The Rogue
Chapter 19

Ryan’s body woke up all at once, his brain struggling to play catch up. The sunlight edging past his blinds told him it was morning, and he replayed the events of the night before in his head. Chloe meeting him at the Thirty-Third. The Intelligence Unit’s update on just how dangerous Bishop really was and how he’d been stalking Chloe for weeks. Addison going so far above and beyond to not just be there for Chloe and keep her safe, but to be there for him, coming home with him and giving him exactly what he’d needed in order to get himself right, then staying the night, wrapped in his arms.

Addison, who was now…gone?

Bolting upright, Ryan swung a gaze around his room. His bathroom door was ajar, as was the door to his bedroom, both as he’d left them last night. Dread spilled through his gut, followed by a sharp spike of disbelief. But then, both emotions were displaced by the soft patter of footsteps, followed by the sight of Addison with one of his RFD T-shirts over her lacy panties, blond hair in a messy twist on top of her head and a cup of coffee cradled between both hands, and Christ, she was easily the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

“Oh. You’re up,” she said, stopping short in the doorway.

“I am.” Ryan watched the indecision on her face turn to understanding as she took in his expression.

“You thought I left again, didn’t you?”

Lying seemed pointless for several reasons, not the least of which was that his face would rat him out even if he tried, so he said, “Yeah. Sorry.”

“You don’t have to be,” Addison said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “My track record for mornings after isn’t exactly great. In fact, this one is, um, kind of my first. So…”

Ryan’s brows took the slingshot route toward his bedhead. “Ever?”

“Yup.” She focused on her toes, which were painted glitter pink, because of course they were. “I hope it’s okay that I snagged some mouthwash from your bathroom. And a T-shirt. And made some coffee. Oh, my God, I’m really f*****g bad at this. I hogged all your covers and now I’m basically stealing your shit.”

He laughed. “Come here.”

Addison placed her coffee mug on his nightstand, letting him tug her closer. “I’m a hot sleeper, so I don’t care about the covers, nor will I miss the swig of mouthwash. You look cute in my T-shirt”—he placed a quick k!ss on her mouth before shifting to grab her mug—“and you making coffee means I don’t have to. So, really, it’s fine.”

Well, it was until he took a sip and remembered that she preferred only a little bit of coffee with her sugar. “Ugh, okay. You drink that and I’ll just get my own. You want some breakfast before you go to the precinct? I make killer eggs on toast.”

She blinked. “I do have a little time before everyone will get there since we worked so late last night,” she said slowly. “And breakfast is my favorite meal.”

“Oh, I remember,” Ryan said, arching a brow. “How about I meet you in the kitchen in five?”

“Okay.”

He went through the wash/brush/dress motions, pulling on a pair of gray sweatpants and a snug white T-shirt, then padding barefoot to his kitchen. Addison—now fully dressed in her clothes from last night and her hair pulled back into a nice, neat ponytail, much to the disappointment of his d**k—had poured a cup of black coffee into a second mug, which she slid across the counter at him.

“I’m not even going to pretend to understand how you drink coffee with nothing in it, but far be it from me to keep you from caffeinating.”

“Thanks.” Ryan took a long draw from the mug, then turned toward the fridge. Addison was clearly still replaceing her way with the whole morning-after thing, but in the same way she’d been there to ease his tension last night, he could return the favor now. “Go ahead and get comfortable.” He lifted his chin at the breakfast bar on the other side of the kitchen island where he’d do most of his breakfast prep and where he nearly always ate.

She perched on one of the two stools there, propping her chin in her hands. “So, you’re surprised that I stayed.”

He had to hand it to her. For a cautious woman, she chose her all-in moments like a champ. “I, uh. Am. A little,” Ryan managed. So much for ease. “But I’m really glad you did.”

“I am, too,” she half-whispered. She watched him move through the kitchen for a minute, taking out ingredients and unearthing his trusty skillet from a drawer in the island before saying, “Last night, when I asked you if you’d found a safe place, you said yes. It was with me.”

“I did.” He’d meant it, too. Even through the potent cocktail of anger at Bishop and fear for Chloe, Addison had given him the ability to breathe.

“Well, I guess I found a safe place, too, so…that’s why I stayed.”

Luckily for Ryan, the eggs he’d taken from the fridge had already made it to the counter, because he one hundred percent would’ve dropped them in shock otherwise. “Your safe place was with me?”

“Yours was with me,” she pointed out, peering at him from over the rim of her mug.

