wow, he looked and sounded pissed, but he could kiss my rosy red behind. “The guy wasn’t hiding. He was sitting down.”
His dark brows flew up. “Did you know that when you opened the door?”
“Well, no, but—”
“So, why in the hell did you answer the door?” he demanded again, eyes turning dark.
“Look, I get that answering the door was stupid.” My hand tightened around my cell phone, and I sort of wanted to slam my other fist into his chest. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“No shit,” he growled.
My eyes narrowed. “I get it. I don’t need you to keep pointing it out.”
“Jesus Christ, Calla, I’ve told you about the kind of shit your mom was messed up in, and I told you not to stay here. The least you could do is not answer the door in the middle of the night.”
I drew in a deep breath as I reached up and brushed the still damp hair back behind my right ear. “Got it. Thanks for hand-delivering your message. Now you can . . .” I trailed off, eyes widening.
A scary look entered his eyes, and then he was right in front of me, moving like he had in the office earlier in the night. I backed up, hitting the wall, and there was no other place to go. The tips of two of his fingers pressed lightly under my right temple. His gaze, troubled and stormy, was fixed to that area.
My heart was pounding as fast as it had when Greasy Guy had busted up into the house. “Jax . . . ?”
His gaze swept over to mine. “Did he hit you?”
“No,” I whispered.
“Then what happened to your temple? It’s red and swollen.” His voice was icy and hard.
“It was the door. When he pushed it open, I was kind of standing in the way.” Anger flashed in those eyes, and his jaw tightened. “He actually didn’t try to hurt me, Jax. He just wanted to get to what was in this house.”
The tension in his jaw didn’t ease and a long moment passed where I didn’t think I took one single breath. “Are you okay?”
Our gazes were locked. “Yeah. It just . . . it shook me up. I didn’t expect that.” It sounded stupid considering what he’d warned me about. “I didn’t know that stuff was in the house.”
“I know.” His voice dropped, softened, and the longer he stared at me, the more tiny flutters grew in my chest, which caused a dozen or so warnings to fire off. “Clyde said you told him that the guy found stuff?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Upstairs in my old bedroom. The closet.”
“Shit,” he muttered, clearly disgusted. His fingers slowly trailed off the side of my head, and then he pivoted around, moving deeper into the house.
A moment passed where I just stood there, the hand holding the phone pressed close between my breasts. Then I forced myself away from the wall. Still having no idea why it was Jax who had come instead of Clyde, I followed him. He was halfway up the stairs, and neither of us spoke until he was crouched down in front of the closet, holding the piece of drywall.
“Did you see exactly what he got?” he asked.
“It was several bags of something that looked like brown sugar. I’m guessing that wasn’t it.”
“Fuck,” he muttered, sounding distracted. “Sounds like heroin. Little bags or big?”
Heroin. God, was Mom doing that shit now? “What do you mean by little? Like sandwich-bag size?”
“No.” He coughed out a laugh as he rose, facing me. “A sandwich bag of heroin would not be little. Talking this small?” He held up his finger and thumb, changing the space between them to a couple of inches. “What about that?”
“It was several Ziploc-sized bags, Jax. There were about eight of them, and they were full.” My heart skipped a beat when his face went blank. “That’s . . . that’s bad, right?”
“Fuck yeah.” He thrust his hands through his hair. “Sounds like there could’ve been a kilo or more in those bags. And, by the way you describe it, sounds like black tar heroin.”
I knew what a kilo was due to the kind of classes I took, but I had no idea what that translated into in the drug world. “Black tar?”
“More expensive shit from what I hear.”
The walls shifted suddenly. “How expensive?”
“Shit. Anywhere from seventy thousand to over a hundred thousand per kilo,” he explained, drawing in a deep breath. “Really depends on how pure it is—if it was high-end shit or not. Could even be worth a couple of million.”
“Oh my God.” My knees suddenly felt weak. “How do you know this stuff?”
His gaze landed on me. “Been around the block a few times.”
“You did heroin?”
“Hell no.” He didn’t elaborate. “Tell me what this guy looked like.” After I finished describing Greasy Guy, Jax looked even tenser. “Doubt that it was his shit he was retrieving. And I don’t think it was Mona’s, either.”
My stomach flopped. “You think she was . . . holding it for someone?”
He nodded. “Let’s fucking pray that this guy was who she was holding it for. If not . . .”
Oh God, I didn’t need to be a drug kingpin to figure out what he meant. If Mom was holding drugs of that kind of value, the owner would eventually come looking for it, and with the drugs being gone, she was beyond being in hot water. She was drowning. All I could hope, like Jax had said, was that the crap belonged to Greasy Guy. He seemed to know exactly where it was.
As we headed downstairs, my phone rang in my hand. Lifting it, I saw that it was Clyde calling. “Hello?”
“You doing okay, baby girl?” came his deep, gravelly voice.
“Yeah.”
“Jax there?”
“Yeah.”
He expelled a long breath. “He’s a good boy. He’ll protect you.”
I frowned, not just because of Clyde’s words, but because Jax was in the bedroom, picking up the stuff Greasy Guy had thrown around, which included a couple of pairs of undies. “Uh, Uncle Clyde . . . I got to go.”
“I mean it, baby girl, he’ll do good by you,” Clyde went on, and his words caused the flutter to return to my chest, more powerful than before. “You hear me?”
“Yeah,” I whispered. “I hear you.”
“Good. Call me in the morning. Okay?”
“Will do.” I hung up and slowly entered the bedroom, my heart skipping around in my chest.
