Page 80 of Hold Him Like Gravity

“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.

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