Page 8 of One Love

Just as she places her hand on the buzzer to unlock the glass doors, she points her chin to the mailboxes, looking over herright shoulder. “A young man that looked like he’d spent the better half of his life in prison dropped something off in your mailbox.” Christ, who needed cameras with Mrs. Perry around?

“Nosy much?” Reaching into my pocket for my keys, I punch one into the keyhole and smirk.

“Someone has to be.” Her retort has me shaking my head. This building has every angle covered in cameras, it’s the reason my small apartment costs significantly more than other buildings around here.

There’s always the chance of someone watching.

Before the doors completely close, she throws out her last remark. “White looks good on you.”

I grin, knowing full well she’s never seen me in anything but black and probably never will again.

Watching her leave, I survey the grounds as she steps into a car she’s probably hired for the morning. Either her husband left her a fortune or she’s making bank at her weekly Bridge games. Both options are possible.

Once the car pulls around the circular drive to the building, my attention returns to the mailbox where a set of keys rests on top of a plain piece of paper. I don’t touch it, looking around again as if someone is going to jump out of the corners somewhere and knock me out. I step back so all the shadowy parts of the floor are visible before returning my attention to the keys.

They look familiar but that’s impossible. What the actual fuck?

My hand flies in and out of the box, quickly grabbing the keys like a snake is there waiting for me.

Holy fuck, it can’t be. How?

Gritting my teeth, I snap up the paper and read it three times before it makes any kind of sense.

My eyes dart from the note to the keys and back to the note, trying to make sense of this crazy as fuck situation. Is the Irish mob playing with me? Teasing me? Or maybe it’s a trap. Kill myself on the bike…problem—aka me—solved. It’s not like they haven’t tried before when they ran me off the road last month, destroying my bike in the process. I’d had to run off to safety, but when I came back to the scene, the bike was gone. I’d always assumed it was the Irish who took it…was I wrong?

Stepping closer to the doors, I look outside as I make sure my tank top is pulled over my gun and hiding the obvious bulge. I look left, then right, then left again before craning my neck to the right. That’s when I see her.

From this distance, my baby looks as new as the day I bought it, and although I’m weary as fuck, I can’t ignore my accelerating heartbeat as I see her there, shiny and blood red, waiting for me to ride her.

Pressing the same buzzer Mrs. Perry punched earlier, I take a tentative step outside. My gaze scans my surroundings, looking for anyone who could be responsible for this but only seeing the street lined with a few cars and the occasional van.

My hand digs into my pocket for my phone, thinking Crank needs to go over every inch of her to make it’s not some kind of death trap.

“Yeah, Boss.” Crank’s voice booms in my ear after the first ring.

“Get a crew over here with a van.” My voice is low, my words clear.

“Your place?” It’s barely eight-thirty, we usually don’t have anything going on until around ten. Flexible hours are the shit.

“Yeah.”

“On it, Boss.” We hang up and I just keep staring at her, shocked that she looks almost brand new. There’s a weird scratch just under the cap on the gas tank, a triangle of sorts thatwasn’t there before the crash. Yet, I know for a fact this is my bike.

Someone’s fucking with me and I will figure out who it is, but first, I need to change into something worthy of my slick bitch on wheels.

Thirty minutes later, the bike is pushed up into the van, secured with ratchet straps hooked onto four different lashing points and taken straight back to our garage where Crank immediately begins to look her over. I followed with my truck, my mind whirling a mile a minute trying to figure out who the fuck is doing this.

All I know is that the voice on the intercom didn’t ring any bells and that Mrs. Perry saw some tough guy putting something in my mailbox. I’m assuming he had tattoos all over his body and face for her to automatically think he’d been in prison, but I’m not eighty-five, we don’t have the same social norms.

Wait…

The keys weren’t just dropped in there, they were carefully placed. And how the fuck did he get into the building?

Goddammit. As if I didn’t have enough shit going on with my life.

Could it be the very real pain in my ass who keeps texting me? I know, I know, he’s helped me in the past, but holy fuck, this whole stalker game is driving me insane. If he wants my attention, he’s going to get it and it won’t be pretty.

Unless it’s the Irish, but for some reason my gut tells me otherwise. Why would they go to the trouble of this whole charade if a bullet to the brain could be just as effective?

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