Chapter 6 #2
Lyric bumped her shoulder against her best friend’s. “Stop being so dramatic. Do you think I don’t know how you all are? We all grew up together!”
“Then you know your birthday is the perfect excuse for a spa day.”
Lyric groaned as all the DAMC women gathered at the counter to check in for their appointments. “Who’s paying, anyway?”
“Your parents.”
Lyric smothered her laugh. “You bitches are unbelievable.”
Avery’s smile was blinding as she shrugged. “We got game.”
“Who paid for the rental van?”
“It came out of the club coffers.”
Oh boy! “Who approved that?”
A credit card was flashed in front of her face. “Visa approved that.”
Lyric turned to see Gabi holding a Visa card issued to the strip club. “Heaven’s Angels?”
“See? Strippers were involved. Sort of. Just not in the typical way!” Avery said on a laugh.
“Are you ladies ready?” the receptionist asked. “Since your group is so large, we’ll be dividing you up.”
“No problem. We’re used to dividing and conquering,” Lexi said. “Right, ladies?”
Vi smirked. “It’s the only way to deal with the pig-headed men in our lives.” She sliced her hand through the air horizontally. “Divide.” She did a karate chop next. “And conquer.”
The bell jingled above the front door when he entered the premises. Rage glanced around but didn’t see who he was looking for. Instead, he found Carl, one of Lyric’s employees, sitting at the drawing desk and shoving gummy bears one after the other into his trap.
“Where’s Lyric? Have an appointment.”
“I don’t know. She was here earlier. Now she’s gone. She never said she was leaving.”
Rage’s eyebrows pinched together. “What the fuck does that mean?”
The heavily tattooed, black-eyeliner-wearing man with dyed black hair shrugged. “Exactly what I said. She opened the shop and when I got back from a break, she was gone.”
“Gone.”
Carl rolled his eyes. “Yes. That means she was no longer on the premises.”
For fuck’s sake. Rage sucked a breath in through his nostrils. “Know what the fuck it means. What about Trish? Or that other one?”
“They’re at lunch.”
“Where?”
Carl frowned. “I don’t know since I don’t keep tabs on them. That’s Lyric’s job.”
“Well, you fuckin’ should!” he wanted to scream. “You’re the only goddamn man that works in this fuckin’ shop! You should be lookin’ out for the women!”
He pulled in another breath and swallowed all that back down. Lyric was really picky with who she hired. He didn’t want to be responsible for this asshole quitting.
Or ending up in the hospital after Rage punched him in the throat.
He tipped his head to the left, cracking his neck, then to the right, cracking it again, then pulled in a third long breath and unclenched his balled fingers.
He dug his cell phone out and texted Lyric. He waited sixty seconds for her to respond, and when she didn’t, he called. It rang three times before her voicemail picked up. “Where you at? My appointment was fifteen minutes ago.”
Yeah, he was late, but whatever. He had a fucking business to run. With a bunch of catty women who liked to claw at each other’s eyes, rip out each other’s extensions, and try to pop each other’s breast implants.
His jaw shifted.
Gabi needed to do a better job of keeping those crazy bitches under control.
“Know what time she left?” he reluctantly asked Carl.
“Like I said, I was on break, so…”
What a motherfucking asshole.
He waited another minute for her to return the call. When she didn’t, he rounded the front counter and headed toward the back.
“Hey! You can’t just—”
“The fuck I can’t,” he muttered. He strode into her office and stopped dead at seeing her desk.
Jesus fuckin’ Christ. It looked like a tornado had hit it.
She needed a part-time secretary or something. Crow and Jazz had always kept the shop organized and neat. Clearly, that gene had skipped Lyric.
He pulled her laptop out from under a small mountain of paperwork. For fuck’s sake, she better not be ignoring any important bills. The office chair groaned when he sank into it before opening the computer.
No surprise, the screen was locked. One side of his mouth pulled up when he realized she never deleted his access. But then, she probably didn’t know he added himself.
Of course, he had a good fucking reason. Since he helped set up the security system, he had programmed his fingerprint to unlock it so he didn’t have to keep asking her to do it while she was busy tattooing. He had no idea at the time that it would come in handy in the future.
He ignored the fact that her email icon had a red number indicating she had over a hundred unread emails.
He ignored the fact she had some fucking shirtless, tattooed guy as her computer’s wallpaper. She probably thought the fucker was hot or something.
He also ignored the fact that there were at least a dozen folders on her computer’s desktop that weren’t labeled.
If she wasn’t one of the top ink slingers in the area—hell, probably in the state—and it wasn’t backed by the DAMC, he had no doubt In the Shadows Ink would have gone under like a boat with a huge hole in it.
Lyric really needed to get Jazz into the office to get it organized if she didn’t want to hire another person. Her mother had helped Crow run the shop for probably over twenty-five years and she knew what the fuck she was doing.
With an irritated shake of his head, he clicked on the security camera icon and pulled up the footage from earlier. He started at the point the shop opened and fast forwarded to see when she left…
He blinked.
What the fuck? Was he seeing shit? He leaned closer, rewound, blinked a few times to clear his vision, and replayed it.
He shot out of the seat like it had burned his ass. “What the actual fuck?” he yelled. “Holy fuckin’ shit!”
He yanked the laptop free of the charger, rushed out of her office with it tucked under his arm and back into the shop where Carl was now jawing with a customer.
“She was fuckin’ kidnapped!” he yelled at that worthless piece of shit.
Carl cocked his head. “She was what?”
Rage’s heart beat was pounding in his ears and his vision was turning red.
Should he call or text everyone? Or head over to the clubhouse and try to figure out what the fuck was going on first?
He paused only long enough to text Zeke: Lyric. Snagged. Church. He didn’t have the time or patience to type out any long explanation. And with the way his body was vibrating with fear for Lyric and fury over the situation, he would’ve had a tough time typing shit out, anyway.
He slammed both palms against the door, not giving shit if it came off its hinges, then raced to his sled and back toward Church.