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“It’d be back upstairs somewhere, but I’d need to know which box you want in specifically. The holder should have the other copy,” she explains. Although her answers are helpful it’s also no help at all.
I doubt Cole has that.
Damnit.
“Remember though, this could be a dead end,” she notes, eyeing the room of boxes, same as everyone else. “You said you weren’t sure what you were looking for? Whatever it is, it could be in another location too.”
Double damnit. She’s right.
“We could be looking for anything. Family heirlooms, a hidden will, a quick getaway stash of cash. Priceless jewels,” she muses provocatively. That last one lighting her eyes up the most.
“Stop snooping, you think we’d really be down here if we were looking for a pearl necklace?” Eli threatens, jeering.
The line on her upper lip thins out, as she juts out her hip in the same motion. Her focus is too stuck on Eli or she’d have heard Hailey mutter, “Sexual tension,” under her breath.
“I was just saying,” Madison defends darkly. Anger coating her tone.
“Well, stop.”
“You stop!”
“You—”
“—It’s not here,” Cole says, cutting in. By his tone, it makes me even wonder if he heard what was going on around him at all.
He’s already at the door, ready to go but I notice how his gaze fixated a second too long on one area before he’d turned facing us all again.
I doubt anyone else noticed but I had, and I find my head rotating over my shoulder as we all shuffle to climb back out. I don’t spot anything out of the ordinary or suspicious.
Those ice-filled eyes I sense, and they are the reason I shift back. I’ve been caught but again Cole says nothing. Only staring me down through those troubled blues.
Shaking his head, he turns away and I grimace. The way he’s veiling his emotions right now doesn’t sit well with me. That invisible chain between us loosening the smallest amount.
What’s going on in that head of yours, Iceman?
“Just know,” Madison says after I’m the last to leave. She’s hung back to reclose the door. “I didn’t do this for you,” her statement a cracked hiss of a whisper.
Thrown off, I momentarily lose my footing but recover calmly after I spot how her eyes briefly flicked in Eli’s direction.
Her voice is smooth and it’s the complete opposite of the tightness I have inside my chest.
Before tonight, you could have told me Madison still had feelings for Cole and I would’ve believed you.
Hailey had been right, and it’s clear Madison has moved on.
The time line I don’t think matters because it’s clear in the way Eli watches her now, pretending like he isn’t but is. There’s something going on between them.
The real question in all this though, is if that’s true, then why was Madison crying earlier? It was like Eli had ripped her heart straight from her chest and was holding it while it beat mercilessly for her to watch, just because he could.
Should I care what’s going on between them? No.
Do I?
I catch up to Cole. His much larger hand perfectly fills my own with a gentle squeeze. Nah, that’s not my story to worry about.
thirty-seven
Rory
