Page 85 of With Spite

“What?” I asked, thinking I hadn’t heard him correctly.

“Bernice’s birthday,” he repeated. “I thought I’d ask her if she wanted to go grab some lunch at Hopps.”

A tendril of guilt hit me.

She’d known that it was mine yesterday, and she’d still brought me a cupcake on her own birthday this morning.

Some stalker I was.

I didn’t even know when her birthday was.

“Shit,” I said as I stopped taking notes. “She didn’t tell me.”

His eyes sharpened. “Why would she need to tell you?” He paused. “And why was she meeting you here for her lunch break anyway?”

So I could fuck her brains out.

“I…” I trailed off when Bernice came through the door looking frazzled. “Mom’s dead!”

Creed and I both frowned, momentarily forgetting what we’d been talking about.

“What?” Creed asked.

“Our mother,” she repeated. “She’s dead.”

“What?” he asked. “How? Last I saw, she was smoking her life away and living off the government with several other men who were also living off the government.”

I snorted.

“Hux thinks that her disappearance was due to my serial killer,” Bernice offered up.

Creed’s head whipped around to stare at me. “He does?”

“I asked a couple of my friends to look into it,” I explained. “Wolf and Griffin. They’re out of the Uncertain field office.”

“Oh,” he said. “What makes you think that? She really is that fucked up. She could’ve just disappeared and it be her own fault.”

“This time, I don’t think that’s the case,” Bernice said as she handed her brother her phone. “Also, Hux and I are seeing each other.”

Creed ignored the phone and narrowed his eyes at her, then once again swung those eyes toward me.

They weren’t angry, but they weren’t happy either.

“That’s why I’m here on my lunch break,” she said. “Also, I ate a crap ton during random breaks all morning. I have no room for lunch. So, thank you, but no thank you. I’ll take a rain check on lunch plans. Where are my gloves?”

“Gloves?” Creed asked.

I pointed toward the drawer. “In there.”

She pulled out a pair of thick gloves that would protect her hands from the cold and a knife and slipped them on.

Then she turned to me. “Did you get me smaller disposable gloves?”

I pointed at the wall where I’d put the second package of small gloves just an hour ago.

She beamed. “Now, tell me where you want me! I have an hour.”

Creed murmured something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like, ‘What the fuck?’