“What the hell are you doing here?” Ryder asks between clenched teeth.
“She asked me to come,” I tell him, taking great pleasure out of the shock all over his face. I look back at her. “We need to get you off of this hard floor. Can you stand?”
“I don’t know,” she says without an ounce of her usual bravado, so I know she still isn’t entirely with me.
“Let’s try it, okay?” I ask, grabbing her hands in mine. I stand and gently pull her to her feet in front of me. Her hands latch onto my arms when she wobbles, and I control the small shudder just from that slight touch. “You good, Beautiful?”
“Zane,” Ryder growls, “I only have so much fucking patience for this shit. Don’t fucking call her that.”
Les shuts her eyes tight, and I can see her bottom lip quiver.Fuck.As much as I don’t want to, we need to find that ice queen buried in there. It’s better than this version that’s making my heart bleed.
“Shit,” Ryder cusses, “I’m sorry,Il mio sole.”
She opens her eyes and smiles, but it’s wobbly. “It’s okay.”
Her voice is so quiet, not the usual whipcrack I’m used to hearing. I don’t like this at all. Even if the other version hates my ass.
“You know you’re making it a habit for me to have to rescue you,” I joke, and she frowns, some of her usual self showing in her eyes. She looks into my eyes for so long I start to get nervous, then she takes a step back, letting her arms drop.
“No one asked you to rescue me.”
There she is.
“You need to go,” Ryder says, pointing to my car.
Les frowns again and shakes her head. “No. He needed to talk to me.”
Now is definitely not the time for me to drop the bomb I have. “It can wait,” I tell her, but it can’t. I can’t risk upsetting her; this would, without a doubt, do just that.
“Obviously, it can’t, or your messages wouldn’t have been so urgent.” She rakes her hand through her hair. “Ryder, take him to the office. Just give me a minute.”
She walks toward the door, and Holden wraps his arms around her shoulders, kissing the top of her head. She slides an arm around his waist, leaning into his embrace.
“This better be fucking good,” Ryder says.
“I wouldn’t classify what I have to say as good,” I say dryly, walking towards my car. I jerk open the door and pull out two folders, slamming the door shut.
Ryder eyes them suspiciously, then jerks his head for me to follow him into the house. He leads me to her office and points towards one of the chairs before leaning against the table behind her desk, crossing his arms over his chest.
After five minutes of Ryder and I glaring at each other, Les finally breezes into the room, looking slightly refreshed. She lowers herself into the chair and folds her arms on the desk in front of her. She looks so much like her dad when she does that.
“What’s so important?” she asks, and I slide the two folders to her, knowing that when she opens those, our whole dynamic changes.
I lay my hand on it before she can grab it. “Just know I had nothing to do with this.” I move my hand, and she slides it over, opening the top one first. I don’t want to upset her after what I saw outside, but she needs to know this. She needs to be prepared for what is about to happen.
She flips through hundreds of pictures with Ryder looking over her shoulder. They’re pictures of her anytime she went out with or without any of the guys. There are also pictures of her with me when we met at the docks. They all have two things in common. She’s in allof them, and they were taken from a long-distance telescope camera lens. She flips to the last one, and I wait for her face to change, but it doesn’t. It’s two people dressed head to toe in black with a black mask concealing their features. The only thing you can tell about it is one of them is a female by the build and height, Alessa’s size, and the other one is male, a very tall, well-built male.
She closes that one without comment and opens the next one. It’s a case file on her, but it isn’t the one the department is running; this one is personal. It’s all her movements, the buildings she owns, and her known associates. Anything you want to know about her is in those files.
She looks up at me when she gets an idea of what she’s looking at. “Where did these come from?”
“They were on the windshield of my truck.”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “When?”
“The first day I told you I needed to meet you.”
“You expect us to believe you just fucking stumbled on these files?” Ryder scoffs, and Les holds up a hand to cut him off before he says anything else. She starts massaging her temples, and I know that panic attack took everything out of her.
