Chapter 20 Kian
Kian
“I thought you weren’t coming to work today?” Cash asks, stalking into my office with his phone in one hand and a glass of liquor in the other.
Then he sits down, crosses an ankle over his knee, and stares at me with his signature smirk.
Besides, what I’ve been doing these past few hours has had nothing to do with work.
I only came here because I didn’t want to sit in my house with her scent lingering so fucking sweetly.
And I wasn’t completely sure whether I’d be able to keep myself from going to Ace’s house and forcing my way in so I could take care of her and make sure she’s okay.
That she’s not in pain. Then demand to know who the fuck was calling her, like he knew her personally. Too personally.
I couldn’t do that to her today, though.
She was exhausted and still out of it. If she’d asked me to stay, I would have in a heartbeat, but she didn’t.
So now, I’ve been going between being worried about her, to getting pissed off that another man called her demanding to know where she was by her first name.
The possessiveness I feel over her scares the fuck out of me. We’ve hung out twice. She’s a fucking stranger.
And according to Cassian, when he called me an hour ago, her name didn’t come up in any public records, so he’s digging deeper for anything he might be able to find with the information I gave him.
“What the hell are you doing here, Cash?” I press my fingers into my temples.
He looks up from his phone and tilts his head to the side, studying me. “Well, I was over at The Sapphire, checking on Jordyn.”
Fucking of course he was.
“And I thought I’d check your location, because I had a feeling that you wouldn’t actually be able to stay away from work, and lo and behold, here the fuck you are.”
After letting my head fall back against my leather chair, I stare at the ceiling, willing myself to refrain from shooting him.
“Okay, so here I am. What the hell do you want? I don’t need you here right now,” I snap.
Unfazed by my mood, Cash takes a sip from his glass. “Why do you feel like you have to be here all the time?”
I sit straight and stare at him blankly. “Are you kidding me right now?”
Is he really this dumb?
He looks up from his phone and shrugs. “What?”
Running my tongue over my teeth, I sigh and stand to get myself a drink from the built-in bar. As I walk past him, I glance at his screen, which shows a map with a tiny red dot moving in the center.
Of course he’s tracking his wife.
If Ace were my wife, I’d track her every move.
The heat of the whiskey I drink spreads through my chest, calming me slightly. I sit in the guest chair, next to Cash, and set the crystal tumbler on my thigh, staring off into space.
“So Ace works for Jordyn,” Cash says as he looks me over. “Which means she’s a local and apparently not a stripper. So, how’s that going? From the looks of you, I’d say not well.”
Running my hand over my face, I let out a heavy sigh.
My brother can be a real asshole at times, but there are only three people in this world I trust with my life.
My brothers. Cash is a sarcastic dick most of the time, but when shit gets real, I know I can count on him.
As if he recognizes that now is one of those times, he slides his phone into his pocket and leans back in the chair, his body aimed toward me.
“Kian, what the fuck’s going on?” he asks more seriously this time.
I tell him everything that’s happened in the past twenty-four hours.
How she lives right by me, so I’ll have to pass her house every time I come and go.
How she told me about her car accident, though I leave out the part about her scar since she seemed embarrassed about it.
I tell him about her getting a migraine, and then how I answered her phone to another man on the other end.
He listens the entire time, taking a drink every now and then.
When I finally finish, he smirks at me. “Dude, you went into her purse? Should I remind you?” He points to the scar on the left side of his forehead. I can’t help but chuckle and shake my head at him.
“You fucking deserved it. You were being a jealous bastard and searching her purse. I just reached in and grabbed her phone. I didn’t touch anything else. I’m not a dumbass like you.”
Cash barks out laughter and nods. “The dick-sucking I got after getting stitched up was worth it.”
I groan and lean my head back. “Can you not tell me about your sex life with my sister-in-law? Fuck. Tell Beckett. I’m sure he’d like to jerk off to that.”
“I’m not telling Beckett shit. That asshole is going to get his teeth knocked out if he doesn’t stop hitting on my wife.”
We both know Beckett’s advances and nicknames for Jordyn are innocent, but Cash still gets riled up about it, and our shit-stirring baby brother loves to make it happen.
“Okay, so who is this fucker? Let’s get him into a warehouse. Have some fun. I need to let out a little aggression, anyway,” Cash says.
This is why I love my brothers. We all think the same in so many ways.
“I have no idea. Cassian is looking into his phone number. And into her house. How the fuck does a choreographer own a place in my gated neighborhood?”
Cash shrugs. “Her parents might be loaded. What did Cassian find on her?”
Something prickles at the back of my neck. “He came up with nothing when he did a basic search. Now he’s following trails.”
