Page 27 of Hold Him Like Gravity

My brother was missing.

I’d spent the last week trying to come to terms with that.

I’d been mildly worried when I’d left his apartment after hearing Bobby hadn’t seen Jake in a while. And that his cell wasn’t in service anymore.

But the real panic hadn’t set in until a day or two later after I’d worked through my anger about the robbery and decided I had to at least track the asshole down.

I’d spent the next several days hitting up all the places I knew he frequented. The comic book store where he—and sometimes Bobby—would go to play shit likeD&DorMagic: the Gathering.

No one had seen him.

He hadn’t been in to the local bodega he used to visit several times a day, the bar he liked, the tattoo parlor he was always getting work done at, the pizza place he frequented.

He was… nowhere.

And no one had seen him either.

The guy behind the counter at the pizzeria had actually askedmewhere Jake was when he saw me.

Which left me to conclude he hadn’t just left Bobby to go shack up with a woman or something in the same area.

Sure, there was a chance he’d found a woman out of the area, but that didn’t explain the phone.

Maybe, if this was any other situation, I wouldn’t have been sweating it. He was an adult. He could take care of himself. And he was careless enough to forget to pay his phone bill and get his service cut.

But I’d seen him.

He’d been one of the robbers.

The crew who broke in really got me thinking, so I spent another two days researching local armed robberies and rapes. Even home invasions.

There was a depressingly large pool of options to sift through to see if anything matched the robbery at the meat shop.

Several hundred in just one month, to be exact.

I had the file of every single one. Then I had a map to mark where the ones that most closely matched the meat shop robbery were located.

I was only about halfway through with the Bronx. I hadn’t even started on the other boroughs yet.

I’d been deep in a research hole, my anxiety tripping into overdrive at the idea of never being able to narrow anything down when Rico knocked on the door.

Honestly, I’d been so wrapped up in trying to figure out what had happened with my brother that I’d practically forgotten that I had a job waiting for me.

I had the money to stay home.

I figured if Rico or Ricky called to ask where I was, I could just claim I was having some, I don’t know, concussion issues or something.

I never expected anyone to show up to check on me.

But there he was.

Looking even better than I remembered.

He was a little more dressed up than usual in black slacks, dress shoes, and a long-sleeve black button-up with a subtle shiny black stripe.

While I stood there in shorts that were just shy of being cheeky in a ratty t-shirt with hair I honestly didn’t remember the last time I’d washed.

He smelled amazing too. Smoky and delicious.

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