Текст книги "Under Locke"

Автор книги: Mariana Zapata

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

Dex scrubbed his hands over his face, his eyes wide with intent. "Babe, I've handpicked everythin' and everyone in here. I know what I want and I get what I want," he breathed. "And I keep what's mine."

~ * ~ *

After cleaning up and making sure none of the guys needed anything before I left, I was running home a bit later than usual. There were a few things I wanted to get from the drugstore that I forgot to pick up before work.  I pulled into the first Walgreens that didn’t look totally sketchy, bought new razors and lip balm, and headed the rest of the way to Sonny’s.

My mind was usually in a million different places, but all I was focused on at the moment was getting in, eating and vegging out on the couch to relax. With only Monday off because of the Expo and the stress I'd put myself under at the thought of quitting Pins, my body was suffering from the long days we had. Not to mention the fact that my brain hadn’t stopped running different scenarios and ideas on what I could do to change my life's current situation forever for the better.

I'd been given a second chance, it only seemed fair that I take advantage of it. What was the purpose of wasting years, months, weeks, days, minutes, even friggin’ moments of life, after everything I'd been through? My mom and yia-yia had done so much for me. I had to figure out something.

Sonny hadn’t come from beginnings that much more different than mine. He had a good job, a house and—except for this crap with our sperm donor—security. There was a reliable future ahead of him.

If Dex could come out of his father's shadow, somehow manage to stay in the supposedly reformed version of the same motorcycle club who had lost half its members over the years, moved passed the years he spent in jail, and built a successful business... there was newfound hope in the world.

If they could do it, so could I. It was just a matter of time.

I’d barely pulled the car into the open spot right in front of the house when I happened to look down the street in the opposite direction I’d come in from. And what I saw made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle up. I forgot all about eating and watching the History Channel.

There were three men straddling old school bikes two houses down. Three men I could barely see in the dark under the luminescence of the street lamp.  It was the same friggin’ guys from the party and two of the same guys who had driven down the street. The one with the shaved head was in the middle as before, his big body looked incredibly imposing from where he was rooted.

Shit!

Double shit.

Something in me told me that wasn’t right. These guys weren’t like Trip or Luther, or the other people I’d watched while at Mayhem. These guys weren’t a part of Sonny’s club.

So I did what any somewhat intelligent woman that’s watched too many movies did—I hauled my ass out of the car, kept my focus on the door, slid my three keys between my knuckles for protection Wolverine style, and slammed the door shut the first nanosecond I was in.

And then I shrieked, “Sonny!”

~ * ~ *

“You’re sure?”

I glared at the dark haired man across the table and nodded slowly. We were sitting at the dining room table while I scarfed down toast and a warm glass of milk before bed. This was normal behavior.

If only there weren't creepy ass bikers down the street.

And if only Sonny didn't currently look like he was fighting every cell in his body to unleash something ugly that was residing beneath his light brown eyes.

“They’re the same guys.” I bit into my toast. “I recognize them from when I left the bar that night, and I swear they drove down the street a couple weeks ago looking over here in a weird way. They have jackets instead of vests, and there's a big bald guy that looks familiar.”

His attention was focused on the wall while his hands propped up his chin. “Fuck,” he muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

My question was calm. “What is it?”

His eyes stayed on the wall.

All right, he wasn’t going to tell me that either, so I was going to plan B.

I reached out to touch his hand, trying so hard not to let the tiny nip of fear in my gut swallow me whole. "Sonny, did you do something?"

He slammed his eyes shut and grunted. His hands fisted into tight balls on the table as he blew out a long breath.

"If something happened, I'll help you," I promised him. Because I would. There wasn't much I wouldn't do for him, and that included letting him use me as an alibi if he'd done something awful.

Sonny's fingers uncurled just enough to wrap around my elbow, squeezing just lightly. "I didn't do anything, Rissy."

Jesus F. Christ. He called me Rissy. He only called me Rissy when he had bad news to tell me.

"What is it?"

He groaned, earning him a poke in the rib.

“Are they like your… arch enemies or something?” I asked him quietly, setting the bread back onto the plate. I probably sounded like an idiot with that terminology, but I didn’t know his biker lingo, and I thought that description worked well enough when his cheek quirked up for a split second before his lips hardened.

He leaned back in his chair, clenching his eyes closed. “Kind of but it's not like that.” He paused. "They're part of a group of wannabes in San Antonio that aren't exactly fans of the MC's territory here."

