Page 54 of The Woman with the Wallet

One taste wasn’t nearly enough.

But then the fucking call.

I wasn’t an idiot, either. Everything about Max was cold and guarded again. It didn’t take much thought to conclude she wasglad for this interruption because it allowed her to put her walls back up and pretend she hadn’t been rocking against my mouth, whimpering and moaning, just half an hour before.

The longer we had to focus on things outside of the two of us and what was clearly growing between us, the more she would push me away, pretend there was nothing going on.

It couldn’t be helped, though.

This could literally be life or death.

That was another reason I wanted Max to keep her ass in the car. The last thing I wanted was for her to be in danger yet again. Even if, objectively, I knew she was a woman who was used to a certain amount of danger.

It was the door swinging open, a food delivery guy making his way back out, that finally spurred me into motion.

I moved inside with Max right at my heels.

Henry lived on the top floor at the back of the building, so Max and I took the elevator before running down the hallway toward the apartment in question.

I only slowed when I saw the door cracked open. Seeming to sense it at the same time, Max grabbed a handful of my jacket, a silent instruction to take notice.

I reached for my gun before moving into the doorway, pushing the door open with my shoulder before moving inside.

I wanted Max to stay in the hall, at least until I cleared the place. But there was no way to tell her that. So I could feel her behind me as soon as I took a step into the apartment.

“Fuck,” I hissed as my gaze landed on the man sitting in his ergonomic chair in front of a long desk full of screens. A fucking charging cord wrapped around his neck.

“What… oh, God,” Max said, trying to rush forward.

I grabbed her, pushing her back behind me as I carefully stepped around the space, making sure we were alone.

“Should we do CPR?” Max asked when we moved back into the living room.

“Wouldn’t do any good,” I said, looking at Henry with something akin to grief growing in me. If not for me, this guy wouldn’t be dead. He’d likely be playing his little shooter games on his gaming console, not strangled to death by… someone. “He’s dead. Was likely dead before we even got out of the hotel parking lot.”

“Don’t,” Max said when my hand immediately moved out, wanting to press his eyelids closed. “Here,” she added, rummaging around in the bag she had strapped at the center of her chest and coming back with… a tube of glue? “Give me your hands,” she demanded.

I did, watching as she held each of my hands in turn and covered my fingertips with the glue. “Okay, there. Now you can touch anything you want,” she told me as she carefully coated each of her fingers as well.

“Just carry that shit around, do you?”

“You never know when you might need to obscure your fingerprints,” Max reasoned as I reached out to slide Henry’s lids closed, saying a silent prayer, with no small bit of regret, before looking around.

“We looking for clues?” she asked, reaching to pull her hood up over her head. “What? Don’t want to leave any hair DNA at a murder scene,” she explained.

There would be time at another point to be really impressed by her ingenuity. But there was no telling if neighbors heard a struggle and called the cops; we were short on time.

So I moved through the apartment, looking for my wallet, for the diamonds, for any sign of what the fuck had happened with this job that had been so perfectly fucking planned.

The two times I’d been inside this apartment, I’d never set foot outside of the common area that served as Henry’s office more so than a living or dining space.

Unlike Zeno’s place, Henry liked things neat. Almost to an extreme degree. He had a collection of those cars you can build stacked on shelves around the room, each one of them completely free of dust. The condiments in the fridge were even organized in alphabetical order, with all of the labels facing out.

His bedroom was similar.

“He has fourteen pairs of… everything,” Max observed. “Socks, underwear, pajamas, clothes, everything. All identical.Had,” she corrected, eyes going sad.

“Yeah, he was a creature of habit,” I agreed. It had taken a lot of convincing to get him agree to work on the diamond heist. The only reason he’d done it was because he had some ‘cutting edge’ project he was working on that he needed funding for.

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