Enemies With Benefits (Loveless Brothers 1)

I look like hell because I didn’t really sleep last night. I couldn’t. I just laid there, watching the ceiling, trying to think about something besides Violet, furious at me and crying in cold storage.

When I was a kid, my dad used to take us fishing at this catch-and-release pond nearby. Usually, the fish would bite the hook, we’d take it out, and they’d go on their merry way. But every so often, the fish would swallow the hook, and if that happened it was all over for the fish. Either we had to pull it out or cut it out, and either way, the fish was a goner.

I feel like I’ve swallowed the hook, like something sharp and merciless is wedged behind my ribcage and I’m just waiting for it to destroy me. Every time I think about her, it tugs. Every time I remember her saying I like you or think of her on the roof, looking at the stars, it tugs.

Even though apparently the last two months don’t matter, it hurts. Even though she thinks I could do this to her, it hurts.

It hurts and I have to do something to try and fix it, no matter what.

“Monty didn’t say anything about that,” the guy says.

Monty?

“It was just a suggestion he had,” I say. “But we’ve had nearly a thousand dollars of saffron go missing in the past week, and I’m starting to think that someone might be selling it on the black market.”

His brow furrows.

“Saffron?”

“It’s a spice,” I explain. “Sells for five thousand dollars a pound, so I’d hate to lose too much.”

He emits a low whistle, then steps back from the door, letting me into the security office suite.

“Don’t know how much we can help you, but you’re welcome to look through the footage. Talk to Marcus over there. I’m Jim, by the way.”

We shake hands. I introduce myself. I confirm that there is, indeed, a black market for spices, a fact which gets another whistle out of him.

Finally, he walks me through the small office suite to the reason I’m there: the monitor room. Inside is a young man, leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head, looking up at a bank of screens. There must be at least thirty.

“Marcus,” Jim says. “This is Eli. Can you point him to the cameras on the kitchen? They’re having a spice problem.”

“Of course,” he says, and I step into the room, sit in an empty chair. Jim leaves.

“What kind of spice problem?” he asks.

“I think someone’s stealing the expensive ones,” I say, and explain the problem I invented.

It’s not real, obviously. I’m not going to find that anyone’s stealing the saffron, or the vanilla beans, or anything else.

I’m going to catch Martin in the act.

Then I’m going to take this footage to Montgomery and get his ass fired.

It doesn’t feel like enough. I want to get him fired and then scorch the earth behind him. I want to get him fired and make him unemployable. I want to get him fired, get him kicked out of his house, get his driver’s license revoked. I want him to have to change his name and move to a new state, and once he’s there, I want someone to take a picture of his flaccid dick and put it up on every street corner and sign post.

I want Martin to suffer. That’s what I want.

For now I’ll have to settle for getting him fired.

Violet might never talk to me again, but by God, I’m going to do something about this shitweasel.

“All right,” Marcus says, and pushes a laptop toward me. “We store footage for the last week on this, but after two weeks it’s deleted from there and stored on the cloud. See those folders that say ‘Kitchen 1’ and ‘Kitchen 2’?”

“That’s the kitchen?” I ask.

“You got it.”

It’s pretty self-explanatory, and I start going through the video files. They’re each labeled with the camera and date, so I find what I need instantly.

Then I hit a dead end. There are only two cameras in the kitchen, and neither one is in the room where our lockers are. Neither is even pointed at the entrance to that room.

The hook digs deeper. It buries itself in my stomach and I swear I can feel the cold steel point digging into my spine.

I don’t give up. I didn’t lie my way into the security office to give up, so I diligently go through a week’s worth of kitchen footage, skimming through it as fast as I can.

Martin comes and goes three times: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday. Each time he’s in the kitchen easily for long enough to head to the lockers, find my phone, go through my photos.

The thought makes me sick to my stomach. How many of them did he go through? Did he look at all of them? Did he deliberate over which picture to send to Montgomery? Did he go back and forth from one topless picture of Violet to another, deciding?