Chapter 10
CHAPTER 10
Deacon
The screaming cut off abruptly, but the sudden silence was even more terrifying. My heart pounded in my ears. Nathan and I charged through the office door into the workshop.
So much chaos greeted us, it was impossible to tell what had happened. The studio staff and other designers, who I’d only just met, were running around in confusion like a swarm of bees whose hive had been kicked. Even their babbling sounded like the unintelligible buzz of insects.
I considered grabbing the nearest person and demanding to know what had happened, but Nathan shouldered past everyone into the center of the room. Two people lay on the floor. A designer I had met but couldn’t remember her name, and...
“Kiki!”
I rushed to my fallen friend, but Nathan held me back.
“Nathan? What the fuck? Let me go.”
“Wait.” His voice was too calm for the situation, almost intimate as he spoke directly into my ear. I was on the verge of shouting at him, when he picked up a nearby clothing hook and used it to prod a roll of fabric lying between the two women.
“Do you smell that?”
Startled by the unexpected question, I automatically took a deep breath through my nose.
“I don’t smell anything.”
“Pyrenic. It’s like arsenic, but... more.”
“What does that mean?” I asked as I watched him use the clothing hook to move the fabric to an isolated spot on the floor.
“That fabric is poisoned.”
“What? But— That’s not...” I sputtered, not sure what I was even trying to say.
While I was still trying to get my brain working, Nathan had already taken charge. He ordered someone to call for an ambulance while also making sure no one touched the fabric or the women. He then immediately started questioning everyone about what happened, quickly getting a summary of events.
Kiki and the other designer had been taking stock of our supplies. The other designer had taken the fabric out of its box, and Kiki had come over to chastise her since it was a particularly expensive material. After a few moments, the other designer collapsed. Panic set in and people started screaming. Kiki had tried to calm things down, but before anyone could figure out what happened, she collapsed as well.
The shock of seeing a second person suddenly go limp had shocked people into silence, which was when Nathan and I entered.
I listened to this explanation with a blank expression. Everything felt fuzzy, like I was merely watching a scene in a movie rather than walking through real life.
Meanwhile, Nathan handled everything with efficiency, and kept people from panicking again as we waited for the ambulance to arrive.
He was too calm. Surely, in this situation, even someone as confident as him should be panicking a little bit.
My mind turned over and over, like a hamster running frantically on a wheel but not getting anywhere. Before I could successfully collect my thoughts and get them moving forward again, paramedics arrived along with the police.
Nathan explained the situation to the paramedics, who whisked Kiki and the other designer away. The police, however, hung around to question people and get an account of the incident.
That was when things started to get weird.
The police were conducting interrogations, as they should, yet they barely spoke to the people who had actually been present. Instead, they focused almost entirely on Nathan.
The man had three police officers standing around him, bombarding him with questions from all sides. He could barely get out a few words to answer one question before he was interrupted by another.
It looked like a group of cats batting a mouse back and forth, except this mouse refused to budge. No matter how insistent or annoying the police officers were, Nathan maintained his usual composure.
Curious, and a little suspicious, I crept closer to eavesdrop on the uneven conversation.
“You bought that cloth, didn’t you, Mister Sterling?” one of the police officers asked.
With a slight nod of his head that still kept his eyeline above the officer’s, Nathan agreed. “I did. I own the company. You’ll find that I funded most of the supplies here.”
The officers weren’t dissuaded, and immediately jumped in with another question. “Yes, but you specifically sought this fabric out personally. Why?”
Since all three officers were asking him questions at the same time, Nathan didn’t bother trying to look at them individually. He only addressed the officer standing in front of him, as if they were having a private conversation.
“Vicuna fabric is rare and hard to find. It was meant as a gift, so it had to be perfect.”
Right. The Vicuna fabric. I’d forgotten about that. It had been a gift from Nathan to celebrate moving into the new studio. Kiki had been gushing about it just that morning.
The officers couldn’t seriously be suggesting that Nathan had gifted the fabric specifically to poison it.
Could they?
That didn’t even make sense. If he wanted to poison anyone here, he had plenty of opportunities. He wouldn’t need to use such a dramatic method.
