Hard As You Can

by Laura Kaye

  But that was about to change.

  The printer chugged out the receipt. Crystal placed it inside a leather folder with the man’s card and returned to the table. “Thank you very much, gentlemen. Come again,” she said with a smile and a wink that earned her a few appreciative chuckles.

  When they were gone, she set about clearing the table as she would any other day. No faster. No slower. Back at the register, she opened the billfold and nearly shrieked with happiness—the men had not only left her a huge tip but they’d left it in cash. A little of her regret at not being able to spend the afternoon with Shane melted away. At least the time spent had been worthwhile. Quickly, she folded and slipped one of the three fifty-dollar bills into her skirt, securing it with the band of her panties on her hip, then she handed the billfold to Walker. The normal process for accounting for her cash tips so Church could take his cut. Walker accepted it with a quiet nod and Crystal swallowed her usual resentment toward losing income she’d earned for a debt she hadn’t created.

  “See you in a few hours, Walker,” she called, forcing normalcy into her voice. With lunch out of the way, she could put her plan to help Shane into action. Which explained why her heart had lurched into high gear. “I’m on at five.”

  He pushed his dark hair back off his face. “Right on. See ya.”

  Taking a deep breath, she made for the dressing room and quickly changed into her street clothes. She hadn’t had time to pick up Jenna’s prescription from the pharmacy this morning, so she had to get it and drop it at the apartment before her evening shift began. And that wasn’t an errand she could do in her uniform.

  Making sure she had everything, she left the dressing room. But instead of turning right to head down the hall to the back door, she turned left, came to the secured door to the senior office suite, and punched in the key code.

  The metallic click caused another spike in her heart rate. Blood rushed loud behind her ears. Head down, pace normal, she made her way to Bruno’s office like she had so many times before. She often waited in his office for him to take her home after a shift, so no one would think twice about her being there. Nothing unusual here. Nothing going on. At least, that’s what she wanted any security cameras that might be tracking her movements in here to see.

  Just docile, submissive, trustworthy Crystal hanging out in her longtime boyfriend’s office.

  Once she closed herself inside Bruno’s workspace, she relaxed. She knew for a fact that none of the Apostles’ offices were monitored by camera. That way they could keep their drugs and their women and any other unusual proclivities private. They’d earned that right through many years of working in the Church gang. It was a sign of trust and respect.

  She wanted to be long gone before two o’clock, just in case Bruno got back earlier than expected. That didn’t give her long. Five minutes. Ten, tops. Problem was, she had no idea what she might be looking for.

  Coming around Bruno’s side of the desk, she carefully sorted through the papers on top, first observing how they’d been situated before she touched them. Schedules, spreadsheets, inventory lists. Nothing that looked interesting. Then again, Bruno wouldn’t leave sensitive documents sitting out on top his desk, would he?

  Crystal sat in his desk chair and pulled out the drawers one by one. On the right side, office supplies filled the top two drawers and dozens of keys on rings suspended from little bars filled the third. Shifting to the left side, Crystal found the big drawer on the bottom largely empty, the middle one filled with various kinds of medicine, and the top one filled with more paperwork. She shuffled through it, and the label on a folder caught her attention.

  Charles and Becca Merritt

  Becca. Hadn’t Shane said his friend’s girlfriend was named Becca? It could totally be a coincidence. The name wasn’t that unusual. Still, Crystal turned the papers on top the folder sideways to mark its spot in the pile and slid it out.

  Maybe a dozen pages of information sat within. Home and work addresses, surveillance pictures . . . She paused on a close-up of a blond-haired man looking over his shoulder. Crystal had seen this man. Bruised, bloodied, and bandaged, yes. But she had no question that this was the guy Shane had rescued from Confessions last weekend.

  That was all she needed to see. Rather than take the time to read everything, Crystal fished her iPhone from her purse so roughly the bag fell to the floor, but she couldn’t worry about that right now. She opened the camera app and took shots of every page. She repeated that process with another folder labeled Merritt and a third labeled Nunya, whatever that meant, because it had been sandwiched between the other two. With each shot, her adrenaline surged until she was shaking so bad she found herself having to take multiple pictures because the images blurred. Then she returned everything to where she’d found it.

