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“Of course,” Stina said, too eagerly, shuffling her daughters out.
“Before you go,” Hawk said, pointing in their direction. “Can you tell me which floor Ella has been working on this month?”
Stina returned to her desk and checked her schedule on her computer. Using her mouse, she scrolled a few times, clicking, and then paused.
“She’s been assigned the third and twelfth floors.”
Hawk exhaled in relief. “And who has been in charge of the fifth floor?”
Stina perused the schedule again. She hesitated for the briefest moment, and her gaze flicked to her daughters. “That would be Pris.”
My suspicions began to grow. She was the one who’d done this, I was sure of it.
How had she managed it? How had she tampered with the feed?
“We need to check the lockers,” Hawk said.
Stina provided the master key. One by one, lockers were opened, their contents examined, until the security guard arrived at mine.
The door was jammed. The handle wouldn’t budge.
The guard jiggled it, pounding on the metal until it gave way and popped open.
The missing printer tumbled out, hitting first the bench before crashing to the cement floor. Reams of paper, the tablets and sticky notes—everything that had been reported missing recently—had been stuffed in and spilled to the ground.
Reaching deeper in, the guard withdrew my purse andremoved two more tablets from within. I’d never seen either of them before.
How had they gotten in there?
“I didn’t,” I said, praying they heard the plea in my voice. “I didn’t steal those things!”
Words were spoken. Hawk muttered to his security guard, offering me sympathetic glances, but I heard it all as if underwater.
I was detached. Devastated. Disbelieving.
I didn’t hear Stina until she grasped me by the shoulders and shook me.
“You’re finished, do you hear me? This is humiliating, and I want nothing more to do with you inside or outside of work. You’ll get no references from me, and I’ll make sure your dad knows the truth about you.”
I fisted my hands. Injustice cooked inside of me like a pot ready to blow its lid.
“You’ve been waiting for something like this to happen for a long time, haven’t you?”
Stina rounded on me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Indignation added to the sense of injustice. “Why else do you not invite me to my own family’s Christmas lunch? And then you schedule me to work in the middle of the night Christmas Eve. You staged this. You set me up.”
Suspicion trickled in with a wretched tang. Prishadbeen the one giving me keys for months now. As manager beneath Stina, she was also the only other person who could have gotten into my locker.
Ethan skewered Stina and me with a glare. “I’mafraid the evidence is against you, Miss Embers. There is footage here showing you using custodial keys to access the offices on the fifth floor.
“The evidence is there, and it’s in your locker. Somehow, you tampered with the feed.”
“I didn’t!”
“Then why is the footage there?”
“I don’t know,” I said frantically, looking to Hawk rather than his security guard. “I was with Hawk on the twelfth floor. I wasn’t wearing the jumpsuit. I didn’t even have my purse that night.”