Okay. She kind of had him, there. “Well, yeah, but you tend to keep things a lot closer to the vest than I do. I guess I’m just surprised that you even need a safe place.”

“Not more than I am. Believe me.”

Her wry smile eased any tension the topic might’ve brought to the table—so to speak—and he let go of a small laugh. “Guess I’m still keeping you on your toes.”

“In a good way,” Addison said. She paused for a minute, then another. Just when he was certain she’d kill-switch the topic entirely, she surprised him with, “I know this isn’t going to come as some earth-shattering news flash to you, but I don’t really do intimacy.”

Ryan grabbed a half-loaf of bread from the pantry, placing it on the counter before saying, “I’m guessing there’s a good reason for that.”

Again, she paused. “It’s a long story.”

“And here I am with nothing but time.”

She looked at him, her voice barely a whisper. “I’ve never told it to anyone before. It’s…really personal. I’m not even sure I know how.”

“Hey.” Forgetting his ingredients—hell, he wasn’t even sure he knew his own name for how focused he was on that look on Addison’s face—he rounded her side of the breakfast bar to cup her face in his hands. “Look at me. You don’t have to tell me anything, okay? That’s not what this is. But if you want to, just do it in whatever way feels right to you. I’m here to listen. Not judge.”

Addison nodded, but didn’t say anything, and Ryan decided in that moment that if she shut him down, he’d let it go. Yeah, he wanted her to trust him enough to open up, but he wasn’t going to force the issue.

Only, she didn’t shut him down. “You’re lucky that you have brothers and sisters,” she started tentatively. “I’m lucky that I don’t. My father was…not a good man.”

Anger beckoned at the edges of Ryan’s awareness. Though it took not a small amount of effort, he pushed it aside. He’d promised Addison he’d listen, and that was what he was going to do. “I’m really sorry. That must have been hard.”

“It was,” she said softly. “The crazy part is, in the beginning, when I was really little, I think things were normal. At least, as close to normal as they were ever going to be.”

At his questioning look, she said, “I was a surprise baby. And let’s just say, it wasn’t the good kind of surprise.”

“Ah.” He nodded. He’d very likely been in the same boat, although he’d never know for sure.

“I was born six months after my parents got married. I can safely say I don’t think they ever loved each other. They were never affectionate. God, they barely even spoke to one another.”

Whoa. No wonder she’d thought his family dynamic was so strange. “But it wasn’t always that way?”

“The affection part? Yeah, that was always nonexistent,” she said, her brow furrowing in thought. “But when I was really little, my father worked a lot. He was a long-haul trucker, so he’d be gone for decent stretches of time. Then, when he was home, he’d sleep a lot or go out with his friends. It wasn’t so bad because we’d never really see him. My mom worked small, part-time jobs—mostly house cleaning or something where she could take me with her. Things were tight and neither of them was particularly happy, but we managed.”

Addison paused for a sip of her coffee. Ryan used the time to keep going on breakfast prep, giving her the room to replace whatever words she was willing to say.

“Then, when I was nine, my father fell asleep at the wheel on a job. He walked away without a scratch,” she added, probably in response to the “oh, shit” that Ryan had just murmured. “The truck was wrecked and the load he’d been hauling was a total loss, though. The trucking company let him go—after they held him responsible for the damages, of course—and no insurance company would touch him because the accident had been his fault. It ended his career. Which wouldn’t have been so catastrophic if it hadn’t also made him such a mean old bastard.”

Despite having a pretty charmed upbringing, Ryan was no stranger to what bad homelives looked like. The circumstances that had led to Chloe landing in foster care, some of the calls they went on at Seventeen—God, he’d seen plenty, and it was only a tiny fraction of what was out there. “So, things got worse after that.”

She nodded. “At first, he was just verbally abusive. He’d yell at me and call me names for making noise, making a mess, not brushing my hair. That sort of stuff.”

Something panged in Ryan’s chest that he couldn’t name and didn’t like. “You were nine.”

“He didn’t care,” she said. “He was mad at the world and he never hesitated to let anyone near him know it. I learned pretty fast to tiptoe and tidy up, but then he’d just replace something else to get pissed about. His anger was so big, and most of the time, it came out of nowhere.”

“That’s horrible for anyone. Let alone a kid.”

“I took it about as well as you’d expect, which is to say, I cried. I’ve always been small”—Addison gestured to her petite frame—“and he was so much stronger than me. He’d call me a runt and say I was weak. Question whether or not I was even his kid because I was such a baby. Tell me if I didn’t stop, he’d give me something to really cry about. That kind of stuff.”

