Page 2 of Honest Neglect

And from what I understood, most of the cops in this town were well and truly in the McCarthys’ pocket.

I tried to put some distance between us so they couldn’t try to do me for assault, but I figured that ship had sailed. Who knew what Tony had spun to the police when he had seen me here. He must have called while he was still inside the house. Even at this hour, the cops were willing to run out here to deal with whatever mess he had gotten himself into.

And I still hadn’t gotten inside his place to see if he had taken Lily. Or worse.

I felt rough hands pulling me away from Tony, and I glowered at him as my hands were pulled behind my back and shoved into tight cuffs.

Tony took a step toward me, and the police attending this call didn’t even try to stop him, as though they knew their jobs depended on playing by the rules this psycho had set.

“Don’t mess with the McCarthys, Warren,” he told me, his voice laced with threat. “It’s not going to end well for you.”

Before I could get out anything in return, I was being dragged toward one of the cop cars and slammed in the backseat. My head was reeling. How had this happened? I should have put a little more thought into it when I had come racing out here to find Lily. I should have known Tony would take any chance he could to pull us apart, and locking me up in prison was a damn good way to make it happen.

Somewhere he knew I wouldn’t be able to protect her.

I scanned the roads for Arielle, and I couldn’t see her. Good. That probably meant she had managed to put enough distance between herself and Tony as to never see him again. I couldn’t believe he was so brazenly making moves on women who were in no fit state to consent. He had probably picked her up at a bar in front of everyone, but this entire town was too chickenshit to do anything about it.

I had to hope that he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to bring Lily back to that place with another woman there. He might have been reckless, but he had seen how his victims had started banding together. No way was he going to risk them doing it right inside his own home.

I tried to explain to the arresting officer what had actually happened as we drove, but they just turned off the intercom and rolled up the divide so they couldn’t hear what I had to say. Might make it harder for them to be so far up the McCarthys ass if they knew what they were actually defending.

I slumped back in my seat and prayed that, wherever she was, Lily was safe. I knew I had to trust in that. She was a strong woman, and that was why Tony was so afraid of her. That was why he struggled so much to keep her under control, because she wouldn’t get put down and made to shut up. One of the many things I loved about her.

At the station, they took my fingerprints, swiped my phone, and made me change into these ugly prison scrubs. I was only in jail, but they were trying to psych me out, trying to make me feel as though I was already hung, drawn, and quartered in their eyes. I wasn’t going to let it get to me. This was just another in a long line of mind games Tony played with the people he targeted, and now, unfortunately, I had managed to become one.

Pacing back and forth in the small cell they had me locked in, my mind went a million miles an hour. Trying to work out where Lily might have gone to, what the chances were that she was safe. Had I just managed to make things a whole lot worse by alerting Tony to the fact I was worried about her? I had pretty much just gone to his place and laid it all out on the line, told him that she was in trouble. If he took advantage of that now that he had me locked away? I didn’t even want to think about it.

After a few hours, I finally saw a friendly face. Frank. I breathed a sigh of relief and gripped the bars of my cell as he approached.

“Frank, you have to get me out of here,” I told him urgently. “Lily’s in trouble, and Tony—”

Frank was already shaking his head before I could even finish.

“I’m sorry,” he replied, his shoulders sagging down in defeat. “I wish there was more I could do for you. I really do. But they’re pulling you up on charges of assault and stalking, and I don’t have enough clout here to get them dismissed without a damn good reason. You were on his property. You were confronting him when they got to the scene.”

“Yeah, because he had another woman locked up in that house!” I exclaimed. “Frank, she’s out there too. Arielle, that’s her name. She was in his place and it looked like she had been drugged.”

“Looked like? That’s all you have to go on,” Frank reminded me. “Remember who you’re dealing with here. They’re going to do everything they can to discredit you. Tony can just claim it was a consensual one night stand and they’ll forget you ever said anything about it. And put her in his sightline again.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. I knew he was right, but the rage bubbling up inside of me was almost impossible to ignore. How could he keep getting away with this? How did this keep happening? How could this man, this evil man, just be walking around out there with no punishment for everything he had done?

“I’m going to keep working on things for you,” Frank promised me. “And in the meantime, I’ll keep you as comfortable as I can. I know that McCarthy’s men will want to cause you trouble as long as they have you in here, but I’m not going to let that happen. Okay?”

“Okay,” I muttered. I didn’t see what other choice I had. Frank paused for a moment, looking at me as though there was something else he wanted to say, but then he sighed, shook his head, and headed back down the corridor.

Leaving me in the quiet of my cell once more and wondering what in the name of holy hell I was going to do to get out of here.

Chapter Two

Lily

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I CAME TO SLOWLY AND painfully, the agony coursing from the top of my head all the way down to consume my entire body.

Where the hell was I? I tried to open my eyes, but it felt like they had been glued shut, so heavy I could have sworn weights were dangling off of them. I managed to peel them open after a few seconds and tilted my head back, pulling in a long, ragged breath of fresh air.

No, not fresh air. The air in here smelled damp and dingy, the weight of it choking in my lungs. What was going on? I couldn’t remember. My brain felt fuzzy around the edges, and I wasn’t sure where to start with sorting through these memories.