That was when the reality of the situation finally hit me. This hadn’t been an accident. Fabric didn’t accidentally end up laced with poison.
Someone had harmed Kiki intentionally. Even if she wasn’t their target, she had been harmed because someone chose to do so.
The fuzzy unreality in my head was clearing up, but it was replaced with too sharp clarity. My vision tunneled, and I could practically count every speck of dust floating through a nearby ray of sunlight streaming through the window. I could hear every nervous shuffle of the officers’ feet as they continued their interrogation, and the lack of any fidgeting or nervous gestures coming from Nathan.
A phone rang, shrill and sharp, and the sound bounced painfully off my eardrums. I flinched, but I still heard every word one of the officers said as they answered the phone.
“Hello. Yes. Really? I see. I’m sorry to hear that. Yes, we’ll be in to see the body soon.”
With a beep, the call disconnected. The officer turned back to Nathan with a smirk on their face that they were trying to hide.
“That was the hospital. One of the women died in the ambulance on the way there. This is it, Sterling. You’re looking at a murder charge.”
Nathan didn’t even flinch. He simply reminded them that whoever had poisoned the fabric was guilty of murder, but since he hadn’t been the one to poison it, he wouldn’t be the one arrested.
I barely heard a word he said. The officer’s previous statement rang in my head.
One of the women died.
My legs went numb, and I collapsed to the floor, knocking over a half-assembled mannequin and creating a cacophony of noise.
“Deke.” Nathan shoved past the officers to kneel beside me, finally looking upset for the first time. “Are you okay?”
“Kiki…”
I couldn’t say more than that. Even her name barely left my lips. Yet, Nathan luckily understood what I meant.
“I’m sure Kiki isn’t dead.” Wrapping an arm around my shoulder, he pulled me closer. “I heard the paramedics say that she didn’t get as big a dose of the poison. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”
A surge of frantic energy burned through my veins, my hands moving seemingly without the input of my brain, and I latched onto Nathan’s lapel.
“I need to go to the hospital. I need to see her.”
Nathan carefully grabbed my hands and removed them from the fabric but didn’t push me away. “Okay. We’ll go.” Helping me stand, he looked over at the officers with a stern expression. “I assume we’re done here.”
One of the officers stepped forward, closely flanked by the other two. “We still have more questions. For you, and...” The officer trailed off, and whispered to one of the others, who answered in an equally hushed tone. “For you, and Mister Millar as well. You’ll both need to come down to the station.”
I opened my mouth to argue, the words halfway off my tongue, when Nathan squeezed my shoulder to silence me.
“Are you arresting us?” he asked.
None of the officers said anything, but the looks on their faces were answer enough.
Sighing, Nathan led me toward the door. “If you aren’t arresting us, then we don’t have to come with you. I’ve already answered your questions. If there’s anything else you need to know, we can come down to the station later. For now, we’re needed elsewhere.”
If the officers tried to stop us, I never knew. Nathan practically marched me out of the studio and slammed the door behind us before I heard another word from the officers. Keeping an arm around my shoulder, he brought me to a car in the parking lot that had a driver waiting next to it.
At first, I thought he’d called an Uber when I wasn’t looking, but once we were inside the car and Nathan addressed the driver personally, I realized this wasn’t hired transportation. This was Nathan’s personal car and personal driver.
Is this what it was like being rich?
Paying someone to specifically wait around and be ready to take you anywhere you needed to go at the drop of a hat?
It seemed a little weird, but it was also very convenient. We were able to get to the hospital with minimal hassle.
My feet carried me through the building’s sterile hallways like I was gliding rather than walking. I didn’t remember taking a single step. I didn’t even remember asking the nurse at the front desk for Kiki’s room, but soon enough, I found myself standing at the foot of her hospital bed.
There were a bunch of wires and tubes hooked up to her, and her face looked much more pale and gaunt than it had that morning. Only a few hours had made such a difference to her appearance. Even her blonde curls seemed to hang limp on her head.
Her makeup was also horribly smudged. Mascara streaked from the corner of her eyes, creating artificial crow’s feet, and her lipstick was so mucky her mouth looked like it was about to fall off her face.
She would hate being seen this way.
