Epilogue – Arabella
SEVEN YEARS LATER
The blood wasn’t mine. That was the first coherent thought that broke through the static in my head, as I stood over the body of State Representative Harrison Cole.
His white shirt bloomed crimson like some grotesque flower I’d helped water.
My hands were slick with the red stain, warm and tacky between my fingers.
I couldn’t remember how they’d gotten that way.
The room smelled of copper and expensive cologne.
A bottle of whiskey was ready on the coffee table with two glasses.
The rich baritone of an Italian crooner played on a speaker from his Bluetooth.
I stepped back. My heel caught on the edge of the Persian rug, and I stumbled, catching myself on the mahogany desk. A pen holder rattled. A framed photo of Cole with the mayor tipped onto its face. The sound was obscenely loud in the macabre setting.
He was dead. Definitely dead. The way his eyes fixed on the ceiling’s ornate molding told me everything I needed to know.
The dark pool beneath him, still spreading, was another clue.
The fact that I’d been standing here for what felt like minutes, watching, and he hadn’t so much as twitched confirmed that my on-again-off-again fling was over.
My breath came in short, ragged pulls.
No…NO!
I looked down at my hands again. Red. Dark under the nails. I’d touched him. I’d—
No. Don’t.
The clock on the wall read 2:17 AM. The building was quiet.
Cole’s office was on the twelfth floor of a building that should have been empty at this hour.
Should have been. The security guard downstairs had been dozing when I’d slipped past, key card gifted me for such nocturnal rendezvous.
I hadn’t planned on finding a corpse. We were supposed to hook up. Blow off steam. It was never personal.
But death somehow made our relationship far more intimate than I could ever have imagined.
It didn’t matter now. Sex was for people who weren’t standing in a dead man’s office with his blood drying on their skin.
Move.
Move, now!
I wiped my hands on my fitted dress. It just smeared the blood, thin rusty lines across the dark grey. I’d need to burn this. Everything. The thought was so absurd I almost laughed, a choked sound that died in my throat.
The surveillance system.
That was the first problem. Cole’s office building wasn’t top-security, but there were cameras in the hallways, the elevator, and the lobby.
I’d been careful coming in. The collar of my trench coach flipped high, my face cast down under the wide brimmed hat, and body slouched.
But careful might not be enough, not with what was lying on the floor behind me.
I moved to his computer, waking the screen with a tap.
Password protected. Of course. I pulled the USB drive from my pocket—the mob boss friend of Dominico had given me, loaded with a custom bypass—and plugged it in.
The screen flickered, code scrolling too fast to read, and then the desktop appeared.
I found the security feed directory. Recent footage, hallway cameras, timestamp search.
My fingers left faint pink smudges on the keyboard.
I located the files from the last hour, selected all, deleted.
Emptied the recycle bin. Then I navigated to the building’s cloud backup and purged those too.
The files would still exist in the system’s temporary memory, but without the originals, recovering them would take time.
Time I needed. I unplugged the drive, shut down the computer, and grabbed tissues from my purse.
With some hand sanitizer, I wiped my fingerprints from the keys and the smudge from the desk’s edge.
Cole hadn’t moved. His mouth was slightly open. He’d been about to say something when the bullet—because it had to be a bullet, the entry wound was small and neat—had taken the words away forever. I hadn’t heard a shot. I’d been in the building when it happened. I’d heard nothing. I’d seen no one.
If I had been here a few minutes sooner….
I would be dead too.
I grabbed my bag from where I’d dropped it by the door, slung it over my shoulder, and took one last look at the room. Nothing of mine was here. There was no trail to have this lead back to me.
Probably.
That was the best case scenario.
I left opting for the stairs. Twelve flights in the near-dark was not an easy feat. My footsteps echoing between concrete walls. On each floor I expected to hear voices. The silence mocked me. My too loud breathing and the occasional hum of the HVAC system were ghoulish in the thundering stillness.
The service exit dumped me into an alley behind the building. The cold air hit me like a slap. It was late October in New York. The chill invaded my bones and refused to leave. I turned my collar up and started walking. I had to force myself not to run. Running attracted attention.
Home was twenty blocks north. I couldn’t take a cab. Not covered in the representative’s blood. And part of me…part of me didn’t want to go there. Whoever attacked the representative had done their work. Which meant they knew.
Knew about us.
That wasn’t as shocking as finding the dead body. I’d had a few days to process the reality that we were under surveillance. Cole had assured me it was a political tactic. That the photos were meant to create a stir. He said he would handle it, and that I didn’t need to worry.
Boy, oh boy, had he been wrong.
I needed to call someone.
Dominico. The name surfaced through the fog.
Dominico would know what to do. He always did.
The don of the Grimaldi Famiglia was like an adoptive brother.
After I’d escaped his grandparent’s clutches, we’d grown close.
His wife helped me get away from Boston.
They’d supported me at school. They’d come to visit, celebrating every win from graduation, to my first apartment, and my new job as a pharmaceutical developer.
They were closest thing to family I had left.
