Antony nodded. “I see.” He pulled off his glasses. Polished them on his shirt. Swept Lacey an assessing stare. “I see,” he repeated.
“I doubt it,” Dex muttered. “You don’t even have your damn glasses on.”
Antony slipped the glasses back into place. “Happy now?”
“I’m not going to be happy until I know who Heather was working with. Tell me his name.”
Antony went back to typing on the laptop. “It’s not that easy. I don’t just wave my hand or something and everything is revealed. I’m not a magician.” He kept typing. “This is the posting she was using on the Dark Web. If you look at it, you’ll see it’s full of mercenaries looking for jobs.”
Lacey leaned in closer so that she could view the screen.
“It’s all in code. Look…right here, where this guy is offering pest control services? He means he’s a hitman.”
Lacey’s eyebrows rose.
“And this one here?” He waved toward the screen. “Where it says the poster is looking for someone to do renovation work? It means he wants a building destroyed.”
“How do you know this?” She crept even closer to him.
“You smell really, really nice,” Antony murmured. “Like roses. I bet you like to buy that Midnight in the Rose Garden bath gel, don’t you?”
That was awfully specific. “Yes, I do.”
He went back to typing.
“What else do you know about me?” Lacey asked him quietly.
“You’re a great dancer.” He was frowning at the screen. Typing faster and faster. More boxes kept popping up. “You don’t drink coffee. You like hot chocolate. You dated that drummer Tim Wraith, but haven’t seen anyone else seriously since then so your surprise engagement to Dex here is—”
She’d been right about him. “You’re the one who investigated me.” Dex had mentioned Antony before. With everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, she’d let that important detail slip too far from her mind.
Antony’s fingers stopped typing.
Dex swore. “Antony, how many times do I have to tell you, you can’t multitask for shit?”
Antony glanced back at her. “I don’t like to think of it as me investigating you. I prefer to view it as recon work. Normal, you know, for when you’re checking out an operative.”
“Learning that I like hot chocolate is normal? Learning what kind of bath gel I use?” She doubted that was on the typical background check.
Antony coughed. A fake sound. “Dex wanted to know everything about you.” A pause. “Now I see why.”
Her attention lasered toward Dex. She glared. “You know everything about me. But I know nothing about you.”
“Absolutely not true.”
“Oh, really?” She advanced on him. Their bodies brushed. “Tell me what I know. Because I feel like—”
“You know I lost my mind when I thought you were the one lying broken on the floor. If you don’t know it, you should.” His voice vibrated with his rage. “You should know that in that moment, I couldn’t see anyone else. Couldn’t even breathe, not until I moved back the hair and realized it wasn’t you. In that moment, nothing mattered. When I thought you were gone, that someone had taken you from me, the whole world went dark. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. I was on the floor next to the body, and if that had been you, I—”
“Stop. Just stop right there!” Antony directed. Or, maybe he pleaded. “This seems like an extremely personal conversation, and, fun fact about me, I don’t like being involved in other people’s personal conversations. I especially don’t like being involved in your personal conversations, Dex. Knowing info about you will only come back to bite me in the ass.”
“Probably,” Dex agreed without even hesitating.
Lacey didn’t look at the other man. She couldn’t take her eyes off Dex. The confession he’s just given had sounded so real. So honest. Almost as if… “Watch it, Dex,” she heard herself chide, “or I’ll start to think you care.”
His gaze swirled with intensity. “I. Fucking. Do.”
Her lips parted.
“I should leave.” Antony leapt up. “I can work on this in another room. You two obviously need to hash out some private stuff here—”
Dex locked a hand around Antony’s shoulder and pushed him back down. “Lacey’s safety is my number one priority. I need you to find out who was working with Heather. She’s dead so it’s not like she can talk to me now. I thought Heather was about to roll and give me usable intel. But her partner—her boss, whatever