Chapter 13
Celia
T he words leave my mouth before I can take them back. “What do you need me to do?”
They hang in the air between us, a surrender that tastes bitter. Something shifts in Yefrem’s expression. It’s not relief, but something darker. Regret, maybe. Like he knows what this moment costs me, and what it takes from who I used to be.
“Help me roll him onto the center of the rug.” His voice carries a gentleness that seems wrong given what we’re about to do. “Try not to let any blood drip off the edges.”
I stare down at Marcus Lang’s body sprawled across my kitchen floor.
The blood has spread farther than I thought possible, seeping into the grout between tiles and pooling in the slight depression where the refrigerator used to sit before I had it moved during the renovations.
The metallic smell fills my nostrils, sharp and nauseating, mixing with the lingering scent of the vanilla candle I’d lit earlier, when my biggest concern was whether the Wi-Fi password was strong enough.
Less than two weeks ago, my most stressful decision was choosing between Benjamin Moore’s “Sea Salt” or “Gray Owl” for the guest room walls before going with “Soothing Sage.” Now, I’m staring at a federal agent’s corpse in a pool of blood on my subway tile.
Yefrem positions himself on one side of the body while I take the other.
Lang’s face is turned away from me, thank God, but I can see the back of his head where…
where Yefrem shot him. The wound is smaller than I expected from movies, but the damage is devastating.
I press the back of my hand to my mouth, fighting waves of nausea. “I don’t think I can touch him.”
“You don’t have to touch him directly. Just grab his jacket or his clothes.”
Even that feels impossible. This is a person. Was a person. Someone’s son, and maybe someone’s husband or father. Now he’s just…meat. Dead meat we need to move so we don’t go to prison.
The thought jolts me into action. Prison. Orange jumpsuits and concrete cells and explaining to my mother why her daughter is serving life for accessory to murder. My hands shake as I grip the fabric of Lang’s suit jacket.
“On three. One, two...”
We lift together, and Lang’s body is heavier than I expected. Dead weight, literally. This is practical physics I never wanted to understand firsthand. His arm flops awkwardly as we maneuver him, and I nearly drop my end when his hand brushes against my leg. “I can’t do this. I can’t?—”
“You can.” Yefrem’s voice cuts through my panic, steady and sure. “You are doing it. Just a few more steps.”
We manage to get the body positioned on my burgundy rug—the one I’d found on clearance at HomeGoods and spent an entire afternoon debating because it was slightly more than I wanted to spend but the colors were perfect for the room.
Now those burgundy and gold threads are about to hide bloodstains and wrap a corpse.
The irony isn’t lost on me. I’ve spent two years making this house perfect, and the last month turning it into the kind of place where people would want to stay, feel safe, and be welcome, only for it to become the scene of a murder.
Yefrem calmly begins working the edges of the rug around Lang’s body. The casual competence of it chills me more than anything else that’s happened tonight.
This isn’t his first time disposing of a body.
Of course, it isn’t. He’s a Russian Mafia boss, and I’m the idiot who let him into my home because he had nice eyes and an accent that made me think of old movies.
“Do you have tape? Something strong?”
I nod toward the kitchen, not trusting my voice. The blood on the floor catches the overhead light, and I have to look away. “There’s duct tape in the drawer by the sink. The one that sticks.”
“Get it. All of it.”
My legs feel unsteady as I navigate around the blood spatter, careful not to step in any of it.
My bare feet are cold against the tile. When did I lose my slippers?
The surrealness of that thought, wondering about slippers while stepping around a bloody crime scene, threatens to break something in my brain.
The kitchen drawer sticks when I pull it open as it always does, warped from the humidity when the dishwasher leaked last winter. It’s another item on my endless list of things to fix, right after “dispose of federal agent’s body” and “figure out how to live with being a criminal.”
I grab the roll of heavy-duty tape I bought for the guest room renovations, along with a smaller roll I keep for packages. Two rolls feels inadequate for wrapping a human being, but it’s what I have.
When I return to the living room, Yefrem has wrapped the rug around Lang’s body like a cocoon, holding the edges in place with one hand while extending the other toward me.
The bundle looks smaller than I expected and more manageable.