“How original,” Ryan said through his teeth, realizing only when his knuckles ached that his hands had turned into fists. He shook them out, scraping up enough calm to keep listening.

“Oh, he was a bully,” Addison said, her words coming out in that calm, cool, just-the-facts way that always reassured him. Now, it made him want to scream. “Of course, back then, I was too scared to do anything about it, so it went on for years. With my mother, too. My old man was equal opportunity with his abuse. He’d threaten me with violence against her all the time, telling me if I didn’t stop my crying, he’d make me watch him hurt her.”

“Jesus.” Ryan had pretty much abandoned making breakfast at this point. Not that he was sure either of them would put much priority on eating, given the conversation. “You didn’t have anyone looking out for you at all?”

“I’ve never had any family,” she said, her story flowing out now. “I’m the only child of only children, and if I had grandparents, I never knew them. I was the quiet kid who never had new clothes or enough to eat at lunch, so friends weren’t exactly plentiful. I did have a teacher in the eighth grade who asked me if things were okay at home. I nearly told her, but then my father decided verbal abuse wasn’t enough, and he started following through on all those threats to hit my mother.”

Ryan’s molars came together so hard, he was sure one would crack. “That’s inexcusable.”

Addison nodded, a wisp of hair tumbling free from her ponytail. “It is. I suspect now that it wasn’t the first time he’d done it, but it was the first time she couldn’t cover it up. She had two cracked ribs and one of the worst black eyes I’ve ever seen, to this day. She said she’d fallen down, but I knew she was lying. I was too scared to say anything to my teacher, though, for fear of how he’d retaliate. Against my mother or me.”

Addison dropped her gaze to her hands, and Ryan’s gut tightened with unease at what he was sure would come next. “It turns out, it was only a matter of time before he decided I was big enough to knock around, too. A couple months later, I’d had the audacity to make microwave popcorn after school, and the smell sent him around the bend. He shoved me so hard that I fell and broke my arm.”

Ryan took a long breath through his nose. Counted to five. And nope. He still wanted to throttle this fucker with his bare hands. “Please tell me someone at the hospital noticed.”

“I wish I could,” she said. “At that point, my mother had gotten pretty strategic about clinic-hopping. She lied through her teeth about how I’d gotten hurt, making up some story about how I’d slipped on wet floors in the kitchen. I was so angry at her for not sticking up for me. I knew I couldn’t fight my father—especially if she was going to cover for him—so I did the only thing I could think of.”

She waited for just a beat before continuing. “I hid. I only went home when I absolutely needed to. I stayed after school for help I didn’t need. I walked to the library and stayed until closing. I hung out at the park when it was warm out. Then, one day, I walked past a martial arts academy, and something just clicked inside my head. Like, if I could fight back against my father, he’d never be able to hurt me or my mother again.”

“And that’s how you met Ah-lam,” Ryan said, the dots all connecting in a snap.

“It is.” Warmth filtered into Addison’s voice, and God, the way she could replace something good in the middle of such a hellscape floored him. “I slipped into the lobby and watched as one of her instructors taught a class. He was a big guy, clearly well-trained. Then, after the class was over, I watched him spar with Master Ah-lam.”

“I’m guessing that didn’t go well for him.”

A small smile played on Addison’s l!ps. “She very patiently and very thoroughly wiped the floor with him. In hindsight, she was teaching him to see the weaknesses in his strategy. She’s never violent in the malicious sense of the word. Not with her students. But all I saw in that moment was someone small, like me, with power. So, I balled up all my courage and I walked over and told her I wanted to learn how to be strong.”

There was pretty much no hiding his rampant curiosity, at this point. “What did she say?”

“She said I had already learned my first lesson because I’d been brave enough to come in and ask. I told her I couldn’t pay for classes, but I’d do anything she wanted—clean the dojang or run errands—in exchange for taking me on as a student. I couldn’t believe she said yes, but she did. The training was hard, but trusting her enough to let her train me was even harder.”

“But you did,” Ryan said.

Addison nodded. “I did. I never told her about my homelife, although my walls were so high, I’m sure she probably had an idea that something was going on there. But I let her in enough to teach me. I learned how to fight, and even more importantly, when not to. Every waking moment when I wasn’t at school, I was at the dojang, training.”

A thought occurred to Ryan. “Your parents didn’t question where you were all that time?”