After my very first job working with models, I’d started keeping makeup wipes in my pocket at all times. It came in handy now as I sat beside her bed and started cleaning up her face. I wished I had new makeup to apply, so she could look as perfect as usual when she woke up, but at this point a bare face would still be better than the mess she currently wore.
Nathan didn’t immediately follow me into the room, and instead, stayed out in the hall talking to a doctor. I’d cleaned off most of Kiki’s makeup by the time he stepped inside, though he stayed near the wall to give us space.
“The doctor said that she must not have handled the fabric very much, because the dose of poison she received wasn’t very high. The poison was extremely concentrated, so it still affected her, but they expect she should recover just fine in a few days.”
I nodded, relieved, but I still couldn’t bear to look away from her.
“We met in high school.” I laughed, only to find tears filling my eyes and a lump clogging my throat. “The only two gay kids in a very conservative school. We were each other’s beards for years.”
Heavy silence emanated from Nathan’s corner of the room.
“Beard?”
He said the word like he was turning over each letter, looking for a hidden message. It made his accent, usually so faint it was barely noticeable, stand out much more prominently.
“I know the word but... I’m afraid I don’t know this term.”
I laughed again, and wiped my cheeks clear of tears that hadn’t fallen in the first place. “I mean, that we pretended to date each other in order to pose as a straight couple and hide the fact that we were gay. We fake-dated all through high school. Even when I got a boyfriend, she covered for me. Then, when we graduated, we left it all behind and moved to Las Vegas. Religious families. College funds. Easy lives where everything was already decided. We gave it all up to live freely in the city of sin.”
The first tear finally fell. Once the dam broke, I expected more to come, but they didn’t. That single tear carved a lonely path down my cheek as I finally looked away from Kiki to stare up at Nathan.
“I don’t have anyone else. She’s all I’ve got, and someone tried to kill her.”
The tears that hadn’t fallen still sat behind my eyes, boiling hot as they slowly changed from sadness to rage.
Stepping out of his corner, Nathan placed a hand on my shoulder. “I doubt she was the target. Whoever poisoned the fabric was likely just trying to hurt as many people as possible in order to sabotage the company.”
Acid burned the back of my throat and my teeth ached with excess emotion as I slapped his hand away.
“I don’t care if she wasn’t the target. She’s the one who was hurt. If she’d picked up that fabric first, instead of that other designer, she’d be... she’d be...”
I couldn’t say it, but that didn’t stop the image from flashing behind my eyes anyway.
Kiki lying on a morgue table instead of a hospital bed, her face gray and lifeless.
It was only a stroke of luck that I was listening to a beeping heart monitor right now, instead of a flatline.
As if triggered by my thoughts, Kiki’s heart monitor started wailing an alarm. I jumped in panic, afraid that my imagination had been brought to life and she was dying right in front of my eyes.
Only seconds after the heart monitor started wailing, a nurse bustled into the room.
“What’s the... Oh. I see.”
All the worry slid off her face, and she calmly walked over to the side of the bed and started messing with the various tubes and wires.
“Sir. You’re going to need to let go. You’ve pulled the heart monitor off.”
Looking down at my hands, I realized it was true. I’d been subconsciously holding onto Kiki’s hand. When I got upset, I’d held tighter, accidentally dislodging the heart monitor that had been clipped to her finger.
I jumped off the bed and nearly crashed into the nurse in the process. “Sorry. I didn’t mean... Fuck. I’m sorry.”
Kiki had almost died, and here I was only hurting her more. Logically, in the back of my mind, I knew that removing the heart monitor hadn’t actually done any harm. The nurse clipped it back on, and the wailing monitor fell silent. Yet, I couldn’t silence the whisper in my brain that blamed me for her condition. For that moment, when the heart monitor stopped, it felt like her heart had stopped as well, and I’d been the one to stop it.
My feet pounded against the linoleum floor as I ran from the room. Nathan called my name, but I didn’t even slow down. I ran until I reached the end of the hallway. My momentum sent me bouncing off the wall. I stumbled but remained upright and kept running in a different direction.
There was no telling how long or far I ran. Every hospital I’d ever seen was a twisted labyrinth of white walls and misleading signs. This one was no different. I could have been on the other side of the compound, or I could have been only a few rooms down from where I started. There was no way to know.
