Page 66 of Maneater

“Tomorrow. Breakfast.”

“Tomorrow?” I ask with a smile,

“Yeah. So long as this isn’t world-ending.” He lifts his phone, which starts ringing again, and he laughs. “Then I want to have breakfast with you.”

A wide smile spreads across my lips, and fuck, I don’t know the last time I felt this light, despite the fact that I know another shitstorm is waiting for me the second I leave this room.

“Okay,” I whisper. He pulls me in tight, a puff of air leaving my lips with anoofbefore he kisses me, long and deep, but quick.

And when I slip out of the room by his side, the only thing bringing down my high is the guilt I feel over the stolen keycard in my pocket.

TWENTY-SEVEN

JOSIE

“What’s going on?” I ask as I enter the room, noting my partner is already there on her computer. I spent a minute alone in the quiet office fixing my clothes and, admittedly, looking around for anything of use, but it seemed like an unused office that held nothing. Once I confirmed that, I walked out of the room and headed right back to our suite.

“A lot,” Rory says with a smile. “There was a break-in in one of the rooms.”

My eyes widen as I take in her words. “What? Abreak-in?”

“Not long after you disappeared, I did, too. I placed a bug in the staff room next to where the party was, since I figured I could pretend I was drunk and lost if someone caught me in there. Thank God for that, because some alert must have gone out, and the party broke up. Several employees went to the room to gossip. From what I can tell, it was a high-roller repeat client whose room was broken into.” She pauses like whatever she’s going to say next is important, and I brace. “And the cameras went out for five minutes.”

“Like the fire,” I whisper, sitting on the arm of the couchbeside Rory, whatever buzz of the night had been washing away. “So it was planned?”

She shakes her head. “The cameras being down wasn’t scheduled this time.”

My eyes widen once more. “So someone did it intentionally?”

She shrugs. “I’m just going by what I’ve heard in the break room and in the pool house. They say the feed looped previous footage for five minutes during the break-in, so the security didn’t realize.”

“The employees are talking about it in the pool house?”

“Yeah, the maintenance crew was doing their night tasks and gossiping.”

Not for the first time, I’m grateful for Rory’s decision to put a bug in there.

“We need to put more in the break rooms,” I mumble, contemplatively. Rory nods, though we both know if it were that easy, we would just do it. When she broke into the security control room, we almost blew our cover by Rowan showing up. I was able to distract him, but it’s clear he knows something is going on, but hasn’t figured it out yet. For now, I’d like to keep it that way.

“The police scanners say nothing was taken from the room, but I can’t confirm or deny that.”

‘Nothing taken?” I ask, confused. “You said it was a high-roller client?”

“Yeah. Some tech bro with a lot of zeros behind his net worth.”

“There had to be at leastsomethingin there worth money. Why not take anything?”

She shrugs. “My guess is it’s just sabotage. Not them trying to do anything more than, in the grand scheme of things, hurt the reputation, the safety, and the trust in the organization.”

I nod because that makes sense, even if a part of me knows we’re missing something important. I just can’t see it yet.

“The cameras went out, and this time it wasn’t scheduled. It’s safe to assume, I would think, that it has to be someone in the security office who has something to do withthis?”

“I’d say either someone in security is our guy, or he has an accomplice. Why else would that be happening? Someone with skills and experience is the only one who could feasibly short the cameras like that. I’m not sureIcould do it just yet. It took me a full week to get into those feeds.”

“I want to get to know them a bit, and anyone who has access to that. Can we see it, and who went into that room in the past, say, forty-eight hours?”

“You mean besides me?” Rory asks with a laugh, and I return it, but still she nods. “Yes, I’m already running a search for it, as well as any coding I might be able to find that would lead to how it was shut off and then turned back on. I’m not sure if it was real-time or a scheduled loop.”