Oh my God, I was living in a real-life television series.

I blinked at him, confused as hell. “I thought you said you guys weren't doing stuff anymore.” I pushed the plate away, leaning toward him.

He was going to tell me the truth, damn it. My mom had told me that back when my dad had left the MC, they'd been associating with drug distributors, whatever the hell that meant. I could clearly remember Sonny telling me that president, Luther's old nutted self that'd been making out with a much younger woman at the bar, had split the club up, cleaning it out after his wife had gotten murdered in retaliation.

He dropped his gaze down to press his forehead to one of his upturned palms, closing his eyes in the process. “It's nothing like that, Ris,” he promised. "It's not me or the Club they have business with."

That little bit of information was better than nothing, but it didn't mean I wasn't going to fish for more. “Okay, so why are they here?"

“I’m sorry, kid, but I can't drag you into this, okay?” he murmured, still looking down. “Don’t worry about them, all right?”

Telling me not to worry would be the equivalent of telling me not to have my period.

But I wasn’t about to stress him out more than he already was, so I mustered my most bullshit face. "You're sure?"

He nodded slowly, darn it.

“Okay," I agreed hesitantly.

Sonny’s features softened at my weak ass smile. “Iris.” In a second he had dropped down to his knees, placing his palms on each of mine. “It’ll be fine,” he assured me.

Listening to him was one of my life's dumbest decisions.

Chapter Sixteen

There were a lot of things that immediately let me know as soon as I woke up that something was wrong.

Seriously wrong.

The top drawer of the dresser was open, and I never left any drawers open. Keeping them closed was a neurotic tendency of mine.

My cell phone was on the bed instead of the nightstand where I’d left it charging before I fell asleep.

And the third was that the door to the bedroom was also closed. I never closed the door because I was paranoid about screaming and not having someone hear me.

My first thought after my brain decoded the clues was that Sonny had come in at some point during the night. Everything besides the drawer and my phone was in place, so I tried to think of what I should do. Luckily, my first instinct had been to check my messages and when I unlocked the screen, I saw that it’d been the right step.

If I don’t leave you a note on the kitchen counter,

call Dex ASAP. My phone and other stuff is in your drawer.

Tell him what you saw.

The three messages were from Sonny at two o’clock in the morning. Thirty minutes after I’d gone to bed and left him sitting in the kitchen shooting off several text messages one right after the other.

I’d known something was wrong and that realization choked my insides, making me throw back the sheets and run out of the bedroom as quickly as I could. But what I saw wasn’t what I wanted to find. There was no note on the counter.

Fuck!

Never in my life had I ever moved so fast besides the time I tried to dodge Will when I took off with his secret stash of Playboy magazines to parade around the house. And this was Sonny. I'd just gotten him back in my life.

His wallet and another set of keys that looked to be too small for any door or car, were sitting right on top of my pile of socks. My fingers trembled as I flipped open his old, basic flip phone and tried to get through the menu with a panicking, freaked out mindset, searching for Dex’s phone number. When I found “Dexter” under the contacts, my thumb was hitting the call button before I even thought to do it.

“Please, please, please, please, please,” I begged to myself, listening to the ringing on the speaker.  My heart was hammering its impatience. “Dex, c’mon—“

“What the fuck?” a sleepy, throaty voice answered with a yawn. “It’s nine, asshole.”

I sucked in a breath. “Dex?”

There was a clearing of a throat and another sleepy sigh. “Uh… Ritz?”

“It’s me,” I confirmed quickly. “Sonny’s gone.”

In the span of a millisecond, Dex’s sleep laced voice froze over. “What do you mean Sonny’s gone?”

I didn’t notice until I heard the trembling in my voice that there were tears in my eyes. “I think these guys took him."

~ * ~ *

I was kind of a mess following my brief conversation with my new ally, The Dick. After having him basically demand that I calm down, I managed to tell him in ten seconds about the guys I’d seen parked down the street, and what Sonny had texted me. Needless to say, I was really friggin’ glad that I wasn’t having this conversation with him in person.

Using the word “pissed” to describe his reaction would be like saying that the Pacific Ocean was a body of water. The term didn't give any justice to what was said over the phone. I didn’t even get a chance to say “bye” before he’d hung up, giving me a thirty minute notice on his arrival.

