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"I hope you forget to put sunscreen on the next time you spend any time outside," I deadpanned.

Slim shook his head with a laugh. “Uh huh. I bet you know all about those piercings now too, don't ya, Ris?”

I made a face. "Keep it up."

"Next thing you know, you're gonna have 'Property of Dex' tattooed on your back," he mused.

There was no way in hell I’d ever get a man’s name tattooed on me. "Dream on, sucker."

Blake held up his hands in surrender. "I wouldn't hold it past him."

Yeah, I wouldn't either once I thought about it. That sneaky dick would do it to me in secret the first chance he got.

And yet...

Strangely, I was only about ninety percent against it.

Not that it would ever happen, especially if I couldn't even decide on a small tattoo to get first.

The swing of the door opening didn’t alarm me. Blake was free and he’d help whoever came in. Being a Tuesday night, we were definitely going to be slow. Hence the reason why Dex had taken off after finishing up his three hour session to go talk to his mom about her possible divorce.

Except the first thing out of Blake’s mouth was a loud and alarmed, “What the fuck?” followed by the sharp sound of something very hard hitting something equally as dense but much more frail. And then the unmistakable sound of a body dropping to the floor had us both straightening up and looking over in Blake's direction

But it wasn’t my bald friend standing there. There were three men in black ski masks standing directly over where Blake had just stood. Average height men with average body builds in ski masks with angry curls to their barely visible lips.

And one had a gun raised in his hand.

And that gun was pointed in my direction.

The urge to ask what the hell was going on was right on my tongue, but I held the question back, remembering what happened to Blake just a second before.

“Take whatever is in the desk, man,” Slim piped in, wrapping a hand around the edge of the chair in a white-knuckled grip.

I sucked in a breath and nodded in agreement to what he suggested, losing the words in my brain to the trembling that had taken over my hands. Where the hell was my cell phone?

The man with the gun snickered this loud, deceiving noise. “You.” He pointed at me, his accent think and sounding Russian—maybe. “You are his?”

Me? Who's?

I was about to open my mouth when another ski masked man just to the right of the one holding the gun, nodded. "It's her. Fast, Fyo.”

Holy fuck! Holy fuck! Holy fuck!

I looked over at Slim, thinking that we were going to fucking die. This guy was going to shoot us. My heart rate sped up about a million beats per second, shaking not just my fingers but my forearms and even my biceps at the possibility of what was about to happen. Was this because of my dad? It had to be. It had to be, damn it.

The Reapers? Oh my god. Were these some of the members? Dex had said he'd handled it but… shit!

“Please, leave my friends alone. Whatever this is about, it's only my fault,” I found myself stuttering out as two of the three men advanced around the divider.

But neither of them said anything as one of the armed men reached out and grabbed the end of my ponytail in a flash, yanking it back so hard that my head snapped brutally. He yanked even harder the second time, pulling my body over the edge of the chair before repeating the pull once more. I cried out loudly, falling to the floor in a painful lump of hip bones meeting hard tile when the masked man jerked his grip.

The man pulled on my ponytail one last time, lowering himself into a squat with the Glock in hand. His lips peeled back as he brought his face to mine. “Tell your father if we don’t have our money back by midnight tomorrow, we’re gonna finish the job we started tonight,” the man said ominously a moment before his free hand whipped out and slapped me straight across the face so hard my vision exploded in multicolored stars.

“Tell him that, you understand?” the man asked.

I was blinking, unable to really see where the hell he was at because my face felt like it’d gotten beaten with a kaleidoscope made of bricks.

The man slapped me again just as hard if not harder. “You understand me, bitch?” The cool barrel of the gun pressed straight into the middle of my forehead and it took everything in me to suppress a whimper. “Answer me!”

The one and only thing I understood clearly was that I was going to kill my father. I was going to slice him up into little pieces, serial killer style, and drop him into the ocean where his remains would never be found.

Somehow in between the quick murder plan I concocted, I muttered out a “Yes.” I managed not to cry as my face throbbed in time with my heartbeat while the men backed out of the shop as quickly as they’d come in.

The slamming of the front door was what made me look up, ignoring the nipping discomfort radiating from my sides, I locked eyes with Slim. “You okay?” he asked me, eyes wide.

I nodded but I really wasn’t. My head throbbed and my side hurt really friggin' bad but right then it didn’t matter. I was alive and—

“Blake!” we both yelled out at the same time.

Slim vaulted across the chair while I scrambled up to my knees, my hands and body aching in protest. Blake was lying on the floor, blood pooling around his head.

Don't freak out, Iris!

Slim kneeled over Blake shaking him. The men hadn’t shot him, I knew that much, but they’d probably hit him with the gun or something along those lines.

I dropped to my knees on the other side of his immobile frame, shaking his shoulder lightly. Dark eyes blinked into focus as his hands weakly reached up to start smacking Slim’s persistent hands away.

“Quit it, asshole,” he muttered, reaching to cover his head.

Pulling away, Slim yanked his phone out of his pocket, dialing on it so quickly I didn’t get a chance to wonder if he’d be calling the cops or Dex first.

“Dex, some men were just here,” he spoke a minute later. That answered my question.

I leaned over Blake, watching as he got his bearings together, face screwing up in pain. "Fuck," he moaned.

“It wasn't them. We’ll wait for you at the bar. Blake needs to get sewn up,” Slim said into the receiver, his eyes flashing up to mine. I could hear Dex speaking on the other end. “She’s—she’s—they left a message for her pops.” A second later, Slim was pulling the phone away from his face, looking down at the screen, worry etching his features.

With great reluctance, he looked over at Blake and me and sighed. “Let’s get over to Mayhem, bro,” he instructed, hands reaching for his elbow to help him to his feet. I got up and tried my best to help Blake too, my eyes darting over to Slim.

“Are you calling the cops?”

Slim’s eyes went wide as he pressed a wad of napkins he kept at his station to Blake’s head. “No.”

“You want me to call?” I asked him as we cautiously made our way across the street with Blake between us.

He shook his head. “We don’t need the cops, Iris.”

Blake didn’t look over at either one of us during this time, focusing solely on holding the napkins to the cut right above his eyebrow.

“We don’t need the cops?” Jesus. This was mafia stuff. Stuff that happened on television, not in my friggin’ life.

“You really want to call the cops when there's a Croatian gang threatening to kill you?” he asked in a matter-of-fact voice.

I looked over at Blake who was still completely tuned out of the conversation, and I swallowed. If they had the balls to come into the shop with guns... I didn't want to know what else they were capable of.