He frowned, looking in the direction of my apartment, and pulled out his keys. “Come inside,” he instructed firmly as he unlocked the door. I followed him in. “Wait here,” he ordered. As he turned to leave, I saw what looked like a gun in that same waistband he’d shoved something into a moment ago.
Had he had a gun pointed at me in the dark? Holy shit! Who was this guy?
Before I could fully think through this new information, I found myself staring at his closed door as he stepped out and left me behind. I tried to listen but could hear nothing. He was being stealthy. After a few minutes, there still wasn’t any great ruckus, so I figured whoever had broken in hadn’t stayed. Was anything stolen? I’m not rich, and I don’t get help from family members, so everything in my apartment is hard earned.
Imagining that someone had gone in and just helped themselves to whatever they wanted was making me queasy and giving me a sense of despair. Knowing someone had been there felt, again, like being violated, and within a few moments, anger overrode my despair and displaced my fear. Twice in a day. First my car. Then my apartment. What. The. Hell.
Just when I was ready to go storming over to see what had happened, Ryder came back, looking grim. “They’re gone. You’ll have to see if anything’s missing.”
I started for the door determinedly, but he stopped me with a hand on my arm and a cautionary look.
“It’s a real mess, Taylor. It’s all tossed. It’s like they were looking for something.”
With that warning, I went to my apartment. Ryder had turned on the lights, so I saw immediately the wreck that had been my living room. Cushions from the sofa were overturned and ripped open, with stuffing strewn everywhere. The sofa had been the first piece of furniture I’d saved for and purchased that wasn’t a thrift-store buy. Ruined.
Horror washed over me as I looked over the rest of the living room.
The small potted plants that I had lovingly nurtured, because I’m not allowed to have animals in the apartment, were smashed on the floor. Shards of colorful pottery mixed with dirt were ground into the rug. DVDs were tossed here and there. Framed prints that had once added warmth and touches of bold color to the walls now had splintered, spiderwebbed glass frames and were askew or even knocked on the floor.
“My bedroom...” I whispered, looking down the hallway. The sound of my breathing was heavy in the stillness of the room. My lungs burned with emotion.
“More of the same.”
“How could this happen? How could no one have seen or heard anything?” It was such a surreal moment. I never would have thought this would happen to me.
“I was out,” he said curtly, “but believe me, I wish I’d been here.” Ryder’s face looked cut from stone. He was angry on my behalf, and that allowed me to take a deep breath, steeling myself for what I was about to find. Somehow I knew he’d been looking out for me at the club again.
The closet and its contents had been thoroughly, rudely, disrespectfully tossed. Clothes were strewn about; my expensive shoes that I leave in boxes for added protection were dumped haphazardly. My most prized drawings, completed on a variety of textured papers, which I’d saved in a cardboard moving box under my bed over many years, were upturned and scattered about the room. Some were even ripped and crumpled, which brought a hot lump of sorrow to my throat. There wasn’t much I was truly proud of, but these fell into that category. I knelt down with shaking hands and tried to gently gather up and stack the pages, placing them back in the moving boxes they had come in.