Twenty-nine minutes later, I’d taken the fastest shower of my life, cried over my missing brother, and freaked the hell out all over again. Even though I knew it was coming, the knock on the front door made my hands shake and heart rate speed up. Keeping in mind what the hell had just possibly happened to Sonny, I checked the peephole to make sure it was Dex—it was—along with Trip and another guy I’d never seen before.

“Open up, Ritz,” Dex barked from the other side of the door.

“’Kay,” I mumbled, unlocked the bolt and took a step back to let them inside.

Dex’s eyes were on me as he strode in, his walk full of that same swagger that made me think he either practiced it or he just got really lucky. That gift kind of seemed unfair but whatever, this wasn’t the time to think that.

“You okay?” Trip asked me, following in after Dex, who also watching me closely but without a crease between his brows.

I should have been tough and said that I was, but realistically, I wasn’t. “Kind of.”

The new guy walked in with a nod and a, “Sup,” which I answered with a weak “Hi.”

“Where’s his stuff at?” Dex asked me as he made his way into the living room like a mother goose leading its babies to water.

“On the coffee table.”

He nodded to himself, bending over the table with his faded but fitting jeans winking at me. “Trip, go check his room. See if anything’s missing. Buck, check out the garage,” he ordered them as he flipped through the slots in Sonny’s wallet.

The two guys didn’t say anything in response but split up, going in opposite directions in the house to do as he’d asked. I just hovered in the corner at a loss as to what I could do without getting in the way of whatever their plan was.

“Can I do anything?” I asked hesitantly.

Dex’s eyes drifted up to mine, slowly. He was still pissed, I could tell, but he was trying to rein it in. “No, babe. We got this.”

“You sure? I don’t have very much money, but if that’s what they want, I’ll give you what I have to get him back,” I told him, feeling my chest constrict. This shit was straight out of an action movie, only this time I couldn’t be certain it would have a happy ending because life wasn’t always like that, unfortunately.

Dex looked at me for the longest before shaking his head and lowering his voice. “No, no. Don’t worry about that. It's not your money they want.”

I almost asked what the hell else they would want. I almost also asked who "they" were. But my survival instincts said this wasn’t the right time to ask so I bit back the questions and nodded at him.

“Babe, this place is about to get packed. Got any errands or something you can run before you go to the shop?” he asked me in that same soft tone he’d just used.

I didn’t but obviously he didn’t want me to be at the house when the other guys from the WMC showed up. But if it helped Sonny, then I’d move back to Fort Lauderdale or drive down to Venezuela if that’s what he wanted.

“Yeah, I can go do a few things.” I just didn’t know what.

His head tilted down so that he could look at me through his long, dark eyelashes. “All right. Already talked to Blake and he’s openin' with you instead of me but put my phone number in your cell so you can get in touch with me if you need to.” He pinned me with this concrete-like look, his tone attempting to be reassuring. “Don’t worry about Sonny. We’ll find him."

I wanted to believe him, but those were pretty much the same words Sonny had told me right before he’d let some assholes do who knows what to him.

~ * ~ *

“Babe.”

Make it stop.

“Babe.”

Oh God. Please. Stop.

I’d barely fallen asleep following an hour long staring contest versus the ceiling. The tension in my body after my shitty day had finally seeped out of my bones enough to let me relax. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Sonny. Kidnapped Sonny. Missing Sonny. Possibly injured Sonny. I wouldn’t let myself even think that something else could happen to him, but wasn’t that what people did in movies and in real life? Torture and… do other things?

I buried my face deeper into the pillow.

All day, I’d been worried sick. After Dex had pleasantly kicked me out of the house, I’d gone to the mall. I watched a matinee by myself at the theater to kill time until work while also distracting me just a little from the uneasy goldfish swimming around in my stomach. I couldn’t remember anything clearly, not the movie or the things I’d seen in the stores, or even the customer’s faces I’d helped throughout the day at Pins.

Blake and Blue must have known something was up because they’d been even nicer to me than usual. They gave me space by not asking a million questions I couldn’t answer but came by to sit with me silently each opportunity they had. I'd tried calling Dex a few times but he'd only answered the first time, sounding annoyed beyond belief but promising to call me if he found out anything. I never got such a call, so I called him again and got no answer.

Fucking Sonny.

The more I thought about what happened, the more pissed off I got. He’d known they were out there. The men hadn’t broken into the house and taken him. Sonny had to have walked out of the friggin’ house and gone to them. What the hell had he been thinking? Obviously, I wasn’t the only one who was an idiot.

