Page 26 of Only the Devil
“Why not do that now?”
Well, she has a point.
“I’m not good at waiting. If I want something, I tend to just go for it.”
Is that right?
I swear to god my dick jumps to attention, excited at the prospect.
Lock it down, Ryder.
“Copy that. Let me hunt around this condo. See if I can find a hammer and nails. You want to just nab something from the condo to hang? We can replace it later.”
She pushes up, determination vibrating off her. “We don’t need the props. If someone asks, I’ll say that’s what we were going to do, but you forgot the nails.”
“They have video in the lobby,” I remind her.
“Fine. We’ll bring props. But we won’t hang anything because we’ll say the nail wasn’t right or something.”
“Sitting around all day is sticking in your craw isn’t it?”
“What?” She scrunches her face and before I can explain, she’s waving her hand dismissively, back turned to me, headed for the stairs.
It takes us all of five minutes for her to select a framed photo of a flower vase—an image Daisy Jonas would probably never in a million years hang in her office—and for me to find a hammer.
We cross the street and enter the lobby. Once again, there’s no one at reception. My gaze scans the black glass domes in the corners and in the middle of the ceiling in front of the elevators.
But when she presses the elevator button, she presses the fourth floor, and her office is on the third.
“What’re you doing?”
“There could be a camera in the stairwell too. Does it matter how we access it?”
I scan the elevator ceiling. There could be one in here, but I don’t see any dead giveaways. But she’s right. Either way if there’s surveillance I haven’t detected we could end up needing to explain our presence on the fourth floor. Still, she’s throwing our prior precautions to the wind.
The elevator dings, the doors slide open, and she bolts down the hall. Too fast. I catch her arm. “Picture-hanging pace, remember?”
My eyes automatically sweep the corridor—emergency exits, blind corners, sight lines. It’s a weekend, Saturday evening, so it’s quiet, as one would expect. No keyboard clicks, no phone conversations bleeding through office doors. Just the hum of fluorescent lights and our footsteps on industrial carpet.
Once again that something’s off feeling surfaces. A faint chemical smell lingers.
We round the corner and I’m busy cataloging escape routes when Daisy stops dead. I nearly slam into her back.
“What—” I start, then see it.
The door. Jocelyn’s door.
It’s closed.
Chapter 9
Daisy
The tremors winding their way through my fingers coincide with a distinct drop in temperature that tightens my muscles and cinches my rib cage.
Did we miss the commotion across the street? No. We wouldn’t have. Would we? Maybe we didn’t wake up?
It’s conceivable the body is still in the office. Perhaps the office cleaning service came by and closed the door without entering? A sloppy cleaning job, perhaps?
