I nodded.

That made sense.

“Yeah?” he asked, even though I nodded.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“You okay?” he pushed.

I couldn’t shake something.

I nodded again.

“Tell me the truth, Hattie,” he said gently. “I wanna deal with this,” he indicated my laptop with his head, “but you’re more important so I need to know you’re good.”

“I’m good. I just think … ” I shrugged and finished, “Something is off.”

“Something is definitely off,” he agreed.

“Not just this guy being whacked. Something else.”

“We’ll get down to it.” He gave my neck a squeeze. “Get dressed, honey. We gotta go.”

I nodded again, he gave me another squeeze and then he let me go.

I ran and got dressed.

* * *

We were all standing around Axl’s workstation (and, by the by, Axl’s workplace was serious cool, precisely what you’d think of as commando central!).

All of us (though, I wasn’t standing, Axl told me to take a seat in his chair, which I thought was sweet).

That all of us included Axl, Boone, Ryn, Axl’s boss, Hawk, and the office manager, Elvira.

They’d connected remotely with some IT guru to Ryn’s computer and he had some diagnostics running.

But they were watching the montages sent to me on mine.

As was not in question, I liked porn.

Watching porn montages sitting at Axl’s workstation with our friends, his coworker and his boss?

Awkward.

“Well, not much you can say about this dude, ’cept he’s got good taste in porn,” Elvira remarked.

Ryn made a choking noise and I knew why because I was swallowing my own laughter.

“Vira,” Hawk’s deep voice tumbled from one side of me, where he was standing, to the other, where Elvira was, and I fought holding on to the arms of Axl’s chair so the force of his unhappiness wouldn’t knock me over.

FYI: pre-Axl, I would probably be apoplectic around Hawk Delgado (much like the semi-functioning apoplectic I was around Axl).

Yes, he was that handsome.

Then again, none of the guys were slouches, far from it.

But they’d been picked for my girls.

Hawk, though (even if he was very married).

Dayum.

I looked up at him.

Dayum to infinity.

His face was carved in stone.

One could say he did not like his boys dicked with, especially not through their women.

Or just not at all.

But one of his men having an issue was one thing.

Another one dragged in?

Man, whoever was doing this was up shit’s creek.

“I watched this one,” Ryn declared. “Start of it was a three out of ten, but I was bored so I let it roll. Totally ended on a bang.” Pause. “Literally.”

Elvira laughed.

Ryn laughed with her.

I chewed my lips in order not to laugh with them and wondered how they could sally forth in such a manner with the suffocating, pissed-off, alpha-male vibe weighing down the air.

“Hattie, could you place any of the pictures this guy sent?” Hawk asked me, muffling the fury in his tone, but just barely. “Did he take stills from porn movies you may have seen and that’s what he sent to you?”

I shook my head at him.

Hawk shifted his gaze.

“Ryn seen the pictures?” Hawk asked Boone.

“Not yet.”

“Show her, see if she can place them,” Hawk directed.

“I’ll get ’em,” Axl said, then he was off.

“Play it again,” Elvira said.

I looked to her then down to my laptop to see the short, three-minute clip had ended.

I reached out to hit play when Hawk repeated, “Vira.”

“What?” she asked.

Nothing from him for a second, then an audible sigh.

Before I could hit go, Axl came back and handed a folder to Ryn.

She opened it, studied what was in it, turned one of the photos over, and went completely white.

Oh no.

“What?” Boone barked.

Barked!

Yikes.

Her eyes drifted up to him.

“Can we talk?” she asked in a strangled voice.

Oh no!

Quick as a flash, he had her hand and was dragging her down the row.

It was safe to say this was not good.

Everyone watched as they had an intense discussion with Boone’s neck bent deep so he could get his ear close to Ryn’s lips.

And this discussion did not go well, and I knew that starting with the muscle that played in his cheek, but also because eventually Boone’s face …

No …

Every inch of his body nearly screamed he needed to hurt someone.

“Oh no,” I whispered.

They came back, and Ryn looked sheepish, Boone still looked murderous and he was walking like his shoulders were a wall of cinder blocks swinging to and fro.

Eep!

Still, he did it again holding her hand.

Sweet.

“Well, some of you know, some of you don’t, and it’s never fun to be outed when you don’t call that ball, but here we go,” Ryn started. “I’m in the life. I had a Dom and he tied me up just like this chick.” She lifted the folder and shook it. “Exactly like this chick. He was not a good Dom and I don’t mean that in the conventional, I-didn’t-enjoy-him way. He didn’t play by the rules in a way that could have been dangerous for me.”

Right.

Before, I realized that I was breathing relatively easy.

Now the pissed-off alpha vibe was suffocating.

But my heart hurt that Ryn experienced that.

“She told me about it,” Boone growled. “I found him, had a few words, shared a few other things nonverbally. Had a few words with some important players in town too so his shit would be shut down. His shit, disregarding safe words, is serious, so the players I talked to assured me that he’d find some difficulties feeding his need. That said, way I left him, I felt sure I taught him a lesson in etiquette. I’m seein’ now I left him with a few questions on that.”

“This isn’t about Hattie, it’s about Ryn,” Axl said.

“Yeah,” Boone grunted.

“He’s fucking with Hattie and me to get to you and Ryn,” Axl went on.

“Yeah,” Boone bit off.