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THIRTY
hawk
All that talkabout stealing kisses.
If it were anyone else, I would think her affections on Christmas Eve had been a ploy to get closer to me, to use me to accomplish—whatever it was she was trying to do.
I couldn’t figure out whyanyonewould want to steal these items, for one thing.
But Ella?
Not Ella.
She hadn’t wanted anything to do with me from the start. She hadn’t rigged the elevator to make it break down that day—or if she had, she was more of a criminal mastermind than I would have ever pegged her for.
She hadn’t sought me out in any way. She’d deflected my every attempt to get closer to her until I’d finally broken through her defenses.
I couldn’t think this of her, no matter what the security feed showed.
Tears streamed down her cheeks. I hated to see any woman cry, but especially her. She was so strong, so self-assured.
“You—you can’t really believe this,” she began.
I rested my hands on my hips and exhaled, staring at the spartan room. “I don’t.”
Her eyes flicked. The tears in them glinted.
“You don’t?”
“I admit, I don’t know you as well as I’d like to,” I said, stepping away and staring at the wooden bench positioned in front of the row of open lockers.
The items Ethan had discovered were strewn across it, and the printer that had tumbled out lay in pieces on the cement floor, its cord still in the locker like some kind of pathetic lifeline.
“But for one, this just doesn’t seem like something you’d do,” I said.
Her eyes widened. “For two?”
“For two, why would you go to the trouble of stealing all of that stuff, and then wedge it into your locker after you’d just quit your job?”
She smeared a hand across her cheek. Her fingers trembled.
I stepped closer to the bench and peered down at the printer, the tablets, the ink cartridges. I wanted to sift through them but didn’t want to complicate things by adding more fingerprints.
The police were going to get a phone call from me. I’d pay everything I had to so I could get to the bottom of this.
Unnecessary interference wouldn’t help with that.
“Some of these items went missing weeks ago. You can’t tell me you’ve had them in your locker this whole time. You all change into your jumpsuits in here, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
My gaze tripped across the other lockers. “Is there anyone else on the staff who can verify the contents of your locker from even two days before?”
“I—I don’t know. We never really look too closely at one another’s stuff.”
I rubbed a hand along my chin and considered. “Even so, someone would have noticed if you had random things like this in there. I mean, who carries a printer around?”
“Especially when it was reported to have been missing,” she added, her voice quiet.
