“Yeah,” Boone agreed. “Good grab, Axe.”

“Yeah,” Axl said curtly. “Later.”

“Later, bud.”

The call disconnected and I handed Axl his phone.

“Was I supposed to hear any of that?” I asked.

“Some of it, no, but since it pertains to you and you’re not gonna say anything to anybody, it doesn’t matter.”

Point taken to keep my mouth shut.

Next up.

“Assault?” I asked quietly.

“With their gig, in BDSM, trust is paramount. This guy put Ryn in a position where he could do absolutely anything he wanted to do to her and she was helpless to stop him. In that world and any other, that amounts to rape. Ryn’s tough, but it understandably fucked with her. But even if she shrugged it off, that’s enough to send Boone over the edge. The fact this guy could be doing it to others, he had a statement to make. He made it.”

“Were you two going to find him in order to—?”

“Definitely.”

I said nothing to that.

“Tease that out, honey,” he said in a gentler tone. “Ryn takes that to the cops, how do you think that’d go? She decided to have sex with that guy, in their scene, and from the cops’ perspective, they could think it’s just that she didn’t like the way he did it. Even if they found some charge to lay on him, she put that in front of a jury, a defense lawyer would chew her up. She consented but didn’t like the way it went. The fact he rendered her defenseless in a way she did not consent to, and doing it, probably scared the shit out of her, wouldn’t matter. A case could be made that was what she wanted. And maybe it was on the bones of it, but the way he did it, it absolutely wasn’t. And he’s free to keep doing this to women? No.”

He was right.

No.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” he replied.

I took in a deep breath.

And got to something else that was now very heavily weighing on my mind.

“It isn’t lost on me there’s an element of danger to your job,” I began, and stopped.

“Mm-hmm,” Axl hummed in an encouraging way for me to go on.

“And it’s very much you. We haven’t talked about it, but I think it feeds something in you.”

“It does,” he confirmed.

“Okay, that may be for a deeper discussion later. But for now, with whatever you were just talking about, are you in more danger than normal?”

He reached his hand out to me.

Like always when he did that, I took it.