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 f**k?” a sleepy, throaty voice answered with a yawn. “It’s nine, ass**le.”

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.