“My father did, but only to complain that I wasn’t around to clean up the house. Ironic, since my mother kept the place spotless so he wouldn’t come after her for the same thing.” Here, Addison paused, a flash of guilt moving over her face. “But she never said a word. At the time, I thought she was glad to have one less thing to care about. She’d never shown me any affection, and I was still so angry with her for lying about my broken arm.”

Ryan sensed there was more to the story, but she didn’t elaborate, so he didn’t push.

“I flew under the radar that way for years. Then, one night, I came home and my father had broken my mother’s wrist and three of her fingers.”

All of Ryan’s breath left his lungs. “Holy shit.”

She said, “Yeah. I tried to help her, and then he came for me. He grabbed me by the hair, and I just snapped. I broke his hold and hit him—not hard enough to knock him out, but enough to let him know I would if he didn’t back off. I don’t know which one of us was more stunned.”

“You have so much more restraint than I do,” Ryan said, making her laugh softly.

“Believe it or not, it goes with the training. Which is not to say that part of me didn’t want to just kick his a*s,” she added, “but if I had, I wouldn’t have been any better than him, and I refuse to be anything like him.”

“Okay, so what happened, then?”

Addison shook her head, her voice softening. “I told him I was going to call the police. He laughed, the old bastard. Said my mother would never press charges against him. One look at her told me he was right. I begged her anyway, but she refused. I knew then that she would never leave him, no matter what he did to her or me.

It only took that one well-placed punch for my father to realize I could—and would—fight back, so he kicked me out. I was scared for my mother, but I knew that even if I called the police, she’d lie, and then he’d probably take it out on her tenfold. She told me to get out, too. She said it was ‘for the best.’ So I left.”

Ryan exhaled, a dozen different emotions pumping through his veins. “Jesus.”

“Yep,” she said. “I was nearly eighteen, at that point, so I went to live with Master Ah-lam while I finished high school, then worked at the dojang as an instructor to pay for community college. I reached out to my mother a few times that first year, trying to get her to change her mind. After the third time, she told me never to call her again. I know now that her denial was probably trauma-based, but…”

“That doesn’t make it any easier when you’re going through it,” Ryan said.

Addison ran a finger around the edge of her coffee mug even though the contents had probably long since gone cold. “It doesn’t. I knew I wanted to have a career where I got to help people—also part of my training, by the way—so I decided to become a cop. I was halfway through the academy when my father died.”

Hello, plot twist. “Whoa. Really?”

“Yeah. He had a massive heart attack. My mother had one of my instructors at the police academy tell me.”

At some point, Ryan might get used to the surprises in this story, but that moment was not going to be now. “She didn’t call you herself?”

“No. There was always that wedge between us that my father put there by abusing us both. She passed away right before I moved to Intelligence, but we hadn’t really spoken much since the night I left.”

Ryan said the only thing he could think of. “Christ, Addison. I’m so sorry. No one should ever have to go through anything remotely like that.”

“I’m sorry, too,” she whispered. “My old man was so angry all the time. It made him a horrible, hateful person. After I left for good, I decided to make my own legacy.”

Realization hit Ryan like a runaway truck. “That’s why you’re so bubbly and upbeat all the time, isn’t it?”

Addison tilted her head in acknowledgment. “It’s a lot of the reason, yes. My father was dealt some shit circumstances and he let that make him bitter and angry and mean. I can’t change what he did to me, or to my mother. But I can be in charge of how I react to it, and to everything around me. I can keep myself safe.”

God, all that hesitation to form attachments suddenly made a shitload more sense. Of course she thought relationships were dangerous—the only one she’d ever been up close and personal with had been chock full of abuse. She needed control so badly that she’d never once even given the story a voice. Not to Master Ah-lam, who clearly cared for her. Not to Maxwell or any of her unit-mates, even though they literally put their lives in each other’s hands every damned day.

But Addison had trusted him with the one thing that made her feel vulnerable, and f**k if he didn’t feel that everywhere.

“You are safe,” Ryan promised, looking right into her wide, green eyes.

She pressed her l!ps together, smiling softly. “I don’t really know how to let someone else help keep me that way.”

Rounding the counter, he reached out to pull her close, pressing a k!ss to her temple. “How about we just take that one day at a time?”

Addison stilled for just a beat before her body relaxed into his, fitting perfectly in his arms. “Okay.”

As they parted and he went back to making her breakfast, Ryan knew two things. One was that she deserved a safe place that wasn’t of her own making.

The second was that he’d do damn near anything to give it to her.