Chapter Twenty-Four #2
It was being able to walk into work without my manager telling me that my skirt being tight might somehow impact the sales figures for the day, or that my eyeliner was too bold, or that my natural hair was too ‘unruly’.
To which, of course, I had to tell him to take his patriarchal, biased, and racist bullshit and shove it up his ass.
Which had me fired.
And on and on and so forth for years.
It was mine.
I bled into my store.
In turn, it took care of me well enough, and I was eternally grateful.
“So if I wanted to buy a gift here…”
“You’d be dropping a couple hundred, easy,” Cassie supplied, moving to the side so he could step fully in, affirming what I had said to Reese when he had to turn sideways to fit in the door.
“Shit,” he said suddenly, tone dark, and I knew it had nothing to do with the money and everything to do with the scene before him.
That scene?
It was the entire week’s designs cut up and thrown all over, along with a threatening message written on one of the mirrors in the lipstick I left in the staff bathroom in the back.
Someone had been in the store.
Someone had destroyed my pride and joy.
Someone dared to write a disgusting sexual threat to both me and Cass on the mirror.
It wasn’t the first.
Message, that is.
But somehow it felt worse seeing it written in my own damn lipstick. It felt more real.
Everything about Tig was suddenly all business. His massive shoulders squared. His back stiffened. His hands curled into fists as he moved between the two of us and over toward the mirror, having to go down on his knee to get low enough to read it.
Which he seemed to do several times before his head swiveled over his shoulder, eyes unfathomable.
“You didn’t call the cops about this?”
It was an accusation as much as it was a question.
“We called the cops every other time something happened,” Cassie cut in before I could answer. “Since that has only led to an escalation, we figured maybe it was time to leave the NBPD to take their bribes and do not a damn other thing in this town.”
Cassie had been hauled in a couple times, always being let off without a charge, but it gave her a sour taste about the police in our town.
Tig straightened, making me have to angle my head up to look at him, even in heels. It was something I was used to around my brothers, but not with other men, seeing as I was tall and taller still in heels, which I almost always wore.
“This has been going on a while.”
“Not the destruction of property,” I answered before Cassie could.
“This is new. But there have been a couple of notes and phone messages and even a creepy figure outside once or twice. For maybe the past… ten or eleven weeks. We thought that maybe we were being paranoid or making a big deal out of nothing.”
“Nothing.” His brows drew together as he looked back at the message.
He looked back at me but waved a hand to the words.
“Someone saying they want to hold you down and shove their arm inside you while your friend watches is ‘nothing’?” He paused for a second, seeming to struggle to hold himself back from saying something.
“You told Sawyer you weren’t in danger.”
“Well, I don’t really have any proof that…”
“Someone breaking into your business and destroying your property and explicitly saying they want to do something to you until you die is a fucking threat, honey.”
Well, put that way, yeah.
So we hadn’t been paranoid after all.
My gaze slid to Cassie, seeing understanding there in the dark depths. We genuinely did have something to worry about. Maybe a part of us had been wanting to deny there was a real problem, neither of us wanting to admit we were in any way vulnerable.
That just wasn’t something women like us wanted to own up to.
“You have security footage, I assume, with price tags this high.” He said that while taking one of the delicate handwritten silver tags in between his giant, strong fingers and looking at the number scrolled there.
“We have it inside, yes. Our front camera went down two days ago, and we are waiting for the company to send someone out to fix it.”
“It didn’t go down. It was brought down.
” He moved down the aisle, his booted feet stepping all over my pretty, delicate, feminine creations on the floor.
I felt almost indignant for a moment before I remembered they were destroyed in the first place.
He went in front of the dressing rooms and reached for the knob, which wouldn’t turn, before casting a look over his shoulder that said someone should get him a key. Which Cassie rushed to do.
I wasn’t sure what was wrong with me that morning.
I was in some kind of daze or something. Never did Cassie out-move me. I was generally a bundle of extra energy. I was always doing something—cleaning, straightening, sweeping, anything to keep myself busy.
I had barely moved inside the doorway.
Weird.
He took the key from Cass and jerked his chin in a silent ‘get out of here’ that she did not understand since she hadn’t been raised with brothers, so he had to tell her to go back and stand by me.
It had, stupidly, never even occurred to me that someone might still be around, something that made not fear, but anger well up in my system until I was practically drowning in it.
How dare someone come into my safe haven and ruin it?
