the funding I need, which believe me, isn’t easy. Being a nurse is truly an amazing job, though. I love helping patients and making a difference, but my heart lies in pharmaceuticals. Personally, I feel like that’s where I can make my mark in medicine. Even though working and school are difficult, I’m in the final stages of my graduate program and I am so close to my end goal that the long hours at the lab are worth it.
    Designing a drug that benefits cancer patients is my dream; they suffer so much, and I know this drug would change their lives. The problem is, it’s caught the attention of the wrong people, and it’s putting innocents at risk.
    Maybe Jonas will never understand this, but I can’t be a victim again. Defending myself against Briggs backfired in a big way. I tried out smarting him, which was my first mistake; he was too strong physically. According to him, I always made him feel stupid.  So instead of just leaving me, he nearly killed me. Not knowing what else to do after being attacked by him so many times, I called Venessa about a week later. She did what I couldn’t; she put him behind bars. Once I realized he was really gone, I was resolute. I decided I’d never again let someone hurt me without putting up a fight. Even more, I’d never let anyone close enough to try. What keeps me up at night is that I can fight back, but I didn’t. I’ve been training for years. But training for the odd chance of defending yourself against a random stranger is one thing; having your live-in boyfriend be your attacker is quite another. I froze. It cost me. I’m still