Page 42 of Hold Him Like Gravity

So I started to think that maybe, just maybe, I’d somehow… gotten away with it. That the cops hadn’t found any evidence pointing at me.

There were no cameras in that alley, after all. And my fellow employees and I long-suspected that the ancient-looking cameras inside the store hadn’t been working in at least a decade. On top of that, my work uniform was all black, so no one would see the blood on me.

As if that wasn’t enough good luck, I’d been working off of the books so my boss could avoid having to pay me the shift differential. That was why I’d taken it in the first place. Because there wasn’t a paper trail leading back to me for Kyle to find and track me down.

No one, it seemed, was looking for me.

Kyle’s murder, I began to hope, would just go down as another cold case no one even cared about.

I was free.

I could start over.

And he would never hurt me again.

Except, of course, he wasn’t dead now, was he?

CHAPTER TWELVE

Rico

“What’s all the moping about?” Bastian asked two minutes after he came into the apartment at half-past three in the morning.

Clear across the room, I could smell perfume clinging to him. And there was a tan swipe on the shoulder of his dark tee that I imagined was a woman’s makeup.

He hadn’t known a lonely night since he came home from prison. Hell, when he was working at the shop, he would sometimes take a lunch break and come back with a swagger in his step.

“I’m a grown-ass man; I don’t mope.”

“Yet, here you are, sitting in the dark with a drink, staring out the window… moping,” Bass said as he walked over to the bar cart to pour himself a drink, then move to sit down across from me in the living room. “Work shit?” he asked.

To that, I snorted.

“Work’s fine.”

“Except not figuring out who robbed you.”

“Yeah, there’s that. But since there’s been nothing else going on since, I figure it’s an isolated incident.”

“It’s not work. Then it’s gotta be a woman. It’s gotta be Kick.”

“Why would you say that?”

“‘Cause she’s been looking for you each time the door opens or she sees someone out of the corner of her eye coming out of the back room.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“See that shit?” Bass asked, smirking at me. “There goes all the moping. And, yeah. Figured something went down with you two.”

“You could say that.”

“And you’re sitting here instead of getting buried between her legs because…”

That was a good question.

I’d been asking myself the same thing over and over since walking her back to her door.

“She works for me.”

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