The Woman with the Wallet (Costa Family #10)

Chapter Fifteen

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Miko

“Goddamn it, Max,” I growled when I heard her footsteps running up behind me.

“You’re wasting precious time if you try to argue with me on this,” she reasoned.

I hated that she was right.

Still, I stood there, struggling with my drive to defend her and the urge to get answers to what was going on with the diamonds.

I’d been calling Henry, the IT guy, endlessly since I realized someone who’d known about the diamonds had stolen them. It had been radio silence.

Until the call in the hotel room.

He had the worst fucking timing in the world.

I mean, Max had been all soft and sweet and trembling beneath me. I’d wanted to spend hours exploring her with my fingers, with my mouth, with other parts of me.

One taste wasn’t nearly enough.

But then the fucking call.

I wasn’t an idiot, either. Everything about Max was cold and guarded again. It didn’t take much thought to conclude she was glad for this interruption because it allowed her to put her walls back up and pretend she hadn’t been rocking against my mouth, whimpering and moaning, just half an hour before.

The longer we had to focus on things outside of the two of us and what was clearly growing between us, the more she would push me away, pretend there was nothing going on.

It couldn’t be helped, though.

This could literally be life or death.

That was another reason I wanted Max to keep her ass in the car. The last thing I wanted was for her to be in danger yet again. Even if, objectively, I knew she was a woman who was used to a certain amount of danger.

It was the door swinging open, a food delivery guy making his way back out, that finally spurred me into motion.

I moved inside with Max right at my heels.

Henry lived on the top floor at the back of the building, so Max and I took the elevator before running down the hallway toward the apartment in question.

I only slowed when I saw the door cracked open. Seeming to sense it at the same time, Max grabbed a handful of my jacket, a silent instruction to take notice.

I reached for my gun before moving into the doorway, pushing the door open with my shoulder before moving inside.

I wanted Max to stay in the hall, at least until I cleared the place. But there was no way to tell her that. So I could feel her behind me as soon as I took a step into the apartment.

“Fuck,” I hissed as my gaze landed on the man sitting in his ergonomic chair in front of a long desk full of screens. A fucking charging cord wrapped around his neck.

“What… oh, God,” Max said, trying to rush forward.

I grabbed her, pushing her back behind me as I carefully stepped around the space, making sure we were alone.

“Should we do CPR?” Max asked when we moved back into the living room.

“Wouldn’t do any good,” I said, looking at Henry with something akin to grief growing in me. If not for me, this guy wouldn’t be dead. He’d likely be playing his little shooter games on his gaming console, not strangled to death by… someone. “He’s dead. Was likely dead before we even got out of the hotel parking lot.”

“Don’t,” Max said when my hand immediately moved out, wanting to press his eyelids closed. “Here,” she added, rummaging around in the bag she had strapped at the center of her chest and coming back with… a tube of glue? “Give me your hands,” she demanded.

I did, watching as she held each of my hands in turn and covered my fingertips with the glue. “Okay, there. Now you can touch anything you want,” she told me as she carefully coated each of her fingers as well.

“Just carry that shit around, do you?”

“You never know when you might need to obscure your fingerprints,” Max reasoned as I reached out to slide Henry’s lids closed, saying a silent prayer, with no small bit of regret, before looking around.

“We looking for clues?” she asked, reaching to pull her hood up over her head. “What? Don’t want to leave any hair DNA at a murder scene,” she explained.

There would be time at another point to be really impressed by her ingenuity. But there was no telling if neighbors heard a struggle and called the cops; we were short on time.

So I moved through the apartment, looking for my wallet, for the diamonds, for any sign of what the fuck had happened with this job that had been so perfectly fucking planned.

The two times I’d been inside this apartment, I’d never set foot outside of the common area that served as Henry’s office more so than a living or dining space.

Unlike Zeno’s place, Henry liked things neat. Almost to an extreme degree. He had a collection of those cars you can build stacked on shelves around the room, each one of them completely free of dust. The condiments in the fridge were even organized in alphabetical order, with all of the labels facing out.

His bedroom was similar.

“He has fourteen pairs of… everything,” Max observed. “Socks, underwear, pajamas, clothes, everything. All identical. Had ,” she corrected, eyes going sad.

“Yeah, he was a creature of habit,” I agreed. It had taken a lot of convincing to get him agree to work on the diamond heist. The only reason he’d done it was because he had some ‘cutting edge’ project he was working on that he needed funding for.

“So, where’s his roommate?” Max asked, snapping me out of my dark thoughts.

Turning, I found her standing in the doorway to the other bedroom.

“I… have no idea,” I said, suddenly realizing there was a lot about Henry I didn’t know.

I followed Max into the next bedroom, nearly tripping over a pair of kicked-off shoes in the process.

“Whoever his roommate is, he’s a slob. And that’s coming from someone who isn’t exactly a neat freak,” Max said, kicking a half-full box of cheddar cheese crackers out of her way. “See anything weird here?” she asked.

“The lack of cockroaches in this mess?” I said. “What are you seeing?”

“What’s missing,” she said.

“What is missing?”

“Laptop, phone, TV, charging cords, half the clothes in the closet… it’s like he took everything that he really needed and just left the mess. Why?”

“Lazy?”

“Maybe,” she agreed. “Or maybe he was trying to make it seem like he wasn’t cutting and running.”

“We need to figure out who the fuck the roommate is. Was. Whatever.”

I flipped through all of the carefully organized paperwork in the common area, and Henry’s rooms, but everything from the rent to all of the utilities was in Henry’s name.

“Anything in here?” I asked, circling back to Max in the other guy’s sty of a room.

“Nothing personal, no. He took his whole identity with him. Not a single piece of mail.”

“Fuck,” I growled, exhaling hard.

“We need to get moving,” Max said. “The superglue will wear off. Neighbors might hear us moving around. It’s not good.”

She was clearly more practiced in the art of sneaking in and out of places. So as much as I wanted to hang around and go over this place with a fine-tooth comb, I had to trust her instincts and expertise.

So we both made our way back out into the common room, where Max stopped, staring at Henry’s body.

“Come on,” I said, my voice softer as I wrapped an arm around her lower back and led her back out of the apartment after checking that no one was in the hall.

It wasn’t until we were back in the car that we spoke again.

“Was that your first dead body?” I asked.

“No,” Max said, peeling at her fingertips to get the glue off. “God, no. I’ve seen… so many bodies.”

“On the job?”

“On the streets. New York winters can be brutal, merciless. Then there was, you know, starving. Overdosing. Came across someone stabbed to death in an alley the second week I was on the streets. I’ve seen more bodies than anyone should.” She paused. “Were you close with Henry?”

“No. I mean… no. We talked several times, trying to iron out all the details for the job. But that’s the extent of it. I didn’t want any kind of personal connection. This was work. Not to sound like a dick.”

“I get it,” she said. “Still, this is a lot. You basically heard everything leading up to his murder.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, exhaling hard as I pressed my head back on the rest for a second.

“Did you hear anything? Voices? Snippets of conversation?”

“It was quick. It rang for a while. I think he was about to hang up. Maybe call the cops instead. But then he heard me and he just… he whispered that ‘he’s here.’”

“But didn’t say who ‘he’ was.”

“No,” I said, sighing.

“What about his social media?” Max asked.

“Henry didn’t believe in social media. Said it made people too easy to track down, gave away too many details without you even realizing it. He didn’t have any. Save for his gaming accounts, I guess.”

“We should have taken his phone,” Max said, shaking her head.

“I didn’t see it,” I said, thinking of his neat desk, the rows of screens and their different keyboards.

“What about that guy who found me?” Max asked.

“What about him?”

“Use him to find this guy. I mean, I’m assuming you tracked me down because of facial recognition software. Which is easier than tracking down someone whose name we don’t even know. But he can figure out Henry’s gaming history, right? That’s all stored somewhere. And maybe his text history or—I don’t know—something. That’s his job, right?”

Right.

Zeno was really my only choice, even if I didn’t love the idea of hiring someone in the Family to work on a job I was hiding from the family. That said, honestly, Zeno didn’t seem like someone who cared enough to snitch. He didn’t come across as cutthroat or ambitious. Hell, maybe he didn’t even want to be a capo. I could hire him when I got the position. Set him up for life as a thank-you for working with me discreetly on this.

“That’s a good plan,” I agreed.

“How about we go back to the warehouse now?” she asked.

“Why?”

“We can wait to watch the overnight crew leave instead of come into work. That way, we can just head back to the city early in the morning. Get in touch with your hacker guy. Get him working on this. Time is slipping away. This guy is clearly cleaning up loose ends. How long until the diamonds are gone for good?”

I couldn’t argue with that logic.

There were still several hours before sunrise, but we made our way over to the warehouse anyway, parking closer to the lot so we could see easily even in the dark.

“You have to turn the car off,” Max said. “We could get away with it in the daytime when anyone could be idling in their car for any number of reasons. Not in the middle of the night.”

I hated that she was right about that.

I didn’t like the idea of her being cold. Even if, objectively, she would have a better tolerance for it than I would, given her past history with it.

“Don’t bother,” she added when I tried to blast the heat at full tilt for a moment. “It will chill immediately. Why waste the gas?”

“Alright,” I said, cutting the engine.

“If you want to try to catch a few hours, go ahead. I’m good. I had some sleep,” she added. “And I’m used to being up all night. Besides, you shouldn’t be driving after being awake for more than twenty-four hours.”

“I’m fine.”

“Now who’s being a pain in the ass? There’s no one to impress here with being some sleepless zombie. Get some rest.”

I didn’t plan to.

But not long after my head rested against the window, I knocked the fuck out.

__

“Miko,” a voice called, toying with the edges of consciousness. But I was having dreams about peeling off Max’s clothes and watching her move to straddle me, riding me hard and fast, tits bouncing, eyes liquid heat, lips curling around my name as she came. “Miko, wake up,” the voice tried again.

“No,” I grumbled, trying to cling to the dream, but it was already evaporating right before my eyes.

“Dude, wake the fuck up,” Max demanded, hand suddenly slapping my thigh.

But she must have been reaching out without actually looking because her hand landed a lot higher than I imagined she intended. Her fingers were just an inch or so from my still-straining cock.

When my eyes shot open, though, I saw how she’d managed the miscalculation. Max was sitting at the edge of her seat, half-leaning over the dashboard to see, with just the flickering overhead streetlight to go by, as the front door opened and several men walked out.

She was so distracted that she didn’t even remove her hand from where it was placed. I just barely managed to stop myself from shifting, a move that would make my cock press against the side of her hand.

This was not the place and time.

Did I plan on getting more of her? Oh, fuck yeah. But when not only the diamonds were at risk, but also lives, I figured this wasn’t a good idea. No matter how much I was aching for it, no matter how much I could swear I still felt her taste on my tongue, could hear her moans in my ears.

I forced my gaze out the windshield, watching the men, then looking over at Max to gauge her reaction.

“No,” she said when, after ten minutes, it seemed like no one else was going to emerge. “I mean, it was stupid to think he’d still be here, right? If he killed Henry.”

“I wanted to check just in case there was someone else involved. If one guy was in charge of getting the diamonds and someone else taking out Henry.”

“You still have to talk to the guy who handled the diamonds, though, right?” she asked, squinting at the car that pulled out of the lot.

“He’s not here,” I said. He hadn’t walked in earlier, either. I figured maybe he had a day off. But now I had to track down his ass too.

“What? Then what the fuck are we doing—“ she started, but cut off as she started to turn back, realizing she was still holding my thigh.

Her hand automatically jerked.

And the inevitable happened.

The side of her hand grazed against my cock.

I expected, with her guards fully back in place, that she would snatch her hand away, pretend it didn’t happen, that she didn’t even notice.

I was shocked to watch her eyes go hot, her lips fall open, and a little whimper escape her.

I knew this still wasn’t the fucking time. I had a man to track down. Diamonds on the loose. Zeno to get a hold of.

But, fuck, there was no reasoning with my desire right then.

Encouraged by her reaction, I went ahead and let myself shift in my seat, making my cock not only glide against her hand, but slip under it. The touch of her palm over the head—even through the layers of clothes—was enough to make a shaking exhale escape me.

That little sound moved through her again as she shifted in her seat, making her press her thighs together to ease the ache.

Gaze on hers, I rocked my hips, making my cock slide across her hand again.

She watched me as her hand started to move, cupped, rubbed. Then, frustrated by the barrier, she worked with my button and zipper as I turned over the car, not wanting it to get steamed up as my breathing got faster, more shallow.

Max’s hand was bold, going right into my underwear to close her hand around my hard length, stroking it as she rocked a bit in her seat, lost in her own desire.

And, fuck, if the idea of her getting so hot just touching me didn’t have my own need intensifying.

Max’s fingers caught the hot liquid, teasing it around the head for a second.

Then, suddenly, she was shifting down and sucking me into her mouth before I could even fucking brace for it.

The suck of her warm, needy mouth around me had my hips bucking up, forcing my cock deeper into her mouth as she lowered down, making it hit against the back of her throat.

Her throat clenched in a silent gasp, but a low moan escaped her, vibrating against my cock.

“Fuck,” I groaned, gathering her hair as she started to work me. Bold and reckless, sucking me hard and fast, taking me deep, her fingers moving down to tease and squeeze my balls as she drove me mercilessly toward the edge.

Part of me wanted to fist her hair and drag her up by it, demand she slip out of her pants and panties, then pull her onto my lap, feel myself slip deep inside her in one stroke.

The other part was loving how much she seemed to be enjoying going down on me. The same way I’d enjoyed doing the same for her.

So I let her, sitting back, allowing the desire to overtake me. “Fuck, sugar,” I groaned as she worked me faster still, moving her head in little twisting motions as she took me. “You’re so good at that.”

She made another of those little moans around me, liking the praise.

But before I could give her any more, she had me right there at the edge. “Max, I’m—“ I started, breath panting, thinking of the glovebox, of the cleanup.

Max was having none of it, though.

Instead, she sucked me deep enough that when I came, it was right down her throat.

I swear my fucking vision went white at the intensity as a hushed curse escaped me and Max moaned again.

She waited until I was fully spent before moving away, turning her face away as I tucked my cock back away and redid my pants.

“We, ah, we need to find that other guy,” she said, head turned to look out her side window.

Was she embarrassed by her enthusiasm?

That shit wasn’t going to stand.

She was also right, though. Time was of the essence.

But, hey, I’d always been a good multitasker.

So I shifted the car into drive and started to move, holding the wheel with one hand as my other moved out, slipped under the waistband of her pants.

“What are you doing?” she asked, but her airy voice betrayed her need.

“Be a good girl and let me touch your sweet pussy again,” I said, glancing over to watch the internal battle play across her face. The part of her that wanted to be offended by being called a good girl. And the part that loved it.

It was the latter that won.

Mostly.

“You’re driving,” she said, but her head was back against the rest, her breath coming fast and shallow.

“And, yet, I can still do this,” I said, my hand going into her panties, palm against her clit, and two fingers slipping inside of her.

Her moan filled the silent car as her pussy tightened around my fingers, begging for more.

I was too happy to give, happy for the distraction as we drove down the dead streets. Too late for the night shift, too early for the morning. The world felt like ours alone as my fingers fucked her, as she rocked herself against my palm, her moans getting louder and louder with each passing second.

Until, with the tensing of her whole body, she came, her walls clutching around my fingers over and over before the orgasm finally let go of her.

Finished, I slid my fingers out of her as I pulled into a parking spot. Then, waiting for her gaze to find mine, I slipped my fingers into my mouth, her sweet taste exploding across my taste buds once again.

Then, because I knew she would quickly start to try to put her guards back up, I cut the engine.

“It’s no use telling you to stay here. So, just stay behind me,” I told her as I climbed out and reached for my gun.

Unlike Henry, Chuck lived in a little house rental on a street full of similar ones. Capes and craftsman homes with postage-stamp-sized front yards.

Lots of people to look out, to see us.

Seeming to think the same thing at the same time, Max yanked up her hood as I suddenly became thankful that I never drove out on a job with the real plates on my car.

If someone saw us, it was dark. The best they would get was a tall man in a suit with dark hair and a slight woman. And a black SUV with the wrong plates.

Max grabbed my arm before I reached for the door, flashing her shiny fingertips at me. Sometime on the walk up the tiny path, she’d covered her fingertips with superglue again.

She reached around me for the knob, but it didn’t budge.

Before I could go back to the car for my own, Max produced a fucking lock pick kit from that bag of hers and got to work.

Admittedly, she was a fuckuva lot faster at it than I would have been.

She stood, put the kit away, then moved to my side, but just a half a step behind.

“Ready?” I asked, not sure if I was, in fact, ready to possibly find another body.

But there was no going back now.

“Yep,” she whispered as I pushed open the door.