28 SAM
“It’s a lot to take in.” I stayed sitting on the floor, staring at the board we’d put together. Connor had placed my parents’ photo in the victims column.
“Tell me about it.” Connor sat down beside me.
“It’s a hell of a coincidence that our cases are connected,” I said, but Connor didn’t seem to agree.
“Actually, I think it’s more like a setup.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not in this apartment by accident, Sam.” He looked at me.
“I think they expected us to kill each other before they had to deal with us,” I said, deflated.
“Little did they know we’d become partners.”
“Do you think Bradan or Ammit killed my parents?” My question hung in the air.
Connor leaned his head back against the bed and took a deep breath.
“It’s too early to say.”
“I can’t believe this. This is ridiculously ironic,” I grumbled.
“Why?”
I pulled out my mother’s journal, flipped to the pages I’d read countless times, and began to read.
“Ammit is justice and punishment, a divine whisper transfigured into beast. Her breath carries the weight of broken promises, and her hunger is sated not by flesh, but by the ruin of the condemned. She is not the end—she is oblivion, dissolution, the abyss where not even shadows dare remember what once was.”
“Your mother wrote that?” Connor looked confused.
“I found it among her things a few months ago,” I told him. “But I always thought it was strange that she’d written something so poetic. So I bought that magnifying glass at a flea market to take a closer look and discovered it wasn’t her handwriting.”
“Maybe Cohen wrote it.”
“And why would my mother keep it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she liked it. It is poetic.”
“It’s creepy, Connor,” I countered.
“You’d been going through her things for four years and never seen it?” Connor asked suddenly.
“One thing I learned about my mother is that she was pretty obsessed with puzzles. When they found her suitcases, it took eight days to open them because she’d rigged the locks with some kind of trick.”
“So there could be more?”
“Who knows?” I shrugged. “Every day I feel like I know them less.”
“Maybe if I help you, we can find something useful for both of us.”
I thought about it. I didn’t know if I wanted to learn more about this story or if I preferred the version where they were good people.
“If you don’t want to... we’ll find another way.”
“It’s fine,” I replied. “But I’ll do it. While you figure out where that son of a bitch is hiding.”
“I found something!” I shouted as Connor set our dinner on the counter, trying to navigate around the empty coffee cups, Japanese food containers, and pizza boxes that had piled up over the past two days we’d spent reviewing everything.
“Good, because all I found was this Isis Maddox.”
“Cohen’s daughter?” I pulled the laptop toward me. “She lives in England?”
“According to what Gretta sent me this morning, she’s still paying the bills on an apartment in Oxford.” Connor handed me my Pad Thai. “And what do you have?”
“I finally cracked the mystery of the numbers,” I said confidently. “Though I stumbled into another one.”
The piece of paper we’d found in my mother’s book that day had a combination of letters and numbers that I’d assumed was from some lecture. But looking at it from a different angle, I was confident I’d found the solution.
“Let me see?” Connor took the notebook from my hand and read aloud. “‘The eyes tell the secret’? What does that mean?”
“I have no idea yet,” I huffed in frustration.
“Let’s eat and take a break.” Connor shoved a forkful into his mouth, then groaned as the flavors hit him.
“Told you you’d love it.” I had to gloat after we’d spent almost half an hour arguing about my food recommendations.
The days had been intense but ridiculously light since the two of us laid down our swords and shed our armor.
But no matter how incredible it was, my heart was never completely at peace. I spent all my time waiting for the happiness to end. Because it always does.