A mafia don would know exactly what to do in this situation.
I fished my phone from my jacket pocket.
My hands shook so badly I dropped it. A curse escaped my lips as the screen cracked on the sidewalk.
I scooped it up, wiped the representative’s blood off the shattered display, and unlocked it.
The contact list blurred. I stabbed at Dominico’s name, missed, hit it again.
The call connected on the second ring. “Bella.”
Something inside me broke hearing that one word.
“Bella! What is it?” the voice of death rumbled.
I swallowed hard, unable to catch enough breath to form the words. “Luigi—”
“Where are you?” His voice was rough with sleep, or maybe something else.
I’d never called him this late. I’d never called him, period.
We moved in overlapping circles because of Dominico, but Luigi existed in an orbit of his own.
He was forbidden, and I’d resisted the darker pull of his presence. Always watching, never taking.
“Luigi.” My voice didn’t sound like mine.
It was thin and reedy. But I wasn’t me right now, not the strong, confident, kick butt scientist with a seven figure paycheck.
I was a stranger standing in an alley at two-thirty in the morning with another man’s blood on her.
“I’m sorry. Wrong number. I meant to call—”
“Where are you?” Each word was heavy, daring me to refuse to answer.
“In the city,” I clipped out.
“Be specific.”
Reluctantly, I obeyed. I was five blocks from Central Park now, moving west, the buildings a dark mass to my right. The streets were empty. A taxi idled at a red light half a block ahead, its rooftop light off. “Near the park. East side. Seventy-second and Fifth.”
“Stay there. Don’t move.”
On the street? In the middle of the night? He was out of his mind. I should just hang up.
But the memory of the dead body slammed into me, making my knees buckle. I wasn’t fragile, but I would give anything to sit down and curl up like a ball. It wasn’t the long arm of the law that I feared.
Someone took out my acquaintance with benefits.
The gust of wind raked ethereal talons down my exposed skin.
“I didn’t—” I started, then stopped. What was I going to say? I didn’t do it? I didn’t kill him? The words sounded ridiculous even in my head. “Luigi, I’m in trouble.”
“I gathered, furbacchiona.”
Sly one.
I felt neither sly nor crafty right now.
I was lost.
This was the closest I’d ever come to feeling broken. I always had power and control, even in my most vulnerable moments. But not tonight.
The sound of movement came from his end, the rustle of fabric, the soft click of a lighter. “What kind of trouble?”
The kind where a state representative was dead, and I was covered in his blood. Trouble that would involve the police, probably the Feds. The sort where calling the cops meant handcuffs and questions I couldn’t answer. Or even a jail cell while they figure out if I was a witness or something worse.
Those I could live with. It was the unknown, the threat of violence against me that haunted me here on the sidewalk.
“The kind where I need help,” I said instead.
He paused. I could picture him, walking through his Boston penthouse, one hand holding the phone, the other rubbing the stubble on his jaw. My insides tightened. He was a killer. Sinfully handsome, much too old for me…and Dominico’s best friend. That combination made him dangerous.
“You’re bleeding,” he said. Not a question.
I looked down at my hand. The phone was smeared with a faint pink residue. “It’s not mine.”
“Whose is it?”
I closed my eyes. The cold air bit at my cheeks. “Harrison Cole’s.”
Silence pulsed through the line like a living creature. I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears. The rhythm was slightly off.
“State Representative Cole,” Luigi growled.
I jumped.
His tone was downright vicious.
Of course, he wouldn’t want to deal with a scandal of this magnitude. I was stupid for not hanging up on him and calling the don. Dominico would help me because we were bonded through history.
“You know what, this was a mistake.” I tried to swipe the call, but the red button mocked me.
“Where is he?” the voice of death gritted out.
Sighing, I put the device back to my ear. “His office. Twelfth floor. He’s…he’s dead, Luigi.”
“Did you kill him?”
The question should have offended me. It didn’t. In his world, it was the logical first step.
But I wasn’t a blood thirsty killer. Not like him. I preferred a more intricate end to my victims, few as they had been.
“No.” I said with force. “I found him. He was already—someone else did it. Before I got there. Or after. I don’t know.”
His voice was terribly cold. “Are the police there?”
“No. Not yet. I wiped the security footage. The building’s empty. I think.”
“You think.”
There. There it was! The teasing lilt he always used. This monster killed with a smile on his face. And that dark humor chose to come out right bloody now.
Urge! The nerve of this man. “I didn’t stick around to take a headcount!”
A rough sound barked from his end. It was almost a laugh, but not quite.
The ghost of amusement lingered in his voice.
“Okay, change of plan. Find a diner. Somewhere with lights and people. Not too crowded. Stay there. Don’t talk to anyone.
Don’t use your phone for anything else. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. ”
“Luigi—”
“Twenty minutes, Bella. Move.”
The call ended. I stood there for a moment with my phone in hand. The screen went dark. Twenty minutes. That meant…that meant he was here. In New York. Close.
TO BE CONTINUED in Crimson Night Kiss