9. Giselle
GISELLE
My hands squeeze around a takeaway cup. It’s my fourth coffee of the day. Russo’s hands are at ten and two on the wheel, just like the academy still teaches. Like anyone’s checking.
He’s been quiet since he picked me up. Not the dangerous kind of quiet. Just concerned with a splash of I told you so .
He glances over, squinting. “You sleep at all?”
“Just couldn’t get comfortable,” I say, lying and telling the truth at the same time.
“I could still pull you off this one,” he says, not buying it. “You want me to call it in?”
“No,” I say, too fast. “I need to see it.”
He nods once.
“We’re here,” he says, and kills the engine.
The house is two blocks off the boardwalk. The paint peels in skin-like strips from the porch. There are three patrol cars already clogging the curb, their red-blue strobes reflecting off the windows.
Russo beats me to the threshold, flashes his badge. The officer on the door steps aside, eyes wide and unblinking. I catch him sneaking a glance at my ass as I walk in.
I look back, just long enough to say with my face: Don’t .
I have more reason to think that, now. Not that I’d ever tolerate a handsy cop, but I wouldn’t wish Ivan’s fate on him.
The foyer is rotten, the floor spongy underfoot. I follow Russo through a hall so narrow I have to walk sideways, then down into the basement, a cold slab of stained concrete.
At the center is Ivan Tupolev.
Or… what’s left of him.
He’s laid out like a martyr, wrists cuffed in front, legs splayed at obscene angles. The head is tilted back, mouth open in a rictus.
There’s a rose between his lips, two more coming out of his ears. His hands are gone, and ten roses—one for each finger—are stuffed in their place. But most disturbing are the roses planted in his belly through the knife wounds.
Dozens of them.
They’re arranged like the world’s most grotesque boutique.
And on Ivan’s chest: To Detective Cantiano.
He dared to touch you . My heart speeds up and I tell myself it’s from disgust.
I remember how mad I was the night before, after Ivan slapped my ass and sent me scurrying down the street. The rage had wound me up to a knife-sharp point.
Seeing him this way sends relief washing through my body. My temples release from the vice grip I wake up with each morning, my hands unclench, my tongue unsticks from the roof of my mouth.
I can breathe again, so I do.
“You want to explain yourself?” Russo turns to me.
I shake my head. I feel like a teenager lying to her dad the morning after prom.
“The manager of Faberge is dead with your name on his fucking body, G. And word is you were seen there last night.”
I pause. The instinct is to deny, but I know there’s no way my stalker did me the favor of wiping the cameras at Faberge .
“I went after work. Thought I’d follow up on the councilman’s connection.”
“Alone?”
“Didn’t have a warrant. Didn’t think I’d need backup to visit a sauna.”
Russo glares. “You think these guys play by the same rules as us?”
“No, I don’t,” I say. “But you know Ivan wouldn’t talk under any other circumstances.” I keep my eyes on the body, anything but Russo’s disappointment.
Russo squats next to the body. “And did he talk?”
“No.” I remember Ivan’s breath in my ear, the leer in his eyes, and the naked threat of what he wanted to do to me. “He groped me. And he slashed my tires.”
“And now his hands are gone.” Russo gives one more glare at the stumps of Ivan’s wrists, and then he looks back at me. “Awfully convenient, don’t you think?”
“It’s just another kind of threat.”
“Bullshit,” Russo snaps, patience wearing thin.
“This is what happens when you go chasing leads alone. Are you trying to make yourself a goddamn suspect? If he were talking to some other scumbag and ended up with missing hands, I’d be inclined to believe that it means something. But this guy was talking to you , G.”
Russo stands, wipes his hands on a tissue he pulls from his pocket. I stare at the body, trying to reconcile the man who groped me with the rose-stuffed corpse before me.
“I didn’t do this,” I say.
“You think I don’t know that?” He lowers his voice.
“But the department isn’t going to see it that way.
You met with him. He touched you. Now he’s dead with his fucking hands cut off.
And we’re going to have to explain why homicide sent a detective chasing leads in the middle of the night, with no backup, no partner, and no warrant. ”
You don’t know the half of it , I think.
Russo’s eyes soften, just a little. “You want to tell me what’s really going on?”
