Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-one
Iris pressed her key into her apartment’s front door, and before she even turned it, the door creaked open. She froze, and the realization gripped her by the throat:
Someone had broken in.
Iris took a step back, scared to enter or even make a sound, in case the intruder was inside. The hallway was empty. She should call and wait for the police in the lobby. But then a thought occurred more fearsome than any danger to herself.
“Hugo!”
Her pulse thudded in her ears as she rushed through the apartment, which had been completely ransacked, but she couldn’t process anything until she located Hugo.
She called his name again with panic cracking her voice, but heard no sound in reply.
Her world was already upside down, the last thread tethering her was tied to that dog.
Iris spotted his white-tipped tail on the floor behind her bed, and she leaped over her downed full-length mirror to reach him where he lay flat atop her strewn clothing.
She dropped to her knees beside him and promptly scared the crap out of the poor dog.
Iris cried out in relief and swept him onto her lap, burying her face in his stringy neck, and Hugo, recognizing Mommy’s scent, wriggled with happiness.
Hugo was okay, so Iris could handle the rest of it.
Iris explored her home, that most familiar, comforting space rendered unrecognizable by chaos, and tried to deduce what had been stolen.
Her bedroom mirror had been knocked over and cracked, her dresser drawers opened and tossed.
Luckily, her jewelry box, tucked away on her bookshelves, was untouched, likely unnoticed.
In her living room, her broken laptop lay open like a book, the joint between screen and keyboard snapped, as if it had been stomped.
The kettlebell she kept beside her yoga mat had been thrown into the center of her television, shattering the screen.
Framed pictures smacked off her shelves.
Her things had been destroyed, but not taken.
This wasn’t a burglary.
It was a threat.
Jonathan had told her it could get worse. It terrified Iris that it had already begun.
But then her senses were soothed, her nose beckoned by the scent of Rapacine’s perfume emanating from across the room. She walked toward the fragrance, which grew more potent with every step, and by the time she reached the bathroom, it was overpowering. She pushed open the bathroom door.
The beautiful perfume bottle—its century-old crystal lay in shards on the floor, its precious elixir spilled like blood.
An unthinking stream of “No, no, no…” passed through her lips as she lowered herself to the ruin, careful not to disturb the spill’s perimeter.
Iris delicately picked up the partial base of the bottle, the cicada’s graceful lace wing now jagged and sharp.
Maybe two milliliters of the perfume remained in the bottle’s tiny basin, as the rest pooled in the grout between her floor tiles.
She racked her brain to come up with a way to preserve or salvage what remained.
She ran to her kit of fertility supplies and retrieved an empty syringe, which she used in a desperate attempt to draw up the spilled perfume, but it was futile.
None of the grout-rivulets were deep enough to be captured by the suction, and the rest of the perfume was spread too thin in an oily sheen over the pockmarked marble or had already evaporated, rendering the air thick and heady with the scent.
Her last resort was to take a silk scarf and press it into the dark spot on the floor, hoping to capture a modicum of the fragrance.
Iris slumped against the bathroom doorjamb. She needed the perfume now more than ever. Iris couldn’t report a man like Jonathan Wolff to the police without the perfume. No one would believe her without it. Her only weapon to match his money and power was the perfume. And now it was gone.
A cold, wet nose snuffled the back of her arm, and Iris threw out a hand to block Hugo from stepping on the broken crystal.
She shooed him out and closed the door, then set about cleaning up the rest of the bathroom.
Like everywhere else in the apartment, it was a disaster.
The toiletries she kept on her vanity had been swept onto the floor or, as was the case with her electric toothbrush, in the toilet, and her medicine chest door hung open, its contents jettisoned into the sink.
Iris cleared the sink and closed the medicine chest, but what she saw in the mirror made her gasp.
Scrawled in lipstick across her own horrified reflection:
SLUT
Iris lurched over her toilet and vomited.