  Time’s up.

  Crystal wasn’t the least bit sure she’d found anything useful, and nothing about Friday night, but she’d tried. Damnit. She could only hope there was something here that would help Shane the way he was helping her. Rushing around to the far side of the desk, Crystal cursed when she saw the contents of her purse spilled across the floor.

  She dropped to her knees, grabbed her things, and stuffed them messily back in the bag. With one last look to make sure nothing appeared out of place, Crystal forced a deep, calming breath and opened the door. The outer office was quiet, still. They hadn’t returned yet.

  Walking casually was absolute torture since her muscles nearly screamed with the desire to bolt out of there and never look back. But that would raise immediate suspicion. With four weeks left before they could go anywhere, she had to keep playing her part.

  The outside air tasted like freedom. The farther she got from Bruno’s office, the more assured she was that she hadn’t been detected, and the easier it was to be normal, not just act it.

  Which was a good thing since she had a list of normal things to do in the next three hours before she returned. Pharmacy, a quick trip to the grocery store, then home to drop it all off. And at some point, she needed a good ten or fifteen minutes to text Shane all the photographs she’d taken so she could delete them from her phone. No way she could go back to Confessions with those images on there. She’d be a nervous wreck all night. Bruno had been known to thumb through her text messages (entirely from him and Jenna) and emails (almost all advertisements, Nigerian bank-type scams, and penis-enhancement treatments) from time to time.

  So she better get to it.

  SHANE’S GUT WAS tied up in knots because he’d botched the ask to get Crystal to safety at Hard Ink.

  Sitting at Marz’s desk for the past ninety minutes, he’d run his choice of words through his mind again and again and he’d come to one dumbfounding conclusion—he’d never made it clear that he wanted her here with him. Not because she was in trouble, not because he could protect her, but because he was a man wanting a woman and a chance.

  Fucking idjit.

  Since Marz had pulled a string of nearly all-nighters, they’d convinced him to go get some sleep. But first, he’d shown Shane how to run the Port Authority registries queries he’d been working on to try to identify any relevant businesses of interest at the marine terminal. Shane was more than willing to help, even if his brain was slowly oozing out his ears in boredom.

  Next to him, Jeremy sketched on a big sheet of paper while he waited for the mug-shot research he was doing to produce results. Shane leaned closer. The guy was talented, that was for damn sure. The design was of a big tree full of leaves, but at the top, the leaves turned into blackbirds taking flight and baring the uppermost branches. The birds were dynamic, and the whole image was powerful and melancholy.

  “For a client?” Shane asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, not looking up from the drawing.

  “Maybe I’ll get you to do me sometime.” Shane hadn’t gotten a new piece in a while, but he’d always liked the feeling of the needles crawling across his skin.

  Jeremy’s face
slid into a slow grin, and his tongue flicked at the piercing on the side of his lip. “Do you?”

  “You know what I mean, asshole,” Shane said, chuckling. His cell rang, and he grasped it off the desk. Crystal. Maybe she’d changed her mind about staying with him. “Hey. Everything okay?”

  Silence.

  “Crystal?”

  The line went dead.

  Shane redialed, but the call went straight to voice mail. Probably just a spot of bad reception. No doubt she’d call back in a few.

  “Everything okay?” Jeremy asked.

  “Yeah. She just dropped me.”

  Five minutes passed. Ten. Tension settled into Shane’s shoulders, making his muscles tight and his joints stiff. He rolled the shoulder with the healing gunshot wound, but it didn’t help.

  He dialed again. Straight to voice mail.

  As he stared at his phone’s screen, Shane’s intuition shot up a red flag.

  Glad Marz had shown him how to turn on the audio feeds from Confessions and Crystal’s apartment, Shane minimized the screen with the registries query—now at 42 percent. Almost three o’clock, so Crystal was probably done with the luncheon but not yet scheduled to be back for her evening shift. Where would she go?

