Telling me not to worry would be the equivalent of telling me not to have my period.
But I wasn’t about to stress him out more than he already was, so I mustered my most bullshit face. "You're sure?"
He nodded slowly, darn it.
“Okay," I agreed hesitantly.
Sonny’s features softened at my weak ass smile. “Iris.” In a second he had dropped down to his knees, placing his palms on each of mine. “It’ll be fine,” he assured me.
Listening to him was one of my life's dumbest decisions.
Chapter Sixteen
There were a lot of things that immediately let me know as soon as I woke up that something was wrong.
Seriously wrong.
The top drawer of the dresser was open, and I never left any drawers open. Keeping them closed was a neurotic tendency of mine.
My cell phone was on the bed instead of the nightstand where I’d left it charging before I fell asleep.
And the third was that the door to the bedroom was also closed. I never closed the door because I was paranoid about screaming and not having someone hear me.
My first thought after my brain decoded the clues was thatSonnyhad come in at some point during the night. Everything besides the drawer and my phone was in place, so I tried to think of what I should do. Luckily, my first instinct had been to check my messages and when I unlocked the screen, I saw that it’d been the right step.
If I don’t leave you a note on the kitchen counter,
call Dex ASAP. My phone and other stuff is in your drawer.
Tell him what you saw.
The three messages were from Sonny at two o’clock in the morning. Thirty minutes after I’d gone to bed and left him sitting in the kitchen shooting off several text messages one right after the other.
I’d known something was wrong and that realization choked my insides, making me throw back the sheets and run out of the bedroom as quickly as I could. But what I saw wasn’t what I wanted to find. There was no note on the counter.
Fuck!
Never in my life had I ever moved so fast besides the time I tried to dodge Will when I took off with his secret stash of Playboy magazines to parade around the house. And this was Sonny. I'd just gotten him back in my life.
His wallet and another set of keys that looked to be too small for any door or car, were sitting right on top of my pile of socks. My fingers trembled as I flipped open his old, basic flip phone and tried to get through the menu with a panicking, freaked out mindset, searching for Dex’s phone number. When I found “Dexter” under the contacts, my thumb was hitting the call button before I even thought to do it.
“Please, please, please, please, please,” I begged to myself, listening to the ringing on the speaker. My heart was hammering its impatience. “Dex, c’mon—“
“What the fuck?” a sleepy, throaty voice answered with a yawn. “It’s nine, asshole.”
I sucked in a breath. “Dex?”
There was a clearing of a throat and another sleepy sigh. “Uh… Ritz?”
“It’s me,” I confirmed quickly. “Sonny’s gone.”
In the span of a millisecond, Dex’s sleep laced voice froze over. “What do you mean Sonny’s gone?”
I didn’t notice until I heard the trembling in my voice that there were tears in my eyes. “I think these guys took him."
~ * ~ *
I was kind of a mess following my brief conversation with my new ally, The Dick. After having him basically demand that I calm down, I managed to tell him in ten seconds about the guys I’d seen parked down the street, and what Sonny had texted me. Needless to say, I was really friggin’ glad that I wasn’t having this conversation with him in person.
