Read Online Devoted Defender by Rachel Dylan - Free Book Online

had so many issues and personal demons. She always told me that I wasn’t like her, that I was meant to be able to get out of the vicious cycle that she had lived her entire life, and that I could be something more one day. It’s one of the things that motivated me to become a trained chef. I wanted to be independent and secure. To know that I could stand on my own two feet, and not seek out help from others.” She paused. “But none of that explains my hesitancy about the officer earlier.”
    “If you don’t want to talk about it now, I understand.” She’d already opened up some pretty deep wounds. He knew how hard it was to talk about these things.
    “No, it’s better this way. Just to get it all out there right now. Like I said, my mom picked the wrong type of men. Not just guys that weren’t a perfect match. I’m talking about men who were involved in drugs and worse. Guys you did not want to cross. The guys she dated did have money, but it was dirty money. My mom flitted from one bad guy to the next. I don’t ever remember her dating normal guys. I tried to shield myself from it the best I could. But then one day it all caught up to me.”
    “What happened?” A million awful thoughts ran through his mind.
    “I was seventeen and was just about to finish up my senior year in high school. I was at home in the apartment by myself. And my mom had given her boyfriend a key. From the moment he stepped inside the front door, I knew he was strung out on drugs and had been drinking. He demanded to know where my mom was. She hadn’t gotten off her shift at work yet. Then he started to go on a rampage. He roughed me up a bit. I tried my best to fight him off. Then he started throwing things around the kitchen. While he was trashing the kitchen, I ran to my mom’s room and grabbed her gun out of the nightstand. I’d never used a gun before, but I was so afraid. He was so full of rage.” She paused and took another breath. “He’d already hurt me. I thought he might kill me. I was just a child. I shut the door to my mom’s room and locked myself in.”
    Caleb clenched his fists as his anger at this man grew with each word that came out of Annie’s mouth.
    “After a few minutes, he busted down the door and came toward me. I told him to stop and he didn’t. That’s when I shot him in the leg.”
    “You had every right to defend yourself, Annie.”
    “That’s what I thought, too. And I didn’t try to kill him. I was no gun expert, but I tried to aim for his leg thinking that would be better than anything else. I was just trying to stop him from hurting me. That’s all I was trying to do.”
    “What happened to him?”
    “He survived. He lost a bit of blood but there was a lasting effect—he walks with a severe limp because of me.”
    “And the police?” He hated to ask. He was starting to put the pieces together, and he had a pretty good idea where this was going.
    “I thought they would be on my side. Up to that point in my life, I assumed that police helped the innocent. I was a young girl being attacked by a criminal. But they took his side. I underwent hours of interrogation. They tried to get me to change my story. Tried to get me to say that I was the aggressor. They didn’t buy my self-defense claim.”
    “Did they charge you?”
    “No. Thankfully, in the end, another detective was brought onto the case, and he believed me enough to keep the charges from sticking.”
    “Dirty cops,” Caleb muttered to himself.
    “Exactly. My mom’s boyfriend had friends who had some pretty important criminal connections. Looking back it’s all so clear now. But at the time, as a seventeen year old girl, my life felt like it was falling apart. I didn’t understand why they didn’t believe me.” She sucked in a breath. “I was telling the truth.”
    “I believe you.”
    “You do? Just like that?”
    “I know we haven’t known each other that long, but I can see you’re telling me the