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After I hung up, I scrolled through the pictures once again, and something caught my mind and nearly had me jerking inside.
Is that where you both met? When you were in San Francisco?
Come to think of it, how did she know I was in San Francisco? She hadn’t said the last part like a question, more like something she was sure had happened. She’d known I was in San Francisco. Maybe her father told her, but he told me he had fabricated the story of how we met. I always told him to tell people that we met pretty recently, so no one actually knew much about our friendship.
Suspicion bit at me.
I pulled up the picture with Emily and the man again and saw what bothered me about it.
He stood ramrod straight with an arrogant look in his eyes, and there was something on his buckle—a badge.
Now I saw what Ansel wanted to tell me.
Her boyfriend was a cop.
I recalled the first day she came here and how desperate she had seemed for a job. And not just any job either. She especially wanted to be hired by me. At the time, I figured it was because she heard about the gePaulus pay. I paid my employees well to keep their mouths shut about anything they saw.
But now I think she came back intentionally just to get close to me.
Her boyfriend was a cop.
And she had a criminal record.
Shit. She was a mole.
It wasn’t the first time they sent a woman as a mole to work in one of my shops. It was just the first time she went this long without getting caught.
I didn’t know if I was annoyed or impressed.
No, definitely annoyed. Pissed, actually.
This changed fucking everything about our relationship and how I saw her. She wasn’t innocent. She was a fucking rat.
I’d been trying to play Mr. Nice Guy, but now I saw it was pointless. I should have known.
Always look out for yourself and yourself alone.
A sinister plan started forming in my head.
9
EMILY
It was the next day, and I was about to do something very stupid that would potentially save my life once and for all.
And I had about thirty minutes to do it.
Chris was in here this morning, working most of the day. Earlier, he seemed distracted and hadn’t responded to my greeting. And then, when I’d gone into his office to confirm the price of something, he’d snapped at me.
It was probably because he’d been shutting something in the process, something that looked like a safe. And then he’d blocked it with his whole body the second I’d seen it.
I pretended like I didn’t notice it and went back to work. But the whole time, I kept thinking about how I was going to infiltrate the safe. My lock-picking skills were legendary. From my brief glance, the safe didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary. I was sure I could get into it within thirty minutes.
Ineededto get into it within thirty minutes.
So I told myself to wait until around noon when Chris left to have lunch. Or maybe to kill someone else. I didn’t know.
And then, once he left, I would sneak into his office and check out whatever was in that safe.
