The Cyber Twins novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Jillian's Door

Nico's POV

I told my father a lie, and I slept better than I had in a month.

At seven the next morning I went to Jillian's second apartment alone.

She called it her office.

The doorman knew me and handed over the spare key without a question, because I was the man who paid her rent.

I stood in the hall with the key in my hand and thought of her at my mother's funeral.

Then I opened the door.

It was neat and cold, with one desk, one chair and a wall of dark monitors.

I did not touch the monitors.

Jillian would have rigged them, and I had taught her how.

I opened the bottom drawer instead.

Under a stack of takeout menus lay a cheap black phone and four fat envelopes with a rubber band around them.

I opened the top envelope.

Sixty thousand dollars, in hundreds, the same figure as the last line on the page Gia had brought me.

I stood there a long time holding it.

I had wanted Wynne to be wrong.

I had wanted it so badly that I had told her to her face that Crowe was playing us, and I had been the fool.

I photographed the drawer, the phone and the envelopes.

Then I put every one of them back exactly as I found them.

If I took the money, she would run to Crowe before dark.

If I left it, she would keep reaching for him.

On the way out I ran my thumb along the doorframe, the way my father taught me to check a room, and found the hair she always left in the hinge.

She never lifted it.

She never thought anybody would look.

I called the one man on my payroll who still owed me a favor, an old shipping clerk with a bad leg and a good memory.

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