Under Locke (64 page)

The swing of the door opening didn’t alarm me. Blake was free and he’d help whoever came in. Being a Tuesday night, we were definitely going to be slow. Hence the reason why Dex had taken off after finishing up his three hour session to go talk to
his mom about her possible divorce
.

Except the first thing out of Blake’s mouth was a loud and alarmed, “What the fuck?” followed by the sharp sound of something very hard hitting something equally as dense but much more frail. And then the unmis
t
akable sound of a body dropping to the floor had us both straightening up and looking over in Blake's direction

But it wasn’t my bald friend standing there. There were three men in black ski masks standing directly over where Blake had just stood. Average height men with average body builds in ski masks with angry curls to their barely visible lips.

And one had a gun raised in his hand.

And that gun was pointed in my direction.

The urge to ask what the hell was going on was right on my tongue, but I held the question back, remembering what happened to Blake just a second before.

“Take whatever is in the
desk
, man,” Slim piped in, wrapping a hand around the edge of the chair in a white-knuckled grip.

I sucked in a breath and nodded in agreement to what he suggested, losing the words in my brain to the trembling that had taken over my hands. Where the hell was my cell phone?

The man with the gun snickered this loud, deceiving noise. “You.” He pointed at me, his accent think and sounding Russian—maybe. “You are his?”

Me? Who's?

I was about to open my mouth when another ski masked man just to the right of the one holding the gun, nodded. "It's her. Fast, Fyo.”

Holy fuck! Holy fuck! Holy fuck!

I looked over at Slim, thinking that we were going to fucking die. This guy was going to shoot us. My heart rate sped up about a million beats per second, shaking not just my fingers but my forearms and even my biceps at the possibility of what was about to happen. Was this because of my dad? It had to be. It had to be, damn it.

The Reapers? Oh my god. Were these some of the members? Dex had said he'd handled it but
…
shit!

“Please, leave my friends alone. Whatever this is about, it's only my fault,” I found myself stuttering out as two of the three men advanced around the divider.

But neither of them said anything as one of the armed men reached out and grabbed the end of my ponytail in a flash, yanking it back so hard that my head snapped brutally. He yanked even harder the second time, pulling my body over the edge of the chair before repeating the pull once more. I cried out loudly, falling to the floor in a painful lump of hip bones meeting hard tile when the masked man jerked his grip.

The man pulled on my ponytail one last time, lowering himself into a squat with the Glock in hand. His lips peeled back as he brought his face to mine. “Tell your father if we don’t have our money back by midnight tomorrow, we’re gonna finish the job we started tonight,” the man said ominously a moment before his free hand whipped out and slapped me straight across the face so hard my vision exploded in multicolored stars.

“Tell him that, you understand?” the man asked.

I was blinking, unable to really see where the hell he was at because my face felt like it’d gotten beaten with a kaleidoscope made of bricks.

The man slapped me again just as hard if not harder. “You understand me, bitch?” The cool barrel of the gun pressed straight into the middle of my forehead and it took everything in me to suppress a whimper. “
Answer me!
”

The one and only thing I understood clearly was that I was going to kill my father. I was going to slice him up into little pieces, serial killer style, and drop him into the ocean where his remains would never be found.

Somehow in between the quick murder plan I concocted, I muttered out a “
Y
es.” I managed not to cry as my face throbbed in time with my heartbeat while the men backed out of the shop as quickly as they’d come in.

The slamming of the front door was what made me look up, ignoring the nipping discomfort radiating from my sides, I locked eyes with Slim. “You okay?” he asked me, eyes wide.

I nodded but I really wasn’t. My head throbbed and my side hurt really friggin' bad but right then it didn’t matter. I was alive and—

“Blake!” we both yelled out at the same time.

Slim vaulted across the chair while I scrambled up to my knees, my hands and body aching in protest. Blake was lying on the floor, blood pooling around his head.

Don't freak out, Iris!

Slim kneeled over Blake shaking him. The men hadn’t shot him, I knew that much, but they’d probably hit him with the gun or something along those lines.

I dropped to my knees on the other side of his immobile frame, shaking his shoulder lightly. Dark eyes blinked into focus as his hands weakly reached up to start smacking Slim’s persistent hands away.

“Quit it, asshole,” he muttered, reaching to cover his head.

Pulling away, Slim yanked his phone out of his pocket, dialing on it so quickly I didn’t get a chance to wonder if he’d be calling the cops or Dex first.

“Dex, some
men
were just here,” he spoke a minute later. That answered my question.

I leaned over Blake, watching as he got his bearings together, face screwing up in pain. "Fuck," he moaned.

“It wasn't them. We’ll wait for you at the bar. Blake needs to get sewn up,” Slim said into the receive
r
, his eyes flashing up to mine. I could hear Dex speaking on the other end. “She’s—she’s—they left a message for her pops.” A second later, Slim was pulling the phone away from his face, looking down at the screen, worry etching his features.

