Rite of Wrongs by Mica Stone Read Free Book Online

whole lot longer than her normal trip from the station, it was close to ten when Miriam pulled into one of her two assigned parking slots. Thierry used the other, and his was empty. She was still in her workout clothes, still wearing every layer of the day’s sweat, but at least her time was now her own.
    She’d bought the place ten years ago after taking the job with the UPPD. Before that, she’d lived in the Heights. The quaint atmosphere of that 1900s Houston neighborhood—her house there had been built in 1925—had fit her a lot better than Midtown.
    And as much as she missed those creaking wood floors and high ceilings, the art deco crown molding and original fireplace, she did not miss the noise from the nearby beer garden. The music. The crowds. The 2:00 a.m. drunken laughter and honking horns.
    Her place in Union Park was a first-floor quarter of an old warehouse in the industrial district. She’d bought it because it was close to everything. The station. Starbucks. Her yoga studio. The market where she bought her groceries. The liquor store where she bought her booze.
    She could walk anywhere she wanted. Except she didn’t.
    She should, she knew, but walking felt like a waste of time when she had so many stops to make and so little time to make them. She walked enough on the job as it was. She didn’t need a gadget to count her steps when her feet let her know she’d reached her quota. And after working today in flip-flops, they were definitely letting her know.
    So much for having a day off.
    Spending her downtime with dead bodies and a brokenhearted family, then with one that was just plain broken . . .
    Yeah. Not her idea of fun.
    At least after she’d helped her mom clean up—penitently wiping away smeared globs of icing from the dining room’s hardwood before attacking the floor with a mop—her dad had packed her a plate of lasagna to go, along with a quarter of Lori’s pink cake. Like she hadn’t had enough sugar to last a month, enough pink to last indefinitely.
    Standing now in her open-air kitchen, she pulled the foil wrapping from the Chinet platter and realized he’d actually sent enough for two people to eat. Though as hungry as she was . . . she shoved the whole thing into the microwave and slammed the door, programming the time and temperature so as not to burn what would be one of her best dinners in a while.
    No one makes lasagna like Cyril Rome. With a tired smile, she watched the turntable spin slowly. The smell of all those onions, all that garlic . . . thankfully, Thierry was working. She wouldn’t have to share. Probably said a lot about the dregs of their relationship that she didn’t want to. It said a lot about her hunger, too. She had it for food. She had it for work. What she had left for him was only physical.
    And even that was rare these days. Which wasn’t fair to him. Nothing about their being together had ever been fair to him, she mused, as the microwave’s bell dinged.
    That wasn’t how a rebound worked.
    And, yeah. He’d known where her head was the night they’d met in the ER.
    Dr. Thierry Greer had looked up five years ago from his examination of the man who’d tried to kill her an hour before, held her gaze, and given her a grim shake of his head.
    That was when her then-partner, who’d shot the man to save her, had walked out of her life, leaving Miriam to deal with the aftermath. The dead man’s next of kin had been on scene at the time of the shooting, sparing both her and the forensic investigator from having to make the notification. That had been the only good news that night.
    An hour later, she had barely moved. Thierry had found her sitting at the nurse’s station, her hands wrapped around a cup of cold coffee, her eyes aching and red-rimmed, her nerves so shot she’d thought he might be able to extract bullet fragments.
    Instead, he’d taken her to the doctor’s lounge and made her soup. Hot soup. Chicken noodle from a pop-top can.