Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 76065 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76065 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Everyone is gone. The place is locked down,” he told me. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What the fuck are you talking about then?” I asked, feeling the frantic punch of my heart against my ribs at the idea of something happening to her.
“It’s Kick, Rico,” he said, voice careful, eyes looking, I dunno, regretful.
“What’s Kick?”
“It’s Kick who has been skimming from the register,” he said.
I swear it felt like the fucking floor fell out from under me. I dropped back down into my seat, already shaking my head at him.
“No. No fucking way.”
“I wish it wasn’t,” Bass said, carefully placing the laptop down in front of me. “But it is. Trust me, I checked and double-checked and triple-checked, wanting to find anyone else acting sketchy. But she wasn’t just acting sketchy—jumpy, looking over her shoulder, all the typical shit—you can actually see it happening,” he told me as he opened the laptop and brought up the windows he had open.
There weren’t just two of them.
There were half a dozen frozen videos.
My stomach clenched hard as Bass reached around the laptop to click play on the top video.
There was Kick, doing a cash transaction for a customer.
Honestly, I would have missed it if I wasn’t looking for it.
As she counted out change, her hand slipped over toward the large bills, curling several into her palm, then carefully tucking it into her front pocket before grabbing the coins for the customer, closing the drawer, and moving out of the frame to give the customer their change.
“She wasn’t always so smooth about it,” Bastian told me, toggling over toward another frozen video and pressing play.
There was Kick another day, her hair pulled back in a braid instead of her usual ponytail.
She wasn’t getting change for a customer. She was pulling the cash drawer out of the register to, I assume, bag up the extra money and put it in the cash drop.
She placed it down next to the register, though, on a small piece of counter near the wall, her body blocking it from view.
But she paused, looking over both of her shoulders.
Then she was shoving something into her pocket before taking the drawer to the back to drop the remaining money.
No.
No, this couldn’t be happening.
Seeming to sense my inability to accept the reality right in front of my face, Bass clicked another video.
The most damning of them all.
Not because she was stealing more money or anything, but because I remembered that day. The one where I’d run into her. Where she’d been oddly clutching her sweater to her chest, then shoved it into her locker in a ball.
This time, though, I got to see the moments leading up to that.
Why she was so jumpy.
Why she was clutching the sweater.
Because as she skimmed the money out of the register, something startled her, making her jolt and drop the cash.
Seeming paranoid about the noise, and maybe being caught, she threw her sweater over it on the floor, then scooped the cash up into the sweater, held it to her chest, and made a mad dash toward the back.
As much as I didn’t want to believe it, there was no denying something that was right in front of my face like this.
Suddenly, I was going back over every haunted look, every time she tried to change the subject, when she seemed jumpy or guarded.
It wasn’t because she was hiding her past from me.
It was because she was fucking stealing from me.
My heartbeat was thumping hard and bile was creeping up my throat.
No, this wasn’t the first time I’d been betrayed. But, fuck, this cut deeper. This was personal.
I was fucking falling for this woman.
And she was, what, scheming behind my back? Laughing at my gullibility?
I couldn’t tell which was stronger right then. The burning in my gut of betrayal. Or the crushing feeling in my chest that seemed to make it hard to breathe.
“When?” I growled.
“What?”
“When did it start? How long has she been stealing from me?”
“This is the first one,” Bastian said, clicking to a timestamped video.
“You’re sure?”
“Went back to the beginning of her employment, man. She’s never so much as skimmed a quarter before. Actually, once saw her drop a quarter under the counter. When she couldn’t get it out, she went and got another quarter out of her purse to replace it. This shit just started when you saw the anomalies in the books.”
Why, though?
Why just the two and a half weeks?
What had changed?
The robbery?
When we started getting less than professional?
No.
That shit didn’t make any sense.
There had to be something else going on. Something she was hiding. Something that was making her jumpy and haunted-looking.
I didn’t know what it was.
But I was sure as fuck about to find out.
“Don’t tell anyone about this,” I demanded, slamming the laptop. “Not yet,” I added, knowing I never kept shit from Renzo for any length of time. That wasn’t how being in the family worked. We didn’t get the luxury of secrets from the boss.