She was taken right in front of me. I’d been so busy rehashing shit from fifteen years ago and watching a string of different emotions fly across her face that I didn’t even hear the car approach. There was no time to react before she was grabbed and flung into a black town car that peeled out of the parking lot of my own damn building. She was grabbed on my turf after she came to me for help.

Shit piss hell damn.

This must have been the trouble she was talking about before we both got angry and started yelling at each other. I’d been back in town for almost a year and she had never tried to contact me. I hadn’t tried to contact her either, but I sure as shit bugged my mom for all the information I could. Mom always thought we would grow up and get married to each other, but that was mom’s dream, it was never what Angel and I wanted.

At any rate, it didn’t make sense that Angel would be mixed up in anything nefarious. Nefarious was my business, and since I’d come back to Toledo, I tried to keep track of all the troublemakers. Angel Jax was not on that list, and it was my job to be informed. Well, to most people my job was being the head of Anderson Investments, and that was what my dad wanted for me, too. His dream was me taking over the company someday, but it was never my dream. And it chapped my ass to agree with Angel, but the truth was, she was right. I had run into the military without telling her. I hadn’t told anyone—not even my mom and dad until the last minute.

The pressure of following in my dad’s footsteps, of having my college and my future picked out for me before I even knew what I wanted to do—it had been too much. So I ran. I joined the military right after high school and it stuck with me. Mom and dad forgave me early, they were my parents, of course they would. I didn’t get a chance to ask Angel for forgiveness. She managed to avoid me those early days when I only got a couple days to come home on leave. By the time I was invested in the military enough to take actual time when I wanted to, she was off to college on the west coast. It looked like Angel and I had some things to discuss before we were okay with each other. Clearly there were misunderstandings on both sides of the fence.

My parents thought I was going to be career military, but that wasn’t actually true. I put my time in with the United States government, and I did my duty as a soldier, but my specialized skills weren’t actually put to use on formal assignment. See, in the army, you are at the mercy of your orders, and those orders need to be carried out no matter what. I’m not really the kind of guy who likes to be told what to do, especially considering good guy and bad guy can be a really gray area on a worldly scale. I do better making my own decisions, taking my own jobs, and after a few years of trial and error, I found that working independently allowed me the freedom to become good at all kinds of things. Personal protection and information gathering. Those were my specialties. And from what she hinted at, Angel knew that about me, which meant she must have been coming to me for some kind of protection, and I let her get snatched right out of my hands like some dickhead who didn’t know what he was doing.

Now, I may be an asshole, but I most definitely know what I’m doing. I may have been retired from the bodyguard business, I may be a guy in a suit running the family empire, but I still had my hands in the information network.

Jogging up the private stairs to my office, I pulled my cell out of my pocket and punched in the number that would get me to Dino. He and I went back a ways because we had worked together on some projects. We weren’t close friends exactly, I don’t know if Dino actually had any close friends, to be honest. Dude was a complete spook and could change his personality at will to blend in. We did, however, respect each other’s skill set. Dino was in the area, from what I remembered. He might know of some underlying issue that would necessitate someone being snagged out of a parking lot. Some shit must be going down for civilians to get nabbed out in broad daylight, especially someone with a squeaky clean background like Angel.

“Jeannette,” I said as I stepped from my office into the waiting area occupied by her desk, “Code Yellow.” I saw her straighten, eyes going wide behind her glasses. Jeanette wasn’t just my personal assistant at the company, she and I went back a ways, too. She knew stuff about me and I knew stuff about her. It was a pretty good working relationship. She knew that our code yellow meant missing person, and her whole demeanor changed as she snapped to attention, awaiting orders.

“Yeah, Boss? Is it something that has to do with that girl who was just here?” She and Angel may not have hit it off, but it really wasn’t Jeanette’s fault. I was a guy with a lot of money at my disposal, and after my dad passed away and I took over as head of Anderson Investments, they oozed out of the woodwork. Money Bunnies was what Jeanette called them. She could probably make a full time job out the work she put into keeping the gold diggers out of my way. Desperate women could get really creative with extortion, even if they have never met the man they were trying to get money from. If I had actually slept with even half of the women who came forward claiming to have a relationship with me, my dick would probably snap right off. That was par for the course of having a lot of money. And as the son of a highly successful business mogul, I had more money than I could spend. I didn’t ask for that to be my life, it just was. I was lucky I had Jeanette to go to bat for me. She was a good woman who had been through some rough shit. I was grateful to have her in my admittedly small trust circle.

