Page 35 of Violet Spark
I hit the download button, and while my slow-ass phone tried to pull the video out of the sky, I watched a daddy push his pig-tailed daughter on a swing. Not a care in the world. For all I knew, this guy could be my dad, who was a doctor now. Or at least he’d been in med school when he’d gotten my mom pregnant. Now he probably lived in a neighborhood somewhere just like this one and had a pigtailed girl just like her.
The video had loaded when I glanced back down, and I hit play.
The shaky cam made my vision dance, but I watched as tall, lanky Brayden moved in on me. Rique and Amanda snickered offscreen—little shits—as I backed up to the mixers.
“Who else comes back here?” Brayden asked.
My heart thumped hard as I watched, but I didn’t know if it was because I was seeing him alive again or reliving the moment.
“Just employees.” Video-me took a small step backward toward the dispensers. I shivered in the car as my stomach pitched. “But I only gave my crew a ten-minute break, so we can’t…”
Brayden reached above video-me, as if to brace himself. It would’ve been a sexy move, if he weren’t so dead now.
Right there.
I paused the video. Zoomed.
He had something in his hand. Looked kinda purple, but that could’ve been the reflection off the smoothie mix in the dispenser.
I hit play again. We kissed. It hurt to watch my humiliation. Made my skin goosebump too. Dead boy kissing. Brayden was clearly not into it. The teen peanut gallery choked and snickered again. Fuckers. While I’d been trying for sparks, Brayden had been feeling around the shelf above me. His hand came away empty, and he straightened.
I paused the video again. Okay, IknowI searched that shelf. I’d moved the bottles around and everything. I’d swear on my grandmother’s grave: nothing was there. One of those teen assholes must have taken it.
I wassogoing to blast into the Freeze and smack the shit out of them if they didn’t cough it up. My life was on the line here.
Ever the masochist, I hit play again.
Brayden was looking over his shoulder, out the window—probably for Dane or Alling or whoever else was following along in this craptastic parade of lethal bullshit—and muttered something the video didn’t pick up and I couldn’t remember.
Video-me frowned at the back of his head. “Don’t you want…that freezie?”
Not cute.
“Nah. I—” He turned to look at me. “I guess I don’t have time.”
Video-me reached for his hand. Needy. Ick. “Sure you don’t want that caffeine?”
Was that really me? God, maybe Daneshouldkill me.
“Maybe next time.” Brayden started for the front exit, and he got close enough to the teenage turds for me to see that his complexion had gone ashy, his eyes wide. He looked as spooked as I now felt.
My poor, dead MageLord. “Oh, Brayden,” I whispered. “What did you get into?”
Video-me spun back to the pomegranate freezie dispenser, giving it a vicious shove. Something had been wedged, I remembered. Above video-me, something fell off the shelf into the dispenser.
Hold on.
I pulled the vid back five seconds and let it roll again.
Something purple definitely fell.
I replayed the video a couple dozen times. In real life, the dad with the little girl went inside their perfect little house. And on the tiny screen, the purple thing on the shelf fell over and over. Into the dispenser that I had cleaned out. The little teen shitshadn’ttaken Brayden’s thing.
Opening my gloved palm, I stared at my hand.
Dread pooled in my belly.
Thanks to Rique’s over-enthusiastic efforts to steal my job, I could connect the last dot.
