Page 48 of Hold Him Like Gravity

I had to steal from Rico.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Rico

“Looking for me?” I asked as I came in through the back door of the meat shop to find Kick rushing around the corner after, I assumed, looking for me in the office.

“What?” she asked, eyes going wide. “Oh, uh, I was, just going to my locker,” she said, her words tripping over themselves to tumble out, everything about her strung a little too tightly.

“You alright?” I asked as she rushed past me, holding a sweater to her chest.

“Yeah, fine,” she said, getting to the lockers, then reaching out toward hers.

It was then that I realized she’d actually put a lock on hers.

My gaze slid along the line of lockers, not seeing any others with locks. That was… strange.

“You having an issue with your locker?” I asked as she turned the dial to plug in her combination.

“What do you mean?”

“You locked it,” I told her as the lock came undone, making her pull it away, open the locker, ball up her sweater, and shove it inside the locker.

“Oh, yeah. Tips have been good lately,” she said, voice tight. “I just wanted to, you know, keep ‘em safe.”

That was a reasonable enough answer. Still, something was rubbing me wrong about it. I mean, I’d seen her purse just sitting on the table every day since she’d been hired. She’d never seemed worried about her money before. Which made me think something had happened that she just didn’t want to talk about, maybe not wanting to point fingers at coworkers.

“Kick, I need—“ Ricky said, rushing into the back, stopping short when he saw me.

“What do you need?” Kick asked, slamming her locker, and making sure she slid the lock back in and clicked it closed, despite it only being the three of us in the building.

There was no way she suspectedRickyof stealing from her, right?

I mean, no, the guy wasn’t part of my family, so he didn’t get the implicit trust those men and women got. But I trusted him with my business. The man would never steal from me or mine.

“My wife called,” Ricky said, voice just shy of frantic. “My boy is in the hospital.”

“Oh,” Kick said, her hand flying to her heart for a kid she’d never met.

“Go,” I said, nodding at Ricky. When he hesitated, I reached out, grabbing his shoulder. “Go. Family comes before everything else,” I said. “Kick and I got this,” I added, waving around the shop.

“Yeah, of course. Go. I hope everything is alright.”

“Let me know if you need anything,” I said as Ricky grabbed his jacket out of his locker, then rushed out of the back door.

“I, ah, I have this,” Kick said, waving toward the shop as a whole. “If you need to get going.”

“I’m not leaving you alone in a shop at night,” I said, shaking my head at her.

Bastian was usually around, but he’d been offered to work a job with Cinna and Dav, so he was off trying to make some money and gain more favor from Renzo.

“Okay,” Kick said, giving me a smile that seemed even tighter than before. “I have to, ah, finish cleaning up.”

With that, she moved away from me, casting another look at her locker before making her way out front.

I locked the back door before following her to the front, where I locked that door as well, wanting to make sure she was safe as she moved around, wiping down the counters and meat slicers. The chairs were up on the tables, the floor still shiny from mopping.

The place had never been cleaner since she started working.

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