Chapter 3
Three
Jaxson
I’ve been trying for the past twenty-minutes to get through to Jayden. He’s not answering his phone, and I know he’s avoiding my calls because they keep getting sent to voicemail after a couple of rings.
What the hell is he up to?
“Hello?” Jayden finally answers, and he sounds a bit out of breath.
“What the hell took you so long?” I grumble at him, and in the background, I hear a faint female voice screaming. It’s mumbled and muffled. “What the fuck is going on, Jayden?”
He clears his throat. “Just the television,” he answers. “Sorry, I muted it.”
I don’t hear anything suspicious, and I pause, listening again, but just his breathing. “Dante called me, wants to know why you were hanging out at the Bloody Rogue.”
“I can’t go to the bar after work for a drink?” Jayden asks.
Everyone in town, at least our crew, we all know the Bloody Rogue is owned by Dante Ricci. The same Dante Ricci who runs the Italian mafia. Typically, we steer clear of their venues as much as we can.
“What’s really going on?”
“Is that my dad?” Izzie’s voice pipes up from the other side.
My stomach flops. “Why is my daughter hanging out with you?” Izzie is in her mid-twenties, there’s no reason for her to spend time with Jayden.
“She was helping me with a project,” Jayden says, clearing his throat.
“Does that project have anything to do with a missing young woman, Harper Ricci? Let me talk to my daughter.”
I hear the phone being passed down to my daughter. “Hi, Dad.”
“Please tell me you’re not involved in Harper Ricci’s disappearance.”
“I’m not involved in Harper Ricci’s disappearance,” she repeats a little too quickly. My daughter has never been good at lying to me. One of the advantages of what I do for a living, I’m able to read people.
“Where is she, Izzie?”
“Umm, in the basement.”
Jayden’s voice echoes from the other side, slightly distant but still rather loud. “Fuck! Why did you have to tell him? He’s going to fucking turn us into the cops!”
“I-I didn’t know what Uncle Jayden had planned,” Izzie stammers, and I believe my daughter. “He told me we were helping a young woman escape the mafia.”
Izzie wouldn’t get involved in a kidnapping, not intentionally. She’s smarter than that fool. Why the hell had I hired him again?
Oh, right, because he was useful when working undercover and helping with missions. Well, right now, I was second guessing every decision I’d ever made regarding Jayden Scott.
“Where is the girl now?” I ask, grimacing, realizing she’s nearly my daughter’s age. If someone took Izzie, I’d go to the ends of the earth to find her and bring her home.
“She’s downstairs in the basement. She’s already seen Jayden’s face; she knows him, but I wore a mask.”
“Good. Don’t let her be able to identify you. I don’t need you getting thrown behind bars for your Uncle Jayden’s foolish actions.”
Jayden married my sister, Skylar, making him Izzie’s uncle. A shitty one at that, but he showed up, came around, tried to be part of the family, and with time, I reluctantly gave him a job.
Biggest mistake of my life.
Had I known he’d get Izzie involved in this nonsense, I’d have let the wolves have him. After all, that’s where he belonged.
And it isn’t like Jayden and I had met solely through Skylar. We’d served time together overseas; we were in the same unit, brothers. Even in the military, trouble seemed to follow him.
“I want you to go home, stay out of trouble. Now, give the phone back to your uncle.”
“Yes, Dad.” Izzie doesn’t so much as question my authority. She recognizes when she’s in danger, and I’m trying to protect her.
The phone changes hands and Jayden clears his throat. “Yeah?”
“You need to let Harper go.”
“I can’t do that. She knows who I am, she’ll go straight to the cops.”
“Then convince her to tell the Riccis that someone else was behind the abduction. I’m sure there are other enemies out there, use them. What were you planning on doing?”
“I hadn’t been planning on it taking that long to get her here.
There was an accident that shut down the bypass road.
I had expected her to be gone less than an hour, back at the bar, and hoped no one would notice.
They’d figure she took her break, and we’d have intel on Dante. She’d be working for us.”
“I didn’t ask you to go after Dante, and good job fucking that up,” I growl at him.
Why does he have to work for me? Had I left him doing his own thing, maybe then my daughter wouldn’t have gotten involved.
He still would have met Skylar, though, because it wasn’t like I had anything to do with that introduction.
I wanted the two of them kept far apart.
And then he went and married my sister.
“I’ll figure it out,” Jayden grumbles under his breath.
“You harm a hair on her head,” I threaten, “and so help me, Jayden, you’re a dead man.”