Chapter 4 – Corvus #2
Becca moved closer to my side. I couldn’t hear her breathing anymore as I opened the other door, twisting the knob with two fingers before shoving it the rest of the way open.
I already knew what I’d find, but that didn’t make it any easier to swallow.
“Fuck,” I cursed, giving the room a quick once over before lowering my gun.
Behind me, Becca vomited on the floor, gripping on to my arm to keep herself from falling over.
I waited until she was finished and returned to standing.
The reek of her corpse was nearly enough to make me follow Becca’s lead, but I’d smelled worse. Seen worse.
Though that didn’t mean the gruesome picture of violence in front of us didn’t unsettle the absolute fuck out of me.
Julia sat in the wooden chair in front of her wooden desk by the curtained window. Her head bent over a desk covered in scattered blank note paper. Motionless.
Her skin was tinted in shades of red and green, slipping in places where it should’ve been sedentary. But it wasn’t the disgust of her corpse itself that made my stomach squeeze. It was the objects sticking out of her flesh. Hanging out now that time had worn her body down.
The sharp ends of pencils and pens and little silver bits I thought might’ve been paper clips.
A line of what looked like staples ran down the back of one of her arms.
But the piece de resistance, the cause of her death, appeared to be the cord from the ancient landline phone wrapped threefold around her thin neck, the skin bloated now around the tight beige coiled line.
“Oh my god, I just dumped my DNA all over this crime scene,” Becca said, still trying to catch her breath from retching so hard.
“Don’t worry about it,” I told her, moving deeper into the small office space. “I’ll be sending a clean up crew to take care of this. Cops won’t touch it.”
I noticed the safe to the side of the desk, open, papers spilling out. All Julia’s notes on the kids who called. Meticulously taken by hand in black ink, areas highlighted, circled and underlined.
I nudged the safe closed with my foot and found blood on the dial.
Whoever did this forced her to open it.
I leaned over Julia, pressing my shirt harder into my mouth and nose to find the cord of the landline phone had been ripped from the wall.
Her cell phone was left on the desk. I tapped the screen, but it was dead. I picked it up and slipped it into my jacket’s inner pocket, hoping there was something, anything on it that might lead us to the person responsible for this.
Maybe she’d started to type out a message to one of us. Or left a voice memo. Recorded the attack. Something .
Julia was smart, but was she that smart? Was she able to act that fast or had whoever did this snuck up on her?
My hand hovered over Julia’s shoulder. I couldn’t bring myself to touch her.
I let the hollow sadness of her loss fill me, but only for a second. She deserved for someone to grieve for her. She was only twenty-six and she had no family left that cared for her.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to her. “I’ll find the person who did this and I’ll make them pay.”
I clenched my hand into a fist and lowered it.
“Make yourself useful,” I told Becca. “Grab all those notes from the safe. Whoever did this will have taken the notes she had on them to avoid being caught.”
“What?”
I forgot Becca didn’t know about our humanitarian project.
There was a lot she didn’t know.
Even more she shouldn’t.
If she knew what was good for her, she would get the fuck out of dodge the instant Ava Jade came back. Maybe her friend could convince her to.
When I didn’t answer her, she bent to her knees and began scraping the papers together, keeping as much of a distance from Julia’s corpse as she could.
Once she had them all in a neat stack, she rose to her feet shakily and tucked them under her arm.
I checked the rest of the room for any other evidence, but my gaze kept falling back on Julia.
Something about her death, the nature of it, didn’t sit right with me.
The assholes we visited vengeance on in Thorn Valley didn’t seem capable of it.
They were drunks. Assholes. And one in maybe every fifty was truly unhinged, but all of those were dead.
Whoever did this appeared to be playing with her. Fuck, they turned her into a human fucking pin cushion. Sickly, it reminded me of something Rook could’ve done, though he never would’ve served this level of pain on an innocent person.
On a monster, sure.
But not to a girl like Julia.
Not on purpose.
And this was very fucking purposeful.
There was something here, and I was missing it.
“Corv,” Becca said, gagging again. “Can we go?”
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
My brows furrowed at the rough scrape in the dark wood desk beneath a sheet of the note paper next to Julia’s head.
I pushed the sheet of paper out of the way and found the carved line in the wood had a curve to it.
Quickly, I began to tear the sheets of paper from the surface of the desk, revealing jagged lettering carved into its surface.
“Sorry, Julia,” I uttered, lifting her heavy head off the desk to hang back in her chair. A smear of her putrefied remains clung to the pages, gluing them to the surface of the desk, and I had to scrape them free, swallowing the taste of bile as it rose up the back of my throat.
I swiped what remained from the desk with my forearm and stood back to read the message left for me.
No, not for me.
For us .
No more carrion for the Crows
Below the hastily scratched in text were smaller letters. A signature.
I roared, rage singing in my veins, exploding in my eyes, tinting my vision red as I flipped the desk and spun, storming out of the office and through the kitchen, back to the front door. To the air I needed to get a hold on myself.
My fingers curled around the wooden banister, flexing the old wood to the point of snapping as I pushed the rage down. Swallowed it back.
Controlled it.
Control it .
“C-Corvus?” Becca hedged, hovering in the apartment. “What did it say?”
I whirled on her, taking the papers from under her arm, making her yelp as I threw them back into the apartment. “We don’t need those,” I seethed. “I know who did this.”