I open my mouth, close it. The earrings, the hands, the burner, the call. Why am I hiding it? All that evidence, it’s bound to lead me somewhere, and it might lead me there a lot quicker with the department behind me.
Everything my blue-eyed shadow is doing: from the killing to the stalking to the torturing and the toying? It’s wrong.
And by keeping his secrets, I’m fully implicated.
But somehow, I know I should keep on keeping his secrets.
Like they’re meant only for me.
“You think this is a good week for me, Captain?” I say, gesturing to the body. “You think I like finding two dead bodies with my name literally written all over them?”
We stand there for a long minute, Russo and I, him studying me and me thinking about how if my blue-eyed shadow goes to prison, then this whole thing ends.
And, fuck me, I don’t want it to end.
Not yet.
I hate myself for it, but I think I want to know just how far both of us will go.
As though answering yet another silent prayer, a chill runs up my arms, prickling the skin. For a second I think it’s just the temperature, but then I feel it: the old, animal sense of being watched. I glance up, out through the splintered window.
On the far side of the street, under a dead sodium lamp, is a man in a hoodie. Hands are deep in his pockets, he’s built like a wall—wide, tall, and brutal.
Bigger than life or death.
He’s facing the house, head tilted, waiting so patiently for my eyes to meet his.
Blue.
By now, I know those eyes better than my own: blue so deep they have their own gravity. And I’m being dragged right in.
He lifts a finger to his mouth, slow and deliberate in that universal sign of silence.
Then he smiles again, and it sets my heart racing.
The balls on this guy!
I clench both hands so tight that my fingernails dig into my palms. It’s the best I can do without Serena’s earrings. I feel my heartbeat everywhere, from my scalp to my fingers to the uncomfortable warmth pooling between my legs.
“Cantiano!” Russo’s voice snaps me back. I turn, and he’s standing on the other side of Ivan, holding something silver between gloved thumb and forefinger. “Those look familiar?”
I squint to push out the heady rush of seeing my stalker again. Russo’s pointing at an earring. It’s silver, cheap, and has three stones missing on the right.
My stomach flips over on itself when I see it.
My stalker’s voice echoes in my memory: To see if you’ll lie for me. I think you will.
I hate that he’s already so deep in my head. He shouldn’t know me at all, never mind knowing me this well.
“I—yeah,” I say. “They must’ve popped out last night at Faberge .”
Fuck!
Russo stares at the earring, then at me. “Don’t do this to me, G.”
“I’m not doing anything,” I say quietly. To you , I finish in my head.
What I’m doing, I’m doing to myself.
And I don’t want to stop. I only want to look like I want to stop. It’s killing me, knowing that as someone who’s dedicated my life to doing things the right way, I’m being forced to face down my darkest cravings and make a choice. And every time, I keep choosing the darkness.
“You want it back?”
If I didn’t know better, I’d think he might be fighting tears. He knows what happened to Serena. He and Ida are the only two people other than my parents who know the full story. That’s why he’s been so protective of me ever since I joined the force.
My heart breaks, but I know if I look out the window, there’s another man asking something of me.
And I know if I look out the window, I’ll do everything that he demands.
Because after hearing his voice this morning, I can’t make myself refuse.
He’s taken root in my head, burrowed his way into my brain, and planted something that is slowly blossoming into something dark and twisted. Reshaping me into someone different.
Someone just like him.
I shake my head. “It’s evidence now.”
Russo slips it into a bag, writes my name on the label. “I’ll let the lab know you want it returned. But no promises.”
I chance a look back at the window, but my blue-eyed shadow is gone.
Russo finishes the note, and clicks his pen shut. “You want to ride with me to the morgue? Or you got somewhere else you’d rather be?”
I meet his gaze, steady. “I’ll come.”
“Attagirl.” He hands the evidence bag to a nearby tech, and then leads the way back through the corpse of the house.
We make it to the car without incident. I check the street, the alleys, and the shadows for my stalker.
Nothing.
As Russo starts the engine, I catch my own reflection in the passenger window. My jaw is tight, hair mussed, and my soul seems to shimmer against the blue sky.
I stare at myself for a long time, wondering which part of me he wants and which parts I’ll wind up giving him.