Just a rug-shaped package that happens to contain what used to be a person.
“Start at his feet and work your way up. Multiple layers. We need to make sure nothing leaks through.”
The tape makes a sharp ripping sound as I pull it from the roll, unnaturally loud in the silence of my house.
I’ve always hated that sound. It reminds me of moving day, of packing up my life and leaving behind everything I liked about the current place.
We moved a lot when I was a kid, due to Dad’s career, and I hated starting over.
Now, it’s the soundtrack to sealing up a dead body.
My hands shake as I press the first piece of tape against the rug. The sticky side catches on itself, and I have to start over since my fingers are clumsy with adrenaline and shock. The second attempt works better, but barely. “I can’t get it straight.”
“It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just secure.”
I need it to be perfect. Some part of my brain insists that if I can just do this one thing right, if I can wrap this tape neatly and cleanly, then maybe this whole nightmare will somehow make sense.
Maybe I can maintain some illusion that I’m still a competent person who has control over her life, instead of someone who’s helping hide a murder because she doesn’t know what else to do.
I continue wrapping, adding layer after layer.
The tape gun would make this easier, but it’s in the garage with the rest of my moving supplies, and I don’t want to leave Yefrem alone with the body.
Not because I don’t trust him—though I shouldn’t trust him, should I?
—but because being alone with what we’ve done feels impossible.
“More around the head.” Yefrem adjusts his grip on the bundle. “That’s where most of the blood is.”
I add extra layers where he indicates, trying not to think about what I’m sealing inside.
The burgundy pattern of the rug is barely visible now under all the tape, transformed into something industrial and ominous.
My beautiful rug, the one that tied the whole room together, is now a makeshift body bag.
“How do you know how to do this?” The question slips out before I can stop it.
Yefrem pauses in his adjustments, meeting my gaze across the wrapped body. “Experience.”
“How much experience?”
“Enough.”
The non-answer chills me. Enough means more than once. Enough means this is routine for him, just another Friday night cleaning up after violence. I’m having the worst night of my life, and for him, it’s probably not even in the top ten. “Have you killed other federal agents?”
“No.”
“Other people?”
A longer pause. “Yes.”
The simple honesty of it makes me wince. Yes. Not self-defense, not accidents, and no justifications or explanations. Just yes, I have killed other people, and now you know with what you’re dealing.
I should be running. Screaming. Calling 911 and taking my chances with the truth. Instead, I wrap more tape around a dead man’s head while having a casual conversation with his killer about murder statistics. “How many?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters to me.”
Yefrem studies my face for a long moment, and I see him weighing how much truth I can handle. “More than one. Fewer than you’re imagining.”
“I don’t know what I’m imagining anymore.”
“Good. That’s probably safer.”
We finish securing the bundle in silence, testing the edges and adding reinforcement where needed.
When we’re done, Lang’s body is completely contained within the rug, sealed with enough tape to prevent any forensic evidence from escaping.
The bundle is awkward and heavy but manageable for two people working together.
My living room looks like a disaster zone.
There’s blood on the floor, some of the furniture is knocked over or pushed aside, and empty tape rolls remain on the floor where I dropped them.
One has rolled into the congealing blood pile and is slowly soaking up the liquid—it’s better not to think about it as blood—to become stained reddish-brown.
The couch cushions are askew from when I’d thrown myself down earlier, before Lang burst into my home and ruined my life.
“We need to get him to my car.”
I look up. “Where is it?”
He jerks with his head. “Three blocks away, but I’ll move it to your garage first, for cover.”
I nod, incapable of speaking as he heads for the front door, leaving me alone with the wrapped body.
The silence presses in around me, thick and oppressive.
I stare at the bundle on my floor and try to reconcile what I’m seeing with reality.
Inside that tape and rug is Marcus Lang, who knocked on Mrs. Patterson’s door a few hours ago asking questions about a man named Aleks Sokolov.
I’d lied to him. Looked him right in the eye and lied to a federal agent because some instinct I didn’t understand told me not to trust him.
If I’d told the truth, would he still be alive?
Would I be sitting in a federal holding cell right now instead of standing in my living room planning where to bury a corpse?