Page 129 of The Ripper

“I know,” I gritted my teeth. “I’m here to pick up her things.”

“I can’t let you go to the women’s locker room; she has to come and pick them up herself,” she crossed her arms in front of her chest.

“I can go,” Midnight interjected, shrugging her shoulders.

“And who are you?”

“Someone who doesn’t like that question,” Midnight rolled her eyes. “I’m a woman, I know the combination, so… be a doll and show me the way,” she smiled in a dangerously innocent way.

“Why can’t she come and get it herself? Is she too ashamed to show her face?”

I clenched my jaw so hard I thought I was about to break my teeth, and my hands balled into fists as I forced myself to stay calm and not put a hole between her eyes.

~ With a power drill, very slowly.

“God, you’re so full of questions it bores me.”

Midnight ran her fingers through her hair and pulled out the needle she used to pin her bun with, then stepped to the side to be obstructed from view and pushed the thick, pointy needle into Lana’s nostril, the image giving me far too much satisfaction.

“How about this? You show me to Arella’s locker, and I won’t give you a live lobotomy right here,” she smiled.

“I’ll call security,” the brunette breathed out, her body frozen in place.

“You’ll drop dead before you even open your mouth,” Midnight said calmly, “so let’s go for a walk,” she hooked her arm with Lana’s, then left me to watch her six.

~ God, this woman makes you look like a saint. Are we sure she’s not another half-sister?

Ten minutes later, Midnight came back by herself, casually strutting down the hallway, carrying a cardboard box, which she promptly pushed into my arms as her eyes went left and right.

“Where’s the Wicked Witch of the West?” I asked as I looked at the contents in the box, nothing standing out right off the bat.

“It’s my understanding that she helped that asshat of a director with firing your girlfriend, right?”

“Yeah,” I answered rather reluctantly, raising an eyebrow as we walked towards the exit.

“Well, let’s just say I’m not a big fan of women who put down other women, and since you haven’t sent her to hell yourself because of what I assume is an inherited sense of care towards women, no matter how putrid they might be, I thought I’d do you a favor and put the bitch down myself,” she shrugged.

I grinned, shaking my head as I put the box on the backseat of my car, then got behind the steering wheel.

*

Back at the warehouse, Klaus had returned from Arella’s apartment, where he didn’t find anything relevant.

I was going through the stuff from her locker, feeling like a creep for invading her privacy.

~ Get off your moral pedestal, asshole. You did this for six years before you finally got the guts to speak to her.

There were a lot of pens, notebooks, assorted paraphernalia, a fucking doll with removable organs, scrubs, her name tag, a set of scrubs, and underneath it all… a red, rectangular velvet box.

That red box I thought I saw when she put her gun back in the safe, the box that wasn’t there when I searched her apartment, and I wondered where it had gone.

~ Why would she carry it around with her and leave it in her work locker?

“I think I found something,” I said as I took it out, feeling like I was pulling the hope out of Pandora’s box and holding it in my hand.

“What is that?” Klaus asked as he came closer.

“The red box,” I whispered.

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