  “Mind if I play this on the speakers, or would you prefer I get some headphones?”

  “I don’t mind,” Jeremy said, frowning up at Shane’s computer. “What is that?”

  “Crystal’s apartment.” Music played in the background, like maybe a door separated it from the listening device picking it up. No voices. No sounds of movement.

  Another ten minutes passed, and Shane dialed one more time. Same result. And now his gut was calling an outright foul.

  Something’s not right. Why the hell hadn’t he asked for the number to her iPhone? The thought had passed through his mind whenever she’d checked the cell for the time. But Crystal was skittish, and her nerves had been out in force during some of their conversation. He hadn’t wanted to add to her stress by asking for it.

  Shane glanced at the speakers and crossed his arms tight over his chest. This was going to make him crazy. He shoved out of the chair. “I’m going to go find her.”

  Jeremy’s pen fell still, and his expression was all concern. “You really think something’s wrong? I could come with.”

  “Appreciate that, man. But stay here and keep at this—we need the data you’re producing. I’ll grab one of the guys.”

  Jeremy nodded, disappointment flashing across his face. “Good luck. I hope everything’s okay.”

  Shane cut across the gym, planning out a strategy. Should he go to Confessions and look for her truck first? Hell, why hadn’t he put a GPS tracker on the vehicle? Rookie oversight. The thought had him doing a one-eighty and marching back to Marz’s desk. Beckett had brought tracking devices with him, so Shane knew they had them. It was the work of a few minutes to find the box in which they were stored, then he took off again.

  “Shane?” Jeremy called across the gym. “Wait. Come here,” he said.

  The growing alarm in the man’s voice hauled Shane back to the computer, back to the feed pouring through the speakers.

  “I want this place searched top to bottom,” came a bitter male voice. One Shane recognized. Bruno, with that same suspicious, paranoid tone he’d had the night Shane had been there.

  Shane’s gut twisted.

  Something crashed. A scream.

  “What the hell are you doing—” Another scream. “Get the fuck off me—” The sickening sound of a slap or a hit. The voice was so warped by fear and anger, Shane couldn’t tell if it belonged to Crystal or Jenna, but it didn’t matter.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jeremy said. “What the hell are we listening to?”

  Shane didn’t stick around to answer. Because he knew. That call he’d gotten hadn’t been from Crystal. Somehow, Bruno Ashe had gotten ahold of the burn phone he’d given her. And Shane’s calls had given the scumbag all the ammunition he’d needed to suspect Crystal of—what? Disloyalty? Cheating? Lying? Any of the above. All of the above.

  He tore across the gym and into the Rixeys’ apartment. Much as impatience and urgency ripped through his gut, Shane needed backup, because Bruno hadn’t been alone. Shane’s entrance was so abrupt that everyone froze and looked at him.

  “Shit’s going down at Crystal’s right now. I need you,” he said to the lot of them.

  The room exploded into activity. Within three minutes, the whole team was armed and loaded into Beckett’s SUV. Within four, they were on the road to Crystal’s.

  “Call Jer and see what he’s hearing,” Shane said over his shoulder to Nick.

  Rixey dialed immediately. “Jer? Put your phone up to the computer speaker,” he said in tight voice. A moment of silence passed, and then sounds poured out of Nick’s phone. Shouts. Crashes. Screams. Crying.

  Nausea rolled through Shane’s gut. He couldn’t lose Crystal. He couldn’t go through that again.

  Beckett drove like his house was on fire. The others checked and double-checked their weapons.

  It was a fifteen-minute trip under the best of circumstances. Except, it was after three o’clock, and Crystal lived on the eastern side of the city. There was every likelihood they were going to run into some early-rush-hour interference. Sonofafuckingbitch.

  Why the hell hadn’t he laid it all out there when he’d been with Crystal this morning? If he’d handled that conversation right, she and her sister would be with him right now. They’d be safe.

  And Crystal would know that Shane loved her. That he was in love with her. The fact that she might never hear that from his lips—no. He couldn’t even entertain that possibility.