So I stewed all day. Thinking about friggin’ Sonny and how much of a dumbass he was. Thinking about what reasons those men could want him for.

Sonny didn’t tell me enough about what he did when I wasn't around or when he magically disappeared at night, so I had no idea the kind of crap he got into. Mainly, it was blind trust between us. Neither one of us was used to having someone to answer to.

As soon as we closed down the shop that night, Blue had asked me if I needed anything—which was extra sweet because she rarely spoke to anyone, much less me—and then we’d all gone our separate ways. The thought of not going to Sonny’s hadn’t even entered my mind, so I drove straight there, showered again, forced myself to eat two-day-old leftovers, double-checked to make sure all the locks were secure, and went to bed. The bed where I tossed and turned for more than an hour before I somehow managed to fall asleep, pushing away that little voice that warned me here was someone else that I cared about that I could lose.

And now, I was quickly losing that sweet reprieve from reality.

“Honey, wake up,” someone whispered in the dark.

Someone?

Shit!

I knifed up in bed, my heart jack-hammering against its house of bones. I blinked away sleep, expecting to see one of the bikers, or I don’t know, a serial killer sitting on the bed next to me with his hands on my arm, thumbs making lazy circles on my skin.

“What the—!” I panted, blinking in the dark to see that strikingly familiar facial structure inches away.

“Chill, Ritz,” Dex murmured gently, thumbs still circling.

My hand flew up to press against the skin over my heart, willing it to slow down. “Jesus, you scared me,” I panted.

In true, normal Dex fashion he didn’t smile in amusement or apologize. "What are you doin' here?"

"Sleeping?"

He sighed. "Blake didn't get my text?"

What was he talking about? I shook my head.

“Get up,” he ordered. “You need to go talk to your bro before we get outta here.”

I blinked again slowly as his words settled in. Talk to my bro? "Sonny's here?" My voice hitched up.

Dex nodded. "He's packin' some shit up. Pack a bag so you don't have to come back here for a while, then go talk to him."

Confusion swamped me in a million different ways. Where was Sonny going? Where the hell was I going? But mainly, I was wondering what was going on, period. There was too much secrecy to make me feel good.

Like a good girl, I tried to focus on what to pack so I could figure things out as soon as possible. Luckily, I had enough good sense before falling asleep to keep a pair of sleep shorts on because I usually slept in just my underwear and a bra. Dex flicked the lamp on while I grabbed a bunch of random clothes from the dresser.

“Where was he?” I asked him while stuffing my duffel with what I’d absently picked. I couldn’t even look at Dex as I asked him the question, it made me too nervous. I'd ask if Sonny was fine but he wouldn't be home packing if he wasn't.

“County hospital.”

My spine snapped up to standing, the muscles along my back tensing. "What?" I'm pretty positive I screeched out the words.

"The county hospital, babe. Some lady found him by the park unconscious this mornin' and called in an ambulance for him," he explained.

Without even thinking about it, my legs became unglued and started leading me around the bed to skip the whole packing thing and find Sonny instead. But Dex held up his arm, blocking me from going around him. "Calm down, Ritz. He just had a little concussion, a few bruises. He's all right," he said softly. "Finish packin'."

What the ef constituted a little concussion?

I was going to be sick. Breathing in and out of my nose a few times, I looked up at Dex's eyes to see if I could catch a hint as to whether he was being honest with me or not. Those fathomless dark blue eyes were intent and clear in a challenge of the wills, like he could tell I was trying to catch him in a lie.

"He's okay," Dex insisted, nudging me back with the muscles of his forearm. "Finish up, babe."

Holy crap. He probably wasn't lying. For about the hundredth time in five minutes, I nodded, pushing back that sickening sensation in my chest again. “Okay.” Zipping the bag halfway, I yanked it off the bed and looked at him. "I think I have everything, I'm going to go hunt this moron down."

I didn't bother waiting for a response before I took off down the hallway to the opened door of Sonny's bedroom. The fan light was on, illuminating the room and the figure sitting on the edge of the bed with a duffel bag next to him. Even from behind, his features looked loose. Tired. Worn-out.

But it wasn't until I rounded the bed and saw the side of his face that made me gasp. "What the hell, Son?"

His cheek was swollen to twice the size it should have been. The skin was broken and purple, only slightly worse than the awful split on the corner of his mouth. Yet, he managed to give me a little grin out of somewhere.

