Page 89 of Stolen Kisses
Francesca, one of the bartenders offered to show me what to do, but I told her I was practically born to do this.
I waitressed a lot, but stock taking was a thing that came with the job specs.
In my experience lots of people loathed this part of the job. I on the other hand loved it.
It offered a sort of refuge. A place out of the way to think.
Thinking was what I was doing now.
Thinking about Elliot Granger.Again.
God … it was really on the tip of my tongue to tell Dante about him, but what I had said to him stood.
Be twenty percent sure.
With what I’d seen him do to Todd, that made me want to think it was him. It was speculation and assumption and I wasn’t going to put Dante in danger based on that.
I hated to admit it, but Christina kept a lot of secrets from me. Towards the end I just saw more and more of only what she wanted me to see.
Based on what she said when we had that little argument of ours, it confirmed what she thought of me, and what she must have thought of me the whole time. She might have said it in the heat of the moment, but she for damn sure meant it. I knew she had meant every word.
It didn’t however change how much I loved her.
While Dante was only telling me as much as he could, I wanted to help
I wanted to help in whatever way I could.
Deep down though I wanted to get the answer so I could shove Elliot Granger to the back of beyond if it really wasn’t him. Or, find out if it was.
This was a personal mission I wanted to fulfill. A quest for an answer.
I was many things, but I wasn’t a coward. My time with Franco was awful and I became my worst nightmare by staying in an abusive relationship. I became the coward. Some may call me that now for running and if they did I would tell them to go fuck themselves.
They could do just that because it was never cowardly to run away to protect yourself. It made all the more sense to do so if you had a child.
Staying would have been the coward’s way. It would have been foolish—deadly.
As for Elliot, I would never be the kind of woman to know he killed Christina and keep it to myself.
It already felt like some kind of damnation in keeping knowledge that he was one of her guys to myself. I just knew what would happen if I unleashed that and I was wrong. What I needed was that twenty percent of certainty.
It was Luc rubbing off on me. I had learned that from him, one of his rules on instinct. He’d always said if you could be twenty percent certain of something you could infer a further thirty percent to get you to fifty. It meant you could check something out based off instinct—gut instinct.
I believed in that and did so accordingly. I lived by it.
If I got any form of inkling in my efforts to help that Elliot was responsible I would tell Dante in a heartbeat.
The idea of his to go to his mother’s place and look at Christina’s stuff was a good one. All her stuff from my old place had gone there. It was all placed in Christina’s old room. Their mother left the room exactly the same as if Christina had never left to come live with me. When I’d first seen it, I wished then that she hadn’t. I wished I’d gone solo and just got the apartment for myself. Being on our own like that at nineteen was the perfect breeding ground for us to get up to all manner of things, none of it good. It was the perfect set up for her to stray off the path of life and end up where she was now.
I counted the beer on the shelf and ticked it off against the sheet I was given. I lifted my head to proceed to the next row that housed the wine when my eyes met the cold hard stare of the man in front of me.
My heart jumped into my throat and I screamed from the shock.
“Oh my God, you scared the shit out of me!” I gasped.
I took him for one of the staff, but as I looked at him properly I didn’t think he was. He had a rough and rugged look about him that no one who worked here would have sported. They all dressed trendy and looked the part. He looked like he’d just walked in off the streets. Tall with a hood that was down, he had greasy hair, a full beard and red blotchy eyes.
I turned to go, but someone from behind caught me. I screamed when I saw a muscular guy with a tattoo of a snake on his face.