“Angel really is an old friend, Jeanette. Actually, for a long time she was my best friend. Some horseshit happened when we were kids and we haven’t talked for a really long while, but she came here for help and ended up getting kidnapped in the parking lot.” Jeanette’s eyes widened even further at that. I watched as she removed the tortoiseshell glasses I knew were just for show, and she placed them on the desk next to her. She was all business now.

“What do you need me to do, Boss?” That was it, Jeanette was on board, and with my heart thundering in my chest—probably with the fear of having watched someone I once cared about getting yanked off the street right in front me—I gave instructions.

“I’m trying to get ahold of Dino but he isn’t answering.” That was no big scare, Dino rarely answered. You either left a text or a voice mail and he would get back to you, on Dino time. I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for Dino time to roll around, so I was going to hammer at him from all angles. He was going to be the guy with the knowledge to help, so I would do what I had to do to get that sly fucker’s attention.

“Every number we have on file from Dino, I want you to hammer it, Jeanette. Call then text. Then wait ten seconds and try the next number. I don’t know what phone he’s using, he has like fifteen numbers on file.” A different number for every personality, or part that he played. It worked for Dino, because he was amazing at what he did, an actor of grand talent. He went undercover like no one’s business to get intel, and he made his money that way. Buying, selling, and trading information. Dino had recently fallen from a pretty high place, and he had some serious ties to people with power, but that also made him very dangerous. We worked together on occasion, but I never knew if I could trust him, or if he would sell me out to the highest bidder.

Well, I was a rich man. I could probably trust him so long as I always had the cash to be the highest bidder.

“Got it.” Jeannette nodded firmly. “Annoy Dino until he is forced to return the call. What is our intel so far?” She didn’t ask unnecessary questions—that was another thing I liked about Jeannette. She could see me visibly distressed but knew enough not to comment on it. All business, I could respect that.

So, I laid it out for her. “Who is running around in a black, late model Lincoln with tinted windows that looks straight out of a mob movie? Not cops. There were four people that I counted, but I only saw the two that were in the back because they got out of the vehicle to snag her. One was totally rough looking, probably a low-rank user, the other one looked like someone’s grandpa. No rhyme or reason, but they didn’t even stop to talk, harass or threaten. They just took her. I need to know what kind of underground shit is going on, relatively recently, that might provoke such an occurrence.” I rolled my shoulders back and forth to remove some of the tension that had been building since I opened my office door to see Angel standing there arguing with Jeanette.

“If you make it through the phone list and he hasn’t responded, start over. Do whatever you have to do to get his attention.”

“Shall I send nudes, then?” Jeannette asked dryly, voice heavily laced with sarcasm. I couldn’t fault her. One common denominator for all of Dino’s personalities was that he was a colossal flirt. It was like he lived to ignite panties. He didn’t even need to follow through with sleeping with women, it was just like some amusing game to him, to say shocking things or work women up. It irritated Jeanette beyond reason when he turned that charm on her, but I had never had enough interest to look more deeply into why that was.

“I doubt that will be necessary, but thanks for offering. You keep trying to get ahold of Dino however you can. I’m going see what I can turn up as well.” I disappeared into my office, confident Jeannette would complete her task. She always did. I cracked my knuckles and stared at my computer screen before I started typing away. This was the work I was good at. This shit was my bread and butter. Protection. Reconnaissance. Retrieval. I was a badass mercenary, and I could do anything, so why were my hands shaking as they moved across the keys? I knew. I was pissed. Regardless of what had happened since we had become adults, at one point in time, Angel Jax had been one of the most important people in the world to me. We may have been out of touch, but time wasn’t going to change that. Someone had taken something that belonged to me, and I would turn the streets upside down to find her.

Goddamnit, Angel, what the hell have you gotten yourself into?