"Ris," he greeted me in a lower voice than usual. He patted the bed. "I'm fine, kid. Come sit down."

"My ass you're fine," I told him, taking a step to stand in front of him.

Sonny tilted his head back to give me a better view of the ass-beating those sons of biscuit-eating whores gave him. The entire right side of his face looked deformed from the swelling. I was kind of worried that maybe he'd lost some teeth but I couldn't be sure.

"I've had worse, believe me," he argued softly. "Come here and quit worrying."

I gave him a look that said it'd be a cold day in hell before I stopped worrying about him.

"C'mon, I don't have a lot of time before Trip gets here," he said, patting the bed again.

I wanted to argue with him but logic told me not to. My poor, poor brother looked like complete crap. It made my stomach tense horribly, like I was having contractions or something. My hand was out and clinging to Sonny's instinctively.

"You remember I told you the sperm donor came down and asked me for money?"

Like I'd forget. "He asked Luther for money too, right?"

Sonny nodded slowly. "Yup, and he didn't give it to him either," he explained. "He didn't want to tell anybody what the money was for, except he just needed it real bad."

"How much was it?"

It looked like he tried to make a face but immediately stopped the effort once he remembered he looked like the Elephant Man's cousin. "Ten grand."

An ugly guffawing noise sprang out of my throat. "What?"

Sonny nodded again. "Exactly. No one in their right fucking mind is gonna let him borrow that much money for no damn reason. So nobody in the Club did." And I suddenly had a really bad feeling about the word choices my brother had chosen. No one in their right fucking mind...

"So what does that have to do with you exactly?" I asked him hesitantly.

"It turns out this wasn't the first time dear old daddy asked for money. A few months ago, he'd come down and borrowed a healthy chunk from the Reapers."

Oh crap. Oh boy-crap.

I'd never heard of the Reapers before but the puzzle pieces were making too much sense. "Those men?"

He sighed. "Yeah, Ris. Daddy didn't stick to the payment plan, and from what Trip figured out today, they aren't exactly happy that he came into town, and then bailed. They want their money."

This had to be a bad dream. An awful dream.

"But you don't even—" What was I going to say? That he didn't matter to our father? It was the harsh truth.

He must have known what I was trying to explain because he lifted a shoulder in lame agreement. "I know, Ris. I know. But I'm not paying for his shit, and I'm not lettin' them come after you next now that they know you live here. I'm sure they know you're his too."

I gagged, earning a slap to the back from my brother.

"Quit it, kid. It's fine. I'm gonna go find this motherfucker and make sure he pays his shit now. I’m not sitting around, waiting for God knows what to happen. The last thing he deserves is to get rescued by one of us. I’m not paying for his mistakes any longer and neither are you,” he stated evenly.

Every minute just seemed to make this entire scenario seem so much more like a dream. A very hard dream that I couldn't swallow. "So we're going to go find him?"

Sonny didn't agree. The hand he'd left on my back after slapping it, slid up to rest on the shoulder furthest away from him. "No, Ris. I'm gonna go find him. Trip's coming with me. We don't know what other kind of pile he's dug himself into and you're better off staying here with Dex until all this shit gets sorted out."

The sound that came out of my mouth sounded like a squawk. "What?"

"You're staying with Dex. The house isn't safe and I don't trust you to stay with anybody else in the Club," he explained, squeezing my shoulder. "Hopefully I can find him in a few days."

But what would he do once he found him? The old man had obviously taken off because he didn't have the money to pay back the Reaper assholes. I almost, almost asked Sonny but by the look on the half of his face that didn't look like it'd gotten friendly with a baseball bat, Sonny had no limits on what he was capable of.

So making Curt Taylor find ten grand was going to happen one way or another. Of that I suddenly didn't have a doubt.

"Shit, Sonny," I whispered. How the hell had this mess fallen on us? On him? The one Taylor offspring who had less to do with his father than the other two. Christ.

The hand on my shoulder tightened. "Ris," he whispered, pulling me closer to him. The side of his forehead rested against the top of my head. "I'm coming back, all right? I swear to God I'm not leaving you here. I'm just gonna go find this asshole so we can get back to Tofu Tuesdays and shit," he assured me. "I'm coming back."

The intent behind his words weighed my sternum down. He was leaving. Leaving me in a new city all alone with his friend. I wasn't going to have a panic attack. I had a panic attack once when Will had first left, and then I'd dealt with it. But Sonny was coming back.