I passed an open door to an empty room, and making a quick decision, I slipped inside and slammed the door behind me.
It was dark, and after the bright lights of the hospital hallway, my eyes needed a moment to adjust. Once I was able to see, I found myself in what appeared to be a break room. It was empty at the moment, but there was an old moth-eaten couch on one side, and a table with a few chairs on the other. A refrigerator hummed away in one corner, while a sink holding a stack of drying coffee mugs on its adjoining small counter sat on the opposite wall.
I stood, unmoving in the dim atmosphere, my breath coming in short little pants. Even after my heart rate calmed down after my sudden sprint, I couldn’t seem to get my breathing under control.
The door behind me opened. I hadn’t known Nathan for that long, but his footsteps were easily recognizable from the way he made almost no sound when he moved.
“Deke. Are you all right?”
I didn’t answer. My breathing came even more erratically, and something bitter settled like a ball in my stomach, pushing up on my breastbone until it felt like my heart would be smashed against my ribs.
“Fuck!”
I grabbed one of the chairs from the table and threw it against the wall. With a resounding crash, one of the legs broke off and it left a deep hole in the drywall.
Picking up the now three-legged chair, I smashed it several more times against the floor. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
Someone came into the room, demanding to know what was going on, but Nathan quickly intercepted them. I never heard what he said, but a moment later, he convinced them to leave, then he closed and locked the door so we were alone.
“Deke,” he started to say, but I cut him off.
Grabbing his lapel, I pulled him forward, so our faces were only inches apart.
“Who are you?”
Nathan held both hands out to his side, almost like he was surrendering. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
Gritting my teeth, I tried to shake him by my grip on his jacket, but the man was infuriatingly solid and didn’t budge.
“I’m not an idiot, Nathan. I see the signs. When Agent Belden showed up at my old studio to question me about that model who was killed, she made a lot of insinuations about you.”
“I told you,” Nathan said as he placed a gentle yet firm hand on my wrists. “Agent Belden has a vendetta against me. She’ll accuse me of anything she can think of.”
I held firm to his jacket, though I stopped trying to shake him. It wasn’t accomplishing anything.
“That’s actually even more suspicious. Most people don’t have regular interactions with Interpol. And today, those officers were only interested in questioning you. Why? You weren’t even in the room when the poisoning happened.”
“I did buy the fabric,” Nathan tried to reason.
“That’s not enough. Those officers had already decided it was you from the moment they showed up. Was that due to Agent Belden’s vendetta as well?”
He barely reacted as I practically shouted at him, and was far too calm when he replied. “Probably. You’re right that they were ready to arrest me. I suspect Agent Belden probably put them up to it. Or maybe even blatantly lied to them. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
He wasn’t listening to me. His hazel eyes had hardened into a steel wall, completely shutting me out. I realized that he wasn’t going to tell me anything. He was barely even listening to me. We could talk all day, and he would keep spinning the conversation in unhelpful circles.
“You’re too calm. This whole time, you’ve been too calm. You weren’t even surprised by the sight of someone dying right in front of you. Normal people are upset by things like that, but it was just an ordinary thing to you.”
“Are you... blaming me for keeping my composure?”
Letting go of his jacket, I shoved as hard as I could against his chest. A small flame of pride lit within my heart when I managed to knock him off balance and he had to take a step back.
“No. I’m saying that all these things together are too suspicious. I’m no genius, but I’m also not stupid. There’s something going on, and you’re at the center of it. So, tell me who you are and what’s actually happening here.”
Still keeping a straight face, Nathan fixed the rumpled lapel of his jacket. “You don’t need to worry about anything. It’ll be handled, and I promise that you and your friend will be safe.”
He turned to leave, and that hard bitter thing in my stomach erupted. Fury bubbled up within me and erupted like a volcano, driving my hands and voice to act on their own.
“Listen to me, damn it.” I was shouting now, but it had no more effect on Nathan than if I’d whispered.
Trembling so badly that my teeth chattered, I shoved his shoulder. Then, when he finally turned back to look at me, I slapped him across the face hard enough for his head to snap to the side.
“Don’t dismiss me like I’m a child.”
