Rough Ride (Chaos #5)(52)

It took a second for his words to hit me.

And when they did I nearly busted out laughing.

I managed not to do that but I couldn’t stop myself from smiling.

Snap smiled back, so Snapper, not hiding from me he was relieved.

Or how deeply.

But his smile didn’t last long.

“Valenzuela has disappeared,” he announced.

I’d been about to take another fortifying slug from my beer, but what he said made me stop.

“What?”

“No one has seen him in weeks. Weeks that are now becoming months.”

“Whoa,” I whispered.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“We have no fuckin’ clue,” he answered.

“Are you thinking things are better or worse without him?”

“I’m thinking things are uncertain without him. They weren’t entirely certain with him, the man is messed right the fuck up. There was always no telling what he would do, just that whatever he did would be what we know of him. Messed right the fuck up. But at least he was visible, around, and although his operation is tight and him being around didn’t give us dick, something is better than nothing. Him disappearing off the planet is just nothing, and nothing in this situation is not good. Uncertain nothing is definitely not any better.”

“That doesn’t sound real great,” I noted in an understatement.

“It isn’t,” Snap unnecessarily agreed. “But even so, him bein’ gone does not mean his operations have ceased. His crew is still at it like he was in the driver’s seat, full bore.”

“Do you know what that means?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Either he’s callin’ the shots remotely, or he’s put someone in charge. We don’t got much of a handle on it, neither do the cops, and that’s making everyone twitchy.”

I was feeling twitchy right along with them and I didn’t really understand what was happening.

It struck me belatedly he was sharing this with me.

And cautiously, I brought that to his attention. “I thought we weren’t going to talk about this kind of thing.”

“Well, I’m deep in this and your ex is now deeper in this. Not to mention, I had to come clean about what the Club was up to with your ex and I didn’t know how you’d respond to that.” He grinned. “So although I’m not gonna give you daily status reports, I never intended to keep you fully in the dark, so here’s where we are now. Me, Chaos…and Throttle.”

My Snapper was so awesome.

“Thank you, Snapper,” I said softly.

“Don’t mention it, Rosie,” he replied.

“Though I think it’s relatively weird I’m thanking you for not keeping me fully in the dark about a drug dealing, woman pimping, gun running, pornographic movie producing bad guy and my ex, who beat the snot out of me with his brothers, who now is putting his ass on the line for immunity and atonement, something your brothers essentially set him up to do.”

His grin spread into a smile. “Yeah, baby. Now we know precisely how nice it is to have our little cloud of sweetness in the sea of all that crazy.”

Oh man, did I know what he meant.

And I loved it that he felt like he was right there with me.

Cloud of sweetness.

That was almost better than Eden.

But Eden was paradise so I was going to stick with that.

“Yeah,” I replied and then took a pull from my beer.

When I finished, Snap asked, “You good?”

I nodded.

He studied me. “You sure?”

I nodded again.

He inched nearer to me, reaching out a hand to tag the side belt loop on my jeans and pull me a lot closer to him.

Our bodies were inches away when he noted, “Rosie, you kind of freaked.”

I was worried he’d worry about that. It wasn’t done for a woman to get twisted up like that for an ex, and the road to our cloud of sweetness had been a pretty rough ride.

“Snap, I have no problem with him paying for what he did to me. But the punishment for that is not him getting shivved.”

He started chuckling and through it muttered, “My Rosie sayin’ ‘shivved.’ Too fucking cute.”

I leaned into him, resting my weight on his body, smiling up at his handsome face. “I’m glad you think it’s cute. But still, I don’t want him shivved. And to come clean to you, he does good with this, my opinion is, he’s atoned. And I hope that WITSEC is better than all those shows that have the mafia guys finding their prey and making them run for their lives.”

There was a loaded moment of hesitation before Snapper replied, “Yeah, that guy was a massive dick and a serious moron, but can’t help, he puts his ass out like this, to hope for that too.” He ran an arm along my waist and pulled me closer, sadly saying, “Since we’re into the heavy, might as well get it all out there.”

Oh man.

“What?” I asked.

He didn’t make me wait, and fortunately, it wasn’t as heavy as he thought.

Then again, with the heavy we’d been talking about, it didn’t get a lot heavier.

“Speck wants a word,” he shared. “He was on you when you got taken and he feels shit how things went down with you. I’ve been holdin’ him back because he was not my favorite person and I didn’t want him anywhere near you. But things have settled, you’re good, I need to let that go and he needs to say his piece so he can get that weight off.”