Chapter Two
KINGSTON
Work never stops when you are trying to build a business, trying to get it to the point where you don't have to work seventeen-hour days most days of the week.
It's never just the work itself. And naive me had maybe thought it was when I went into it.
It was the work.
Then the emails, phone calls, messages, website updating, training, taxes.
It was never-ending most days.
It never stopped.
But sometimes it paused just long enough that I could cut out, go back into my apartment, sit with Padfoot and eat a meal out of takeaway containers for a whole hour before bed until I had to get up again to start another day.
I had just cut the lights and gotten into bed when the pounding started at the door.
Not the front door, the office door.
But the side one, my apartment. The door where only people who were related to me in some way or another knew was there.
Curiosity pulled me out of bed, my feet once again meeting the cold hardwood floor.
It wasn't until I heard screaming that panic washed over me.
I heard her screaming.
Maybe I had never heard her voice make that sound before, but I would know it anywhere.
Savea.
Savea was connected to me in the most ridiculous of ways.
My sister was married to a man whose brother was married to a woman whose sister was best friends with Savea.
A convoluted connection, sure, but it meant she was part of my inner circle, was at Sunday dinners, came to holidays, was randomly around whenever I spent time around my family.
She'd named my dog, for fuck's sake.
That said, she'd never been to my place. We'd never been around each other without our friends or families involved.
Which was both good and a damn shame.
Good because getting in any way involved with the best friend of a family member was certainly a recipe for disaster. But a damn shame because, well, she was a great woman.
Sweet, funny, gorgeous.
She was short and slight, but with an ass that a man could only dream about.
She had this insane amount of long black hair that seemed capable of catching the light even in dark rooms, that looked like it would feel like silk if you were lucky enough to run your fingers through it.
Her face was round with big, expressive, dark eyes with an impressive amount of lashes, a somewhat oversized mouth that could—in rare moments—stretch into a smile that could draw anyone in the room toward her.
Yeah, definitely gorgeous.
But this was not the time to be thinking of any of that, not with her on the other side of my door screaming like her life depended on me answering.
My feet flew across my apartment, my hands working the locks free, pulling the door open to find her sopping wet, shaking, and scared out of her mind.
I didn't get a chance to move outside until after I heard the water splattering down on the shower's tile floor, going out, looking around, seeing nothing. Not that I expected to after so long.
Upset, fearful women were not an unusual occurrence in my line of work.
When you dealt in private security, you handled a lot of rich assholes with extramarital girlfriends who went off the deep end and started trashing their cars and shit, or stars in the area for a summer vacation, and, of course, women being stalked, being threatened by exes, having their lives pulled apart because some jackass thought they had rights to be in it, by any means necessary.
I had a woman in my office, face buried in her hands, weekly. I bought tissues at Costco for this very reason.
And each time it sucked.
I couldn't look at these women and not think of my sister, of how I would skin a bastard for putting her through this, how any one of my brothers would do the same.
But it sucked in a detached, impersonal, professional way. In a way where I had to gently lead them back to the problem at hand, demand they give me more details, allow me to find a way to protect them, possibly handle the situation if the police couldn’t—or wouldn’t—get involved.
It was something different entirely when it was someone I knew, someone I cared about in a distant sort of way. I mean, she wasn't like a sister to me or even a close friend, but I knew her. I didn't like seeing her shaking and crying.
And I damn sure didn't like the idea of some assholes chasing her around the less desirable side of Navesink Bank in the middle of the night during an epic rainstorm like some noir from the fifties.
Moving into the kitchen, I set the machine to brew as the shower cut off.
My mind—tired, worried, lacking its usual focus—drifted down the hall slightly, behind the door, into a room full of puffy clouds of hot air thanks to the fact that the exhaust fan needed to be fixed.
Yet another task on the to-do list that I likely wouldn't get around to for a while.
Savea was likely wrapping one of the brown towel blankets around her slight frame, tucking the edge near the corner of her breast, her long black hair hanging down around her shoulders, a drop of water slipping down the column of her neck, disappearing between her breasts...
"Christ." My voice was a raspy hiss as my hand rose, scrubbing down my face, the scruff catching roughly on my palm, making me wonder when I had last bothered to shave.
Savvy was decidedly off-limits.
Friends of the family were forbidden fruit.
You didn't get to take a bite, no matter how tempting it might be.
I had no business picturing her half-naked in my bathroom.
Especially when she was coming to me for help.
"Well, what the heck was that, right?" Savea's voice broke into my thoughts, making me jerk and spin around, finding her standing just outside the kitchen in a pair of my plaid pajama pants, the drawstring pulled tight to keep them from falling off her hips, my light gray tee—loose, but teasing over the shape of her breasts.
My head had to shake to knock the thoughts loose that wanted to take root on the coattails of that one.
Her long hair was braided loosely down one shoulder, left untied at the end, not having anything to bind it with.
"With all the shaking and crying," she clarified when my clueless ass just stood there staring at her.
"You were just chased through town by a group of guys who clearly didn't want to catch up to you to ask you over for tea, Savvs.
I think being freaked out was justified.
" Turning back, I reached for two mugs, pouring each, reaching for the cream and sugar for hers before turning back, patting the counter, inviting her to hop up before handing her the mug.
"What's the matter?" Her brows furrowed, her gaze was staring down at the almond-colored liquid.
"You know how I take my coffee?" she asked, looking up. Those deep eyes were full of more questions she wasn't letting herself ask.
"We've had dessert—and therefore coffee—dozens of times at Sunday dinner," I reminded her. "You see someone make their coffee a couple hundred times, you start to remember it."
A niggling little voice reminded me that I didn't, in fact, know how any of the other women at those dinners took their coffee.
"Oh, yeah. Of course," she said, shaking her head. "You take yours black. Then again, I think all the guys there do."
"Alright, sweetheart. Let's go over this from the top, okay?" I asked, reaching for a notepad and pen.
"Okay. Well, I forgot the lettuce. So I got out of bed..."
"You forgot the lettuce," I cut her off, brows furrowing.
"For the animals at the store," she clarified. "I always give them fresh vegetables before I close the shop for the night. But I forgot. So I got up to go back."
"To give them lettuce?" I asked. "Didn't they have like... small animal kibble or something to hold them over?"
"Yeah, but they like having their fresh food at night while they are up socializing and exercising."
Savea loved animals. It was one of her best traits.
Anytime one of the kids at Sunday dinner would show up with some new critter to show off to their family, she would drop down on her knees with a giant smile, rubbing their furry bodies against her cheek, cooing over how cute they were, asking the kid—and their parents—if they had gotten all the necessary items to give said critter the best life possible.
I swear she almost cried when she first saw Padfoot.
So if she thought that by forgetting the lettuce, she was negatively impacting the animals' lives, well, yeah, I guess she would lose sleep just to get it for them.
"Alright. So you drove to work. Nothing was off? No people hanging around? No unusual cars?"
"Nothing. The street was empty. Everything was closed.
The front door was locked like it always was.
The lights in the front of the store were off.
Except for the lights over the animal cages and such.
I didn't notice anything off until after I had given the animals their veggies.
I heard a noise," she explained. "From the back room.
Which isn't weird, per se. We board animals back there.
And we had some cats and big parrots back there.
I figured maybe one of them had gotten loose and was causing a little chaos. It happens."
"You went to investigate."
"Of course. I mean, they can't be out all night. The birds could chew a wire or something. And I don't know how much you know about cat pee, but it is impossible to get that smell out of anything. So I wanted to deal with it before it got out of hand."
"But it wasn't the animals," I coaxed. In my experience, when you were trying to get information out of someone who had just gone through something traumatic, it either spilled out of them, words tripping over each other to get out first, or you had to pry every last detail out.
Savea was clearly the latter of the two.
"No. They were all away. So I moved down the stock aisles. And I heard voices. And then I saw three men in the propped-open back doors. And one of them was... was beating my boss."
"Harry, right?" I clarified, jotting down the notes.