If they were still around, fuck it, I didn’t need Tig; I would rip them limb from limb my damn self. Maybe see how they felt about their own dismembered arm shoved up their own ass.
Okay.
I got a bit over-the-top when I was pissed.
After he was done with the dressing rooms, finding no one and nothing, he moved into the back and checked around the bathroom, storage spaces, and the small kitchen we had, despite the fact that we almost always ordered in. It was apparently some kind of rule that we had to have it.
“Alright. I am going to need to know what security system you use, as well as access to your security cameras and the password to your Wi-Fi.”
“The password to the Wi-Fi?” Cassie parroted, confused.
“Barrett can hack into the camera and see if the tampering was done remotely or if it was just the camera itself fucked with. If the cops don’t have it, I am going to need everything else you guys have had.
I am assuming this is an escalation, and I don’t think I need to tell either of you that it will just continue to escalate if it isn’t handled. ”
“Cass, can you get the copies?” I asked, meaning the pictures of all the letters we had needed to hand over to the cops, but not before I was quick enough to at least snap a few shots on my phone.
There would be no DNA or anything, but investigators were interested in other things than that, I knew.
“We have the messages saved on the service,” I told him as Cassie moved into the back. “The voice is altered, but maybe you can read more into it than the cops, or we could.”
He looked around, exhaling a breath hard enough for it to be a sigh. “You got a man?”
That was so unexpected that I actually felt my whole body jerk at it. “A man? No, I don’t have a man.”
Why was he even asking?
“You live with your partner?” he asked, jerking his chin toward the back.
“No. I live with my sister.”
The sigh thing again.
“You really should be telling your brothers about this, Kenz.”
“I know you are only trying to help, but that’s not your concern. I don’t want them to know. They will worry needlessly, and they don’t need that.”
“Does Cassie have a man?”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t bring her to work today after all this shit?”
“He brings her to work every day,” I countered. I always arrived after, so I rarely saw him, which was good because he annoyed me. “And picks her up. I don’t care for him, but he’s good for her.”
“Don’t park in that back lot anymore.”
“There’s nowhere else to park.”
“I parked out front.”
“Illegally.”
“Think a ticket would be better than an arm shoved inside your body,” he countered, making my stomach drop.
It was crass, blunt, maybe a little tactless to say it like that.
But that being said, I obviously needed to hear it.
I needed that reality check. I needed to know that if he thought it was serious, then it was definitely something to stress about.
“Okay. I’ll park out front.”
“Good,” he said, giving me a long look, something in his eyes that I couldn’t interpret.
But before I could ask what it was, Cassie was back, and it was down to business for twenty minutes before his phone screamed.
He had a short conversation; then he left with the promise that he would be in touch by the morning.
“Well,” Cassie said as we both watched his SUV drive away. “I guess we should start recording this for insurance.”
Then we did.
It was every bit as boring as it sounds.
And maybe it took even longer than it should have because my mind kept doing this weird thing where it kept going over my interactions with Tig, regardless of how brief they were.
Why?
That was a good question.
Maybe it was because he was the silent and stalwart type, a mystery—something I wasn’t used to.
It couldn’t have been any kind of attraction.
He wasn’t my type.
Right?
“Alright,” Cass said, nodding toward the front window where you could see her boyfriend’s Charger waiting for her. He never came in, likely picking up on how much I disliked him and disliked me in turn. “That’s me.”
“Have fun at dinner. Just… keep an eye out, alright?”
It wasn’t until she was gone that I realized I had forgotten to move my car to the front after Tig left. We both just got to work, and it had been bright out; it was so normal for me. I had just completely flaked.
And that mistake had my heart flying up into my throat as my stomach dropped to my feet when the door flew open, bringing with it a gust of wind and the smell of rain.
There was even a second where my eyes didn’t shoot up, didn’t want to face a person who wanted to hurt me, as absurd as that reaction was.
And before I could force my eyes to lift, a deep voice growled.
“Stubborn fucking woman, you got a death wish?”
My eyes shot up then.
Because I knew that voice.
Tig.
And there he was, his shirt wet with rain, his bald head dripping the slightest bit with it as well.
“I told you to move the damn car.”
I felt my lips tip up at that, not because I wanted to start a fight or thank him or anything like that.
But because he was apparently the kind of guy who told you to move your car but went ahead and showed up to make sure you did.
That was kind of, well, sweet.
Right?