With great reluctance, he looked over at Blake and me and sighed. “Let’s get over to Mayhem, bro,” he instructed, hands reaching for his elbow to help him to his feet. I got up and tried my best to help Blake too, my eyes darting over to Slim.

“Are you calling the cops?”

Slim’s eyes went wide as he pressed a wad of napkins he kept at his station to Blake’s head. “No.”

“You want me to call?” I asked him as we cautiously made our way across the street with Blake between us.

He shook his head. “We don’t need the cops, Iris.”

Blake didn’t look over at either one of us during this time, focusing solely on holding the napkins to the cut right above his eyebrow.

“We don’t need the cops?” Jesus. This was mafia stuff. Stuff that happened on television, not in my friggin’ life.

“You really want to call the cops when there's
a
Croatian
gang
threatening to kill you?” he asked in a matter-of-fact voice.

I looked over at Blake who was still completely tuned out of the conversation, and I swallowed. If they had the balls to come into the shop with guns... I didn't want to know what else they were capable of.

“All right.” It wasn’t all right though. My face hurt a whole friggin' lot and my heart was going to burst out of my chest from how scared I still was. But Slim's observation got to me. "They were Croatian?"

He nodded wearily. "I recognized the tattoo on their hands. I had an old customer that had me cover up that gang symbol a while back."

Jesus. This was a friggin' nightmare.

And this was exactly what Sonny had said he didn't want to know—who our father owed money to besides the Reapers.

The moment we crossed the second block over to get to Mayhem, three men were already waiting for us outside. One was the guy a little older than Dex that was really attractive, and the other two I’d never seen before. One of the guys went directly for Blake, only casting me a sidelong look before he pulled bloody Blake inside the building.

“Oh, fuck,” the good-looking man named Wheels muttered when he stopped right in front of me. His eyes
went
on a search. “They did this?”

Slim had the grace to repeat what the men had told me in a voice much more balanced than mine could
ha
ve been at that moment.

Wheels groaned in response, shaking his head. “I’m so sorry, doll.”

I was too. “It’s all right. It could’ve been worse,” I tried to tell him but my voice was wobbly and unpaved. Weak, weak, weak. I was fine. Totally fine. I needed to get myself together when Blake was bleeding all over the place and I ran the risk of peeing my pants in fear. When I lowered my eyes to the ground, I caught a flat black piece of metal tucked into the waistband of Wheels's jeans.

A gun. Holy shit. He had a gun. Why was I even surprised?

“Let’s get you some ice,” he somehow managed to suggest through gritted teeth.

The three of us headed up the stairs while Blake had gone off with the other men toward the kitchen on the first floor. Wheels and Slim seemed to be having a telepathic conversation over my head. I didn’t have it in me to care enough to pay attention to what was being communicated. The throbbing of my face multiplied tenfold with any muscle twitch.

With a Ziplock bag pressed to my cheek and a bottle of water between my thighs on the couch, Wheels planted himself next to me with Slim on my other side. None of us said anything. What was there to say? Wheels didn’t ask what happened or ask if I was okay. He simply sat there breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth.

“Is Blake okay?” I finally asked after grabbing another wad of paper towels to cover the bag of ice.

“Jesse’ll be stitching him up now. He’s fine,” Wheels answered.

I sucked in a ragged breath, looking around the dimly lit room with its pool tables and bar. This mess was eating at me little by little. They didn’t want to get cops involved. My dad owed those assholes enough money that they drove all the way to Austin to make a point, and I'd gotten dragged into the middle of a mess by a man that didn't love me. And they’d just held a gun to my friggin’ face after hurting Blake. It was one thing to deal with Liam but a completely different one to get held up by gangsters.

Gangsters. Jesus. Two months ago my biggest worries had been paying my cell phone bill.

“Is this normal?” I asked the man weakly.

Wheels glanced at me out of the corner of his eyes, sighing. “It ain't totally uncommon.”

I didn’t know how I felt about his answer.

"Do you think they'll come back if they aren't paid?”

The door burst open, cracking against the wall in a loud pop of cracked sheetrock that signaled Dex's arrival.  His tall, fit outline filled the doorframe. He scanned the room before landing on the three of us huddled together.

And I felt it. Everyone felt it.

The snap of his mood plummeting was like a blanketing sheet of ice—it might have even been hell freezing over from how chilling and powerful his anger was. It signified the coming of the second Ice Age. Then his eyes narrowed in on the Ziplock bag I had pressed to my cheek. And if possible, the taut line of control in the air pulled to the point of unraveling strand by strand.

In the span of two seconds, Dex had stormed over and dropped to his knees in front of me, one hand burying itself in my hair, the other one planted on the couch cushion just to the side of my thigh.

“Iris.” His tone was wild and low.

I blinked at him. “It’s okay
.
”