He stood there with his head turned to the side for longer than necessary. His hands clenched into fists at his sides, but for several moments he didn’t move.
I probably should have left, or at least apologized, but I did neither. Instead, I waited in silence for his reaction, equal parts smug and angry.
When he finally did look at me, his expression was slightly surprised, like he couldn’t believe what had just happened. However, that surprise was quickly replaced with a dark predatory look, the likes of which I’d never seen before.
He stalked toward me, and I stumbled backward. My feet hit the edge of the couch and I fell, landing sprawled over the cushions.
Nathan didn’t give me a chance to find my feet again. He knelt over me, literally straddling my lap, and gripped the back of the couch so his larger body completely caged me in. With one hand, he gripped under my chin, fingers digging into each of my cheeks as he forced me to look up at him.
“For someone who claims he isn’t stupid, that was a very stupid thing to do.”
I really needed to learn how to censor myself, but without Kiki to act as my filter, I completely lacked impulse control.
“Is that a threat?” With him holding my face in such a tight grip, my cheeks were pushed forward like I was pouting, and my words were slurred. It wasn’t a very intimidating expression, but I scowled up at him anyway.
He was breathing heavily through his nose, and I noticed tremors in his hand as he struggled to maintain his usual composure.
“I’m not threatening you.” He leaned a little closer, so our foreheads almost touched, but it didn’t feel like an intimate gesture. “Now, listen to me. I did not kill that model at your show. I did not kill that designer today, and I did not hurt your friend.”
Even I was surprised by the smile that twisted my lips.
“You know, most people, when proclaiming their innocence, would just say that they haven’t killed anyone. But... that would be a lie, wouldn’t it. You have. Just not in these specific instances.”
He let go of my face but didn’t let me off the couch.
I leaned forward so our foreheads did touch. “So, are you going to tell me what’s going on now, or do I have to keep guessing?”
Nathan’s hand hovered in the minimal air between us, hesitating like he wasn’t sure what to do with it. For a moment, it seemed like he might grab me by the throat, but instead, all he did was lay his palm over my heart.
“You’re lucky I like you. Anyone else who tried to threaten me like this wouldn’t get a second chance. But I’m warning you. Stop.”
The moth-eaten couch didn’t have much padding left. When I threw my head back and laughed, I knocked my skull against the hard wooden frame.
“Now who’s the one being stupid?”
For the first time, Nathan looked truly shocked. Not mildly surprised or confused as I’d seen before, but genuinely shocked.
Seeing such an unusual expression on his face made me grin with a sense of accomplishment. “I’m not trying to threaten you. I don’t care what you’ve done. I don’t care if you actually have killed people. I just want to know what’s going on and who hurt Kiki.”
I watched Nathan take a deep breath, obviously struggling for the composure that usually came so easily to him.
“I... may know who is behind this. And I assure you, it’ll be taken care of. You don’t need to worry. Now, its best if you leave it alone and stop asking questions you don’t want the answers to.”
Hitting Nathan again would be pointless, and in this position, nearly impossible, but that didn’t stop the urge. I balled my hands into fists and they itched with the desire to lash out, but instead I only glared up at him.
“Don’t tell me what I do and don’t want. Don’t make those decisions for me like I’m not capable of deciding for myself. If you have any respect for me, you’ll tell me what I want to know.”
“And then what?” Nathan snapped. His hand balled into a fist against my shirt, crinkling the fabric between his fingers. “Even if I do tell you, what good will it do?”
I laughed. It probably sounded manic, but I didn’t care.
“Good? Probably not any good. I don’t think you’re a good man. That’s fine. I don’t need a good man right now. I need an efficient one.” When I grinned at him, my expression showed too many teeth. It wasn’t a happy expression, which made sense. I wasn’t feeling particularly happy at the moment.
Truthfully, I wasn’t sure what I was feeling.
Anger?
Yes. But there was also a whole host of other things swirling around in my chest that I couldn’t pick apart.
All I knew was that I needed to move. Needed to act. I wouldn’t be satisfied with just sitting back and letting other people handle things for me.
“You’re going to take down the person who hurt Kiki,” I said with complete certainty. “And when you do, I’m going to be there with you.”