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I stopped in front of him, and he reached down, running his thumb over my bottom lip. “OK, sweet Nova. I have to make some calls anyway.” His lips grazed mine, and for the second time tonight, I had to hold back the bile from coming up.
I said goodnight to Valik on the way out and breathed a sigh of relief when the elevator got to my floor.
Things had gone well tonight, and they were about to go even better. With Ryzen out of town all weekend, I was going to rip his apartment apart looking for what I needed. Because Delove and Dobbs had been right before. Ryzen wasn’t that smart, and I knew there was something in there that was going to help me end this madness.
There had to be.
Chapter Twelve
Day 34
“Valik, for the tenth time, Juliet and I are having a girls’ night, and you don’t need to hang out in the hallway all night.” I poked my head through the crack of Ryzen’s front door. Valik stood with his arms crossed, giving me an all-too-familiar look. “We’re just going to get drunk and watch chick flicks on Ryzen’s eighty-inch TV.”
I tapped my foot and opened the door a little more. He glanced over my shoulder at Juliet, who was busy pulling wine bottles out of her grocery bag and lining them up on the kitchen counter.
“Yeah, Valik. I’m sick of men and need to vent.” Juliet walked over with a glass of wine and stood with her hand on her hip. “So unless you want to stick around and hear me complain about Jimmy Finnigan”—she took a sip and held up her thumb and pointer finger in the shape of a small “c”—“who really overestimated the size of his…”
“OK,” Valik huffed, holding his hands up in front of him. “I don’t need to hear any more. Go. Vent. Be magical unicorns for all I care. Just do it safely.” He checked his watch. “I’ll check on you in a little bit.”
I rolled my eyes and grinned. “OK, Dad.”
“Yeah, thanks, Daddy.” Juliet winked at him, and his cheeks turned a shade of red.
We chuckled as he jammed the down button on the elevator panel and got on without turning to look at us again.
“I think you scared him, Jules.” I shut the door and walked over to the kitchen, grabbing a glass of wine.
“Then I did my job.” She sat on the barstool and swiveled around in a circle as she sipped.
We were going to tear this apartment apart if we had to. Ryzen had made a mistake somewhere, and I was going to find it. “Ready?” I turned to Juliet and raised my eyebrows as she put on a pair of plastic gloves, snapping the rubber at the bottom against her wrist.
“What?” She shrugged and tossed me a pair. “Just covering our bases.”
I scrunched up my nose and nodded. She was probably right.
We started in the kitchen, pulling out every drawer and opening every cupboard. I took pictures of everything that might be of help to the FBI, from phone bills, to handwritten notes on Post-it notes. No nook or cranny was left unchecked.
We went room to room, searching all the obvious spots, then the not-so-obvious ones like under the carpets, behind his paintings and under the cushions of the couch. We even unzipped the pillows and checked the stuffing in case he had anything hidden in there. But we weren’t finding anything that looked overly suspicious. I had been counting on finding the journal with the key back in its original spot, but it wasn’t. Maybe it had been just dumb luck the first time I had found it. But we searched his office from top to bottom, and it was nowhere to be found.
We were on a mission, and so far, we were failing at it. We took a quick break and ordered some pizza, devouring the slices and chugging wine. Juliet caught me up on her conversation with the claims specialist. It was taking longer than usual to process our claim, and Juliet said the agent had sounded nervous over the phone. It just confirmed what I already knew but hadn’t been willing to accept—that the FBI was in fact interfering. A part of me had hoped they had been bluffing, trying to scare me shitless so that I would help them. But oh, I’d been wrong. So, so wrong.
A little while later Juliet called out to me from the floor of Ryzen’s closet. She had a box opened in front of her, pictures spread out. “Come look at these.”
I sat down next to her, my heart fluttering in my chest when I realized I was looking at pictures of a young Ryzen and Cian together. They were wearing football uniforms in some of them, so this must have been back in high school. Photos of them wearing matching Halloween costumes, drinking with friends at a bar. Just hundreds of pictures. So odd that Ryzen would keep these after all these years, especially after what he had done to Cian.
There was a woman in a lot of the photos, and I picked up one where the three of them were huddled together around a miniature replica of the Chicago skyline.
“That’s Gretchen.” My hand trembled slightly as I grabbed another photo. “Cian’s ex-fiancée.” Something in the photo caught my attention and I peered at it closer, unable to tell if I was looking at what I thought I was. “Hand me the other photos of her.”
Juliet scanned the floor, handing me a few pictures, and an unsettling feeling ate away at my stomach. “I’ll be right back.” I went to Ryzen’s office and used the letter-opener to jimmy the drawer open. The black box was still inside, and I brought it over to Jules.
“Ugh.” She cringed when she saw the hair.
“I know, so damn weird. But look. It’s the same necklace, right?”
“Oh, shit, it is.” She stared from the photo to the necklace and then back again. “Why would Ryzen have this with, I’m assuming, a piece ofherhair?”
“I have no idea, but I’ll take pictures of it just in case.”