  A yelp and a groan. A low, sadistic laugh.

  Instead, one of them was being terrorized by a man Shane absolutely burned to kill with his bare hands. When he and Bruno finally met face-to-face, Shane was going to bathe in the bastard’s blood and dance on the dust of his bones.

  Suddenly, the noise died down from Nick’s speaker. Shane turned in his seat. “Did you drop it?”

  Pressing a button, Nick examined the screen and shook his head. “No, just got quiet there.”

  And that’s when Shane heard words that turned his blood to ice. “Bring her. We’re gonna have a little fun.”

  Chapter 19

  Driving into her apartment complex, Crystal pressed the button on her phone to check the time. The clock on her truck’s dashboard had stopped long ago. Quarter ’til four. She should have just enough time to drop off Jenna’s prescription and the three bags of groceries, and to text Shane the pictures so she could delete them from her phone.

  As she parked, scattered raindrops fell on her windshield. She peered up at the gray skies and hoped the rain held out long enough for her to get inside. Looping the bags over one wrist, Crystal grabbed the meds and her purse with the other and heaved out of the truck.

  Times like this, she really wished they lived on the ground floor. She hefted her load up the steps and juggled everything as she worked to thread her key into the lock and push the door open with her foot.

  “Hey, Jen, I’m home,” Crystal called. “I brought your medicine.” And just in time, too, since she only had one pill left.

  Crystal rounded the door from the entranceway—and froze.

  The apartment was a wreck.

  “Jenna!” she screamed, dropping everything and sprinting through the debris covering the floor. Books. Broken glass. Soft pillows ripped open. “Jenna!” Something caught Crystal’s foot and she tripped into the doorway of her sister’s room.

  Wreckage covered the floor there, too. A bookshelf had toppled over.

  Oh, God, no. Oh, God. Oh, God, no.

  Dizziness and nausea threatened, but Jenna wasn’t there. Crystal whirled into her own room. The damage was worse. Bedclothes scattered. Mattress tossed and torn. Every drawer overturned—though the dresser remained in place, her brain noted. Her closet almost emptied.

 
Still no Jenna.

  Bruno. Bruno did this. She couldn’t possibly know that, but she did.

  “Oh, God. What do I do? What do I do? Think,” she said to herself in a fast stream.

  Shane. She needed Shane.

  Blood rushed through her ears as she retraced her steps into the living room. Her purse lay amid the discarded bags of groceries. With shaking hands she opened it—wallet, iPhone, makeup, lip balm. Where was Shane’s phone? She sorted through the debris on the floor, but nothing.

  Had she left it in the truck?

  All at once, the image of the spilled contents of her purse on the floor of Bruno’s office flashed into her mind’s eye.

  She gasped a hard breath, and goose bumps ripped across her skin. “Oh, no. No, no, no.” Crystal couldn’t be that unlucky, could she? She couldn’t have done something that led to this. But the more she thought about it, the more she worried she had—the more she knew she had. A sob tore up her throat, and Crystal smothered it with her hand, feeling streams of wetness on her face.

  Footsteps.

  Crystal’s gaze flew to the apartment door, still open a few inches from when she’d come in, her hands too full to close it.

  Whispered voices. More footsteps. Multiple people. Coming closer.

  Had Bruno been watching for her truck? Waiting for her to come home? Had he returned to finish what he’d started?

  Crystal lunged toward the door just as movement passed behind it. With all her might, she slammed it closed, but something kept it from latching—a body pressing from the other side.

  She cried out and dug her feet into the floor, pushing harder. The minute she let up, her opponent would come flying in. He’d be right on top of her.

  “Crystal. Crystal? It’s Shane.”

  The words drilled through the loud buzz in her ears. “Shane? Shane?” Heart thundering, she let go of the door and stepped back.

  He was right there. With four other men, all of them armed, weapons drawn, expressions wary, braced for battle. His arms around her were too strong, too tight, absolutely perfect. “Jesus,” he said, pulling her to the side so the rest of the men could enter.