13. Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Thirteen
Setting my working relationship with Bartos in motion was the smoothest thing that happened that morning. The rest of the day was uncontrolled chaos, so when I threw myself at my bed that night, I had no intention of getting out of it again.
I turned on my side in the light of a bedside lamp and a bit of gold caught my eye. The corner of my pillow stuck out from the pillowcase, and a piece of glitter nestled in the seam.
Weeks, and I was still finding these things throughout the penthouse.
I swiped it up on my fingertip and examined it. Light glinted off it as I turned it back and forth.
You should call him.
She’s right.
He probably wants to hear from you.
He won’t come back if you don’t reach out.
“You should all mind your own business,” I grumbled, “and I don’t want him to come back.”
Liar.
“He got what he wanted from me. I made peace with him, and now we’re done.”
I don’t think that’s all he wanted from you.
I sighed and pulled up the camera on my phone. I snapped a photo of the glitter balanced on my fingertip, which didn’t capture the shininess of the tiny metal shard, but it was identifiable nonetheless.
You’re the worst kind of scum.
I texted it to Rook along with the photo.
Rook: I’ve fucked people who have called me worse.
We didn’t fuck. We are not fucking.
A long pause, then.
Rook: What are you doing right now?
Why do you want to know?
Rook: It’s called making conversation.
Distrust crept up my spine. He was trying to trick me into giving something away. That had to be it.
Why should I converse with you?
Rook: You started the conversation.
I’m in bed. I had a hellish day. What are you doing?
Rook: Trying to make a bunch of idiots semi-competent before the fights tonight. What do you wear to bed?
We’re not fucking, Rook.
Rook: Humor me.
I was starting to seriously question my sanity.
Nothing. I wear nothing to bed, you nosy pervert.
Rook: I’d pay to see that.
You can’t afford it.
Rook: Keep being mean to me. It just turns me on.
Don’t you have work to do?
Rook: I’d rather talk to you.
Was I really entertaining this? Was I so bored and lonely that I’d converse with this riffraff?
I remembered the feeling of my cock jammed down his throat and had to adjust myself under the sheets. As if he had read my mind, he texted me again.
Rook: If you’re not planning to sleep, you could always come by after the fights. I’ll show you what I’d really rather be doing.
I am going to sleep. Goodnight.
Rook: Your loss.
I set my phone aside and rolled onto my stomach, my rigid dick trapped between my hip and the mattress.
I willed it to settle down. I thought of tea and paperwork and the queen.
My body laughed at me, and no amount of repositioning soothed that hard ache.
I sighed and turned back over, shoving the covers to my knees.
I spit on my palm and choked my cock in my hand, each stroke filled with hostility as I dragged my fingers up and down the length of it. Blue eyes flashed, laughing at me, their taunting glint filling me with need that made me want to kiss him and murder him at once.
My chest rose and fell in rhythmless breaths and the wet slide of skin against skin grew loud in the room.
What a complete arsehole. He thought he was so fucking clever all the time—witty and funny—when truly he was a complete menace I should leave well alone.
I wished I were still in my office at Avalon, forcing myself down his throat, muffling that mouth of his that never stopped talking. The way his eyes watered and he moaned around my cock…
I played the image over and over while I fisted myself until I was swollen and the head of my dick glistened with precum.
Rook could suck me off and then burn in hell for all I cared. He didn’t matter. He was no one.
That.
Insufferable.
Bastard.
I came so fast and so hard that I made a complete mess of my bed, and I hated Rook even more as I changed my sheets so that I could sleep in them.
***
Rook: wait for your demise, salvation denied
I picked up my phone where it sounded on my desktop and read Rook’s message.
Sounds like the lyrics to an emo song.
Rook: You listen to emo?
Not if I can help it.
Rook: It’s the next message.
He didn’t have to specify which message or who it was from, and I could guess how it was sent. The murderer had been silent for long enough I thought they had given up, but now there were three victims. Bodies mutilated in the same way. Messages left with each.
This was a pattern.
Does the Council have the body?
Rook: Picked it up this morning just after dawn. Someone already leaked the message, so word must have spread fast. Think your little Council errand boy can get us into the morgue?
He meant Charles, and, come to think of it, it wasn’t a terrible idea. Bribery went further than threats with people of little importance to the Council.
Charles thought it was a bad idea, despite the crisp hundred-dollar bill I slipped him when he met us outside the Council morgue at three in the morning.
“I’m going to lose my job,” he bemoaned, to which Rook handed him another hundred dollars.
“Shut up. If you draw attention to us, you’ll have bigger problems than losing your job.”
Charles closed his mouth and led us to the side of the building, the lot of us giving the security cameras at the main and back entrances a wide berth. I had cloaked us all in shadows and light, distorting the image, but if Rook’s cameras could look past it, the Council’s certainly could too.
“There’s a side entrance no one watches. They bring bodies through here when they don’t want people to know about them.” He gulped, adjusting his glasses. “Like this one.”
The steel door screeched loud enough to give all of us a moment’s pause before we decided no one was running to investigate and it was safe for us to go inside. Rook lit the way as Charles led us past blind spots in the cameras’ eyes and guided us to another steel door.
“I think it’s down there,” he said. “I’ve never been inside, though.”
I unlocked the door with a quick flick of my fingers and looked inside at a set of stairs that led down deep into the basement of the building. The air chilled as we went down single file into a large morgue with at least three dozen coolers filled with or awaiting bodies.
“Which one?” Rook asked, staring at the numbered compartments.
I pulled a clipboard with a numbered log off the wall and scanned the list of names. At the bottom was the alias Jane Doe and the designator 4-A. I read it aloud and Rook counted rows until he found the correct compartment, which sat far above our heads.
“Um, this thing, I think,” Charles said, pointing to a button at the side of the cold storage unit that worked a hydraulic lift.
Rook climbed a ladder near the tall wall of coolers while I moved the lift so it was level with the door we needed.
Rook slid the body out on rollers and we lowered it back down.
Pale and cold, the woman’s face was mostly intact, but blood still caked on her chin where her tongