Rivers Brothers Series Boxed Set

Chapter One

SAVEA

I forgot the lettuce.

My eyes sprang open as my body knifed up in bed, the light sheets pooling around my waist as I stared blindly at the blackness of my room.

"Crap," I hissed, letting out a sigh.

On the dresser across from me, neon red numbers let me know it was five after ten. Reaching up, I rubbed my scratchy, swollen eyes that were adamantly objecting to the forty minutes of sleep I had gotten after a grueling fifteen-hour shift at work.

But I'd forgotten the lettuce.

My legs swung off the side of the bed, soles touching down on the wide-plank hardwood floor. Scratchy and prone to blessing bare feet with splinters, it was in desperate need of sanding and refinishing.

It was on my list.

My list that was as long as my leg.

Someday, I would get to it all.

A steady drip, drip, drip met my ears as I rolled my neck, working out a crick.

The sky had been pelting us with unyielding sheets of rain for two and a half days. The sparse roof tiles and cracked tar allowed water to seep down through the ceiling.

Sliding my feet into slippers, I made my way across the room, finding a bucket in the closet—kept there for this very reason. I stuck it under the leak, making a mental note to check the ceiling for mold when I got back.

The roof, I decided, was high on the priority list.

But after the lettuce.

I jumped into jeans, slipped my feet into clogs, grabbed my purse, and made my way out of the front door, body hunched forward against the cold of the rain.

Maybe I should have just stayed home in bed, let it slide just this once. It wasn't a big deal in the grand picture of it all.

The hamsters and guinea pigs and chinchillas and various other small animals could make do without their lettuce. They wouldn't die. They wouldn't even go hungry. They did have the pelleted food and timothy hay to hold them over.

Most people would just give them the lettuce in the morning when they showed up to open the store.

But hamsters and guinea pigs and chinchillas and most small animals were nocturnal. They ate most of their food at night. The lettuce would sit and wilt if I put it in when I got there after too little sleep in the morning.

As my useless windshield wipers smeared water across my line of vision, I cursed myself for driving all the way home instead of crashing on the couch or in the guest room of one of my friends, like I usually did on nights when I would close and then open the next morning.

My friends—and my job—were situated right in the center of Navesink Bank. My little place was twenty minutes out in a rural nowhere land that I loved deeply but spent very little time at since my boss was dragging his feet about hiring new help, so I was pulling doubles most days of the week.

I probably should have just set up a foldaway bed in the break room at this rate, I decided as I parked across the street from the strip of storefronts.

All had low, brown, slanted roofs, brown brick fronts, and two giant window panes on either side of their glass front doors.

Nothing had changed on this side street of town in at least two decades, I'd swear.

The businesses that were still around were the same mom-and-pop shops that had been there when I was a kid: a gold buying store; a hairdresser that featured women who went to cosmetology school in the eighties—and refused to learn any new techniques since—where only women stuck in a time warp of Aqua Net and teasing went for trims, an antique shop, and, of course, Howie's Pets.

Where I worked.

Where I had been hired by Howie himself back before he passed, handing over the reins to his son Harold.

The ever-present Howie was replaced by the often-absent Harry who, while he was knowledgeable about all the animals and seemed to care about them, did not, in any way, shape, or form, enjoy the business end of running a pet store.

"Come on," I grumbled, the key sticking, refusing to turn until the third try. WD-40, I reminded myself. I needed to grab some and deal with the situation once and for all.

The overhead lights were off in the front where the register was situated to the right, and to the left where dog and cat food were stacked in rows. But the lights on top of the fish tanks along the back wall were set to moonlight mode, as were the lights above the bird enclosures.

In the center of the store, where all the tanks for the small animals were arranged, the lights over their cages were set to low light, giving them just enough to be able to find their way around their enclosures.

Swiping a long, dark strand of wet hair out of my face, I felt my lips curl up in a smile at seeing half a dozen animals getting their exercise on in their wheels.

It was a sad day when rodents were more dedicated to their physical fitness than I was, I decided as I made my way into the break room, dipping into the refrigerator to grab the pre-cut lettuce I had stored in a plastic container.

Then again, I maintained my figure by never having time to take a break for breakfast or lunch, surviving on coffee and a couple of bites of granola bars I kept stashed under the register.

"It's your lucky day, babies," I told them as I found a bag of grapes I had missed earlier, taking it out with the lettuce to place in bowls.

Hamsters, mice, rats, gerbils, and chinchillas had very little reaction to new fresh food, save for running over and chowing down and—in the hamsters' case—stuffing giant bits into their cheeks for later.

But the guinea pigs, oh, those fun little devils wheeped and squealed at seeing me.

Well, I mean, they were probably happier about the food, but a girl would take whatever she could get.

"Hey, buddy," I said, rubbing the cowlicked back of one of the tricolored Abyssinians—always a favorite of the little kids who loved the swirls. "I will be back in a few hours, okay? Hold down the fort for..."

My words fell away at a low but undeniable sound coming from the back room.

Harry and I were the only ones with keys.

And I knew I had locked up after walking around to make sure the store was empty. It was a rote routine I had been doing since my after-school shifts when I was seventeen. It wasn't like I could have carelessly forgotten to lock the back door.

My heart hammered in my chest, pulse points syncing up in unison at the side of my throat and wrists.

No.

There was no need to panic.

I'd been through this before.

Sometimes, some of the animals staying with us for boarding were sharper than we had given them credit for, broke out of their cages, and had a smorgasbord feasting on all the dry pet food stored in the back.

We had two cats, a handful of hamsters and guinea pigs, and three birds boarding with us.

The cats or the ruby macaw could have definitely been at the root of the noises, being big enough to get into all kinds of trouble.

Hell, the cats could have broken free and started trying to get into the bird cages.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, I set down the plastic container on top of the chinchilla cage and made my way down past the row of reptiles, suppressing a shiver at the tarantula standing at the front of her enclosure with her freaky, unnecessary eight eyes.

Sure, I had been changing cages for those creatures from hell for well over a decade. But that didn't mean I liked it. Or got used to it. Or didn't think their butt ropes and belly spiked engage-able weapons weren't creepy as hell.

"Quit looking at me, Satan Spawn," I told her as I moved past to the much less freaky baby iguanas who would one day need a tank almost as big as my bathroom at home.

Finding my key again, I pressed it into the keyhole for the back storage room where we boarded any animal that needed a place to stay for up to a month at a time, in a makeshift room Howie had made out of plexiglass sheets and cinder blocks.

Whereas the front of the building had numerous low light sources, the storage and boarding area was black to the point of night blindness.

Not wanting to upset them if they were, in fact, all in their cages and sleeping, I reached for my phone, hitting the side button to give me just enough light to make my way toward their boarding area, running it along the face of a Persian, a tabby, a bunch of small—but accounted for—rodents, a sun conure, a parakeet, and finally, a scarlet macaw.

Hm.

No one had jailbroken themselves.

Stray birds, possibly. That happened from time to time. When we got a delivery, having to leave the back doors open for an extended period of time, sometimes a stray bird—or even whole families—got inside. They could get startled, fly in the dark, hit something.

A niggling voice in the back of my head was whispering as I turned back out of the boarding room that I was being stupid, that I was coming up with more and more idiotic sources of the noise when every damn scary movie I had ever seen in my life had proven that any noise that could be an intruder, well, was.

But I was diligent.

The lock out front was engaged.

The locks on the back door—all three—had been checked by me just hours before.

Besides, what self-respecting thief would bypass the gold buying store and hit a pet store?

Surely they must have known by the worn linoleum floors with chewed up corners that Howie's was not—in any way shape or form—rolling in it.

While, sure, people could—and often did—spoil the heck out of their furry and feathered and scaled babies, the income we made just barely kept the bills paid and the payroll doled out. There wasn't a heck of a lot leftover.

I would know.

Since Harry didn't like the business end of things, I handled the books.

I was the one who pulled off magic tricks to be able to update the lighting or heating on the reptile tanks, work with a new, better rabbit breeder; found a few pennies to rub together to keep an endless stream of Milk Bones under the counter as complimentary gifts for four-legged visitors.

No self-respecting criminal would target this store.