“Lots of bread, too.”
Laz tapped the tip of her nose. “Done.”
After catching a restaurant just before closing, they found themselves flopped on Laz’s apartment floor, stealing bites of each other’s soup and laughing over stories from the evening.
When Rose fell asleep against Dav’s shoulder, her legs draped over Laz’s lap and Dav snoring softly, he knew that this was how it was always meant to be. The three of them.
This was love.
18
PROFITS, MARGINS, AND CUSTARDS
Lazerath
Lazerath was wrong.
Profits and margins and costs weren’t boring. They were fascinating.
And fuckingconfusing.
He was the first to admit that math was not his strong suit, but he also wasn’t completely incompetent. He knew that one plus one equaled two, this treat sold at this price, and once costs were factored in, there was a thing called profit. If he just viewed all of the items as their profit, the number at the end of the day would look like this.
But one plus one wasn’t really making two, at least in their books.
Davarox was brilliant, that was no question, butsometimes the math wasn’t mathing the way Laz thought it should.
He’d noticed it the other day when he’d secretly pulled the ledger out to study and surprise Dav and Rose the next time they used fancy money words around him. Things like one and one were making threes and fours. Costs on some columns decreased here and there, tips seemed larger than what Laz remembered collecting, and profits were more impressive than their sales for the day.
Lazerath had attributed the discrepancies to his own limitations before, but today was different. Today, Rose was off giving her proposal to Argeth with the new evidence she’d gathered from Elliran the day before. He’d started a few loaves of bread to keep himself busy when really he wanted to sprint into Argeth’s office and listen to her brilliance. He’d tried mopping the floors, but a few customers complained when he tried to clean under tables they were currently occupying. But there was a midafternoon lull, and the sweet buns were cooling before he could put them in the display case, and then he was thinking of new sprinkle patterns for cookies when the idea had struck.
So, here he sat, staring at the ledger and thinking aboutpatterns.
About the numbers changing on the fourth and seventh days of the week consistently.
About Dav’s perfect handwriting sometimes looking like a three had been turned into an eight when the math said it should have been a one.
About that other day, where the numbers were more obviously not adding up correctly, and Dav had tried to convince Lazerath that their tips had been well over what they earned on a busy day.
His head hurt. And maybe his heart. Because when he looked farther back, the pattern continued. Months. Years. And Laz could recall the conversations, how there were times Davarox was incredibly nervous or gave excuses to stay longer and sort the ingredients or study the ledger or decline invitations to go out. Odd, secretive dismissals of what he’d done the night before.
What was this feeling in Lazerath’s chest? Not the sads. A little bit of fear. The hurts? Why did it feel so weird?
If his math was correct, which it might not have been, profits for Lovable Loaf shouldn’t have been this high. In fact, they shouldn’t have still been running at all. And it wasn’t just the higher fees that Laz hadn’t noticed in the contracts. At the end of every line, one thing had become clear.
Davarox was padding their books.
But the money wasn’t made up or missing, like Rosalind had noticed in her proposals. This money actually existed, which meant Dav was finding that coin somewhere.
Or producing it himself.
Laz rubbed at the ache starting in his chest. Where was this money coming from? What was Dav doing that he felt he needed to sneak it into their books? Why hadn’t he told Lazerath the truth about theirfailing bakery?
Just when he’d gathered the courage to call Davarox out from the back and confront him over the discrepancies, the bell over the door chimed.
All worries left Laz’s body as he looked up and found a familiar face.
“Sev!”
