All Chapters of Mummies and their Badboys: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Final Viewing💦🫦😜The second message stayed on my phone overnight like a crack in the glass.Unknown: Nice cleanup with Hale. Professional. But he wasn’t the only one who received the original files. The private viewing isn’t over, Ms. Shaw. I’ll be in touch when I decide what the next piece is worth.Luca read it over my shoulder in the dark gallery after we had dressed. His jaw tightened once, then he reached past me and deleted it.“They’re bluffing,” he said. “Or they’re not. Either way we don’t wait for them to name a price.”“How do you suggest we find someone who only exists as a number?”“Hale.” He pulled on his jacket. “He was the delivery system. Someone gave him the files or paid him to shoot them. He’ll know who. And right now he’s scared enough to talk if we ask the right way.”We found Marcus Hale at a twenty-four-hour diner three blocks from the gallery, hunched over coffee he wasn’t drinking. When he saw us the color left his face. Luca slid into the booth across fro

Balcony Across the Glass💧💦😜The light in the opposite tower stayed on all night.I stood at the floor-to-ceiling glass in a clean robe, arms crossed, watching that single warm square of light forty-two stories up and one street over. Diego had left at 3:40 a.m. after we wiped down the marble and I signed a fake work order for “emergency climate-control diagnostics.” He had kissed me once at the elevator, hard and claiming, and told me not to open the balcony door until we had a plan.The message was still on my phone.Unknown: Beautiful form against the marble. The way you took him twice was especially clear from the reflection in the glass. Revoke Richard’s card if you want. It won’t matter. I already have copies of the building access logs and forty minutes of video from the exterior camera across the street. Leave the balcony door unlocked tomorrow night. Or the board, the investors, and Richard Lang all get the show.I revoked Richard’s card at 6:12 a.m. through the building ma

After-Hours on the Bay💧🫦💦He had me on my back across the metal workbench, one of my legs hooked over his shoulder, the other braced against the toolbox for leverage.“Still so fucking wet,” Cole muttered, driving into me with deep, steady strokes that made the tools on the pegboard rattle. “Proper lady brings her car in for a brake job and ends up taking dick on the bench like she was made for it.”I moaned, head tipped back against a folded shop towel, fingers scrabbling at the edge of the scarred metal. The garage was empty. The big bay doors were down. A single fluorescent light hummed above us, casting hard shadows across Cole’s bare shoulders and the dense black ink that ran from his left wrist up under the rolled sleeve of his coveralls. Twenty-five. Ex-con. The only mechanic at Miller’s Auto who stayed past nine without complaining. My car, the sleek black sedan my late husband had bought me two years before he died, sat up on the lift behind us like a silent witness.“Hard

Nine P.M. Deadline🫦💧💦The photo from the bedroom window was still on my phone when the sun came up.Cole had not slept. He sat in the kitchen with coffee he barely touched, the USB drive from the shop camera between us on the table, and the share-transfer agreement open on my laptop like a loaded weapon. The deadline sat in bold at the bottom of the email: 9:00 p.m.“They’re not going to stop at one preview,” he said. “If you don’t sign, they release enough to damage you. If you do sign, they own the leverage forever.”“I know.”“Then we don’t play their game. We change the board.”I looked at him, the grease stains permanently worked into the skin around his nails, the scar through his eyebrow, the calm way he held himself like the next fight was just another engine that needed tearing down. “How?”“Richard’s the public face. The messages, the sedan, the ‘concerned’ emails to the board, they all run through him or someone feeding him. But the photo last night means someone was phy

Alley Door and Open Mics🫦💦💧The audio clip stayed on my phone all through the next day’s prep.I listened to it once in the office before service, volume low, door locked. My own moan. Ash’s voice rough against my ear. The screech of the prep table. Then I deleted it, recovered it, and deleted it again before forcing myself to leave it in the recently deleted folder like a live wire I couldn’t stop touching.Service that night was clean. Almost too clean. Ash ran the pass with surgical focus, calling tickets in a voice that never rose, never cracked. Every time our eyes met across the line something hot and wordless passed between us. I tasted sauces when I needed to. I corrected a cook’s plating once. I did not undercut him. The duck went out perfect the first time. Table twelve was not in the book.By 11:20 the dining room was empty. The dishwashers finished early. One by one the line cooks clocked out until only Ash and I remained under the single bulb over the pass. The alley d