“Someone put hands on her, ripped a fucking shirt off her. Her shoulders, and one of her tits is completely covered in bruises. How fucking likely do you think it is that if I see this guy, I’m keeping my hands to myself?”

“Well, fuck, at least you have your lawyer with you.”

That surprised a humorless laugh out of me. “At least we have that. Plead insanity for me when I kill him, because I’m losing my fucking shit right now.”

“Here’s the game plan. We go there and wait for the cops, then tell them what we know. You don’t ever even need to look at this guy.”

I shook my head. “You’re delusional,” I muttered.

If I found whoever had put his hands on Danika, I was going to kill him.

“Well, I may be delusional, but at least I’m wearing a shirt,” he shot back.

I glanced down at my chest. I didn’t even remember leaving the apartment, but apparently, I’d forgotten something.

“That’s fine. I didn’t need to ruin one of my shirts with some stranger’s blood.”

“You sound like a nutcase, Tristan. You’ve been attending anger management, right? Can you try to use your exercises and tone it down a bit with the rage hard-on?”

“Some guy ripped her shirt off her, Jerry. Popping a dude in the mouth for calling her hot is an anger management issue. This right here is a necessary evil. No one hurts Danika and gets away with it. And I promise you this, when I get done with this guy, he won’t ever think about doing it again.”

Jerry sighed heavily, shooting me a glance that made him look like a disappointed father…Not that I’d have a clue what that really looked like.

We drove for forty-five minutes before we found the place, and I’d calmed a bit in that time, but my blood started pumping faster as we turned into a rundown trailer park. This was no place for Danika, and Jerry should have known better then to let her come to a place like this alone.

I glared at him.

“It wasn’t this bad the last time I came here.”

“It’s a trailer park on the wrong end of Boulder Highway, man. You should have used your fucking head and done the math.”

“You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”

That satisfied me a bit, but not enough to dampen the rage inside of me for the man we were looking for.

I couldn’t have said whether I would have shown more restraint if we’d shown up and found the culprit, say, sleeping, but that isn’t how we found him.

We found him beating on Danika’s mother, being loud enough about it to shake the walls of their trailer.

I heard a female cry of pain as I opened my car door, and that was it.

I didn’t remember charging to the door, or even through it.

I did remember grabbing the fist the man had cocked back, bringing my other hand to his back, and wrenching it hard enough to dislocate a shoulder, then sending the abuser flying across the room.

I advanced on him, keeping my arms at my sides as he came back to his feet, clutching his limp shoulder, his face twisted in agony.

He took a swing at me with his good arm, and I let his fist make solid contact with my jaw.

He had a hell of a left hook, and my neck snapped to the side with the impact.

I grinned like a maniac as I jerked my neck back to look at him.

It was crazy, but I was so angry that I wanted to feel some pain. I wanted this son of a bitch to put up a good fight before I took him down.

“Who the fuck are you, and what is your problem?” the man growled.

“You’re my fucking problem.”

I took two steps forward, kneeing him in the stomach hard enough to have him doubled over and coughing.

I gripped a handful of his greasy hair in my hand, pushing down hard while I raised a knee. I heard his nose break with a wet crunch.

I pulled his head straight, and his fist caught me in the stomach. Good. I wanted a fight more than a beating, and it had been starting to feel pathetic.

I never let go of his hair as my fist met his jaw, then his mouth.

I felt a few of his teeth give at the contact, and smiled right into the motherfucker’s face.

“You remember the girl you roughed up on Friday?” I asked him, bashing his face into the trailer’s tiny stovetop, once, twice.

“You remember her?” I asked again when he didn’t answer. He was too busy swallowing mouthfuls of his own blood to talk.

“Yeah,” he wheezed, blood flowing freely through his nostrils, and out his mouth.

“If you make it through today, if I decide to let you fucking breathe after this, I want you to remember one thing: You touch that girl again, you’re dead. Do you understand?”

“I-I d-do, man. I understand.” He seemed to mean it.

Unfortunately, the memory of Danika’s breast, covered in bruises from this man’s big hand, came into my head again, and I started beating.

I couldn’t have catalogued all of the blows after that, but he stopped fighting long before I stopped wailing on him, and the only reason I stopped was because not one, but two Tasers had me flopping like a fish on the ground.

Things got fuzzy, and I was cuffed and in the back of a police cruiser before I had my wits back.

“Not cool guys,” I told the two cops in front. “Tasers fucking suck.”

One of them, an overweight sandy-haired guy, looked back at me, his eyes widening.

I smiled at him.

I could tell that he thought I was a crazy fucker. I was shirtless, covered in blood, coming off a stun-gun ass kicking, and grinning like a fool.

I’d think I was crazy, too.

“That stun-gun did a hell of a lot less damage than you did to that other guy.”

“Not my fault he only knows how to beat up women. Probably the first time he’s fought someone his own size.”

“You are no-fucking-body’s size, man.”

He had a point.

“You want to tell me what was going on back there? Why were you trying to kill that guy?”

He’d gone into cop mode, and the word kill had me nervous as hell.

“Ask my lawyer,” I told him, knowing that Jerry was following us closely behind.

“Fucking maniac has a lawyer,” he told his partner.

They laughed. They didn’t believe me, but they would soon enough. Jerry was good, always looking for an angle. He hated being a lawyer, but that didn’t mean he was bad at it.

In the end, I spent way less time in a cell than anyone could have guessed. The guy had worked Danika’s mom over before I’d arrived and that complicated things.

I’d only caught the barest glimpse of the woman before I’d gone after the man. She’d appeared to me to be just a mess of dark hair on a tiny body, but she’d looked badly hurt.

Jerry turned out to be the best witness, and so he called Bev in to be my lawyer, keeping things as much on the up and up as we could. The cleaner the case the better, he said.

In the end, Bev got me out of there in mere hours, no charges pressed. My actions were justified, she argued, since I’d stopped a potentially fatal attack on Marta, Danika’s mother. The woman’s injuries supported our case, since she’d been hospitalized along with the man.

The man, who I found out along the way was named Bert McLeary, was going to live. He hadn’t struck me as a Bert, was my first thought. My second was that I’d dodged a bullet.

Theoretically, Bev explained to me, her argument was sound whether I’d killed him or not, but having a corpse in the mix always complicated things.

She sounded so cold-blooded when she said it, as though she wouldn’t have been too upset if he had died, that it gave me pause.

She took in my wide-eyed sizing up with a grim smile. “I made her show me the bruises. You can’t imagine you’re the only one who’d kill for her. That man is just lucky that you got to him before I did.”

She looked so serious, her tone so glacial, that I believed her.

I made a note never to get on Bev’s bad side.

The only time I felt even a second’s worth of remorse about the whole thing was when we got back to Bev’s house, and Danika rushed outside to meet us. She took one look at me and buried her face in her hands, bursting into tears.

That made me feel like a real bastard.

I gathered her into my arms, making soothing noises as I stroked her hair. I’d acquired a T-shirt somewhere along the way, and she buried her face in the white cotton, sobbing hard enough to make my gut clench.

Finally, she calmed down enough to talk into my shirt. “Were you hurt?”

My jaw clenched, my hand fisting in her hair. I made myself relax the muscles of my fingers and stroke over her hair softly. “Not at all. Bastard barely got a punch in.”

“He was so big. I thought he might hurt you.”

My pulse started throbbing again with that reminder of her contact with the man. I tried to moderate my breathing, calming myself. I toyed briefly with the idea of finding Bert at the hospital and finishing him off.

“He was big, but he was slow. Not a great fighter, from what I could tell.”

She pulled back to look at me, her eyes red-rimmed from crying. “You never lose. Where did you learn to fight like that?”

My mouth twisted ruefully. “When you’re the biggest boy in your class, everyone thinks it’s a great accomplishment to kick your ass. You can’t be my size and not know how to defend yourself. Having a bad temper never hurt either.”

“I take it Bev posted your bail?”

“That’s the thing. No charges were pressed.” I had to consider how to word the next part, sensitive to her feelings. “He was…beating on your mom when we arrived. She’ll be okay, I think, but I wasn’t charged because I stopped the beating.”

She showed very little reaction to that news, just the tiniest stiffening of her expression.

“We could go visit her in the hospital,” I offered.

She shook her head instantly and decisively. “No, that’s all right. Our relationship is…complicated. We aren’t healthy together. I can’t stand the woman, but I know that if she catches me in a moment of sympathy, she’ll prey on that weakness, and I’ll end up doing something I’ll regret.”

I knew just what she meant. My mother had pulled the same sort of thing on me, countless times. I kissed her forehead tenderly, thinking that there wasn’t a way I could love her more.

“Do you think I’m awful? I sound like a cold bitch, don’t I?”

I shook my head, bending forward slightly to kiss her temple. “No. You’ve met my mother. I can well understand what you’ve gone through with yours.”

“She thinks I’m like her because of what I let that old man do to me.” The words burst out of her as though it were an embarrassing confession. “I’m not, though. I was just a kid, and I didn’t think I had a choice.”

A bullet to the chest couldn’t have hurt my heart more than the weak thread to her voice as she whispered those words. My eyes stung as I clutched her to me, whispering into her ear. “Of course not. You don’t ever have to defend yourself to me, sweetheart.”

“I know. I know. And I know what the truth is. It’s just so hard to feel it. Some dirt you just can’t wash off.”