My phone rings right then, and I hold it up to show Cash the screen.
“Speaking of Cassian,” I say, accepting the call. “What do you have for me?”
“Still looking, but that phone number you gave me is a burner, so that gave me nothing. The house is owned by LR Corp. There are no individual names on the deed. I looked into LR Corp and didn’t find anything. So right now, I’m catching dead ends, but I’ll keep digging.”
My stomach twists, and I sit silently, marinating on that information.
LR Corp.
What the fuck is that?
Sucking air through my teeth, I glance at Cash, who looks just as confused.
“You said she was in an accident last year? Where?” Cassian asks.
Shaking my head, I close my eyes. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask her.”
Because I was too busy trying to fuck her as much as possible, because I thought I only had one night with her.
Cassian sighs. “You’re not much help, man. I’ll keep searching.”
He ends the call, and I sit in silence, still trying to wrap my head around what he told me.
“Go over there and demand answers. Fuck, we can kidnap her if you want. I guess I owe you since you helped kidnap my wife,” Cash says before draining the rest of his drink and standing.
“I’m not kidnapping her, you fucking psychopath. Jesus Christ.”
My oldest brother chuckles. “I offered.”
“Do you think Jordyn will let me look at her HR paperwork?” I ask.
Cash grins and nods. “Now, who’s the psycho? Come on. I’ll bribe her somehow.”
An hour later, I have Ace’s employment file in my email, which I forward to Cassian.
It’s not right to look at it. Hell, it’s fucking illegal.
And it might even be a tiny bit stalkerish.
I don’t care, though. Ace isn’t being truthful about something, and I’m going to find out what it is.
Then, after I make sure she’s feeling better, I’m going to spank her for lying to me.
Cassian: I’m forwarding you some news articles. Her last name is Ricci, not Santoro. She’s from Seattle. Her father was a member of the Italian mafia. He died when she was a child. Might be why she goes by an alias.
I slowly steer my SUV toward the side of the road and put it in park to read Cassian’s message again before I tap my email app on my phone.
Every limb in my body goes ice cold as photos and news articles appear in the message.
Lacey Ricci, known to be associated with the North American Italian crime family, nearly killed in crash thought to be a hit.
Lacey Ricci, 24, on life support after a horrific crash.
Ballerina, Lacey Ricci, undergoes emergency surgery to repair femur and hip after drunk-driving crash that killed one.
Prima ballerina’s career comes to a screeching end due to severe injuries she’ll never fully recover from.
Headline after headline, a picture paints itself in my mind, but then, I click on another attachment, and I can’t fucking breathe.
Photos of the accident, of Lacey being pulled from the wreckage, her much-too-thin body covered in crimson as multiple medics give her CPR. Her hair looks blond in the pictures, though it’s hard to tell for sure from how much blood there was.
“Holy fuck,” I mutter, my eyes burning as I keep going over all the information Cassian sent.
Her medical records, the identity of the man who hit her, who died in the crash, photos of her father, Enzo Ricci, from before he died, and photos of Ace on stage.
Fuck, she was so thin. That couldn’t have been healthy.
Everything about her was different. And the one thing I notice in every picture is that she didn’t have the light in her eyes that she does now.
When I’ve gone through every single item Cassian sent, I go back to the crash photos.
“How the fuck did you survive that, Ace?” I murmur to myself.
I stare at the horror that changed the course of Ace’s life, and I think I might be sick.
She was a prima ballerina of the biggest dancing studio on the West Coast, and on a random night, it all ended in the blink of an eye. And now, a year later, she’s still suffering from severe pain.
I got one thing right about her.
Ace isn’t just an average woman.
She’s a mafia princess.
Daughter of the late Enzo Ricci. Enforcer for the Italian mafia.
Why is she keeping her identity hidden here?
What the fuck is she running from?
After tossing my phone onto the passenger seat, I get back on the road and drive toward my house. I’ve wanted to text Ace all day to check on her, but I didn’t want to disturb her if she was sleeping.
It’s been the longest fucking day waiting because, while she might not be mine, I want to know who the fuck was calling her while she was tucked into my bed, in my fucking house.
When I pull in through the wrought-iron gates of the neighborhood, my eyes jump right to her driveway, where there’s a black Range Rover parked.
Tightening my grip on the steering wheel, I grit my teeth and turn into the second parking spot in her driveway and cut the engine.
I’ve never considered myself a possessive or jealous man before; there’s never been a woman in my life who I’ve given a shit about.
Yet, the thought that there might be a man in her house makes me fucking furious.
At her front door, I don’t knock. Instead, I enter the code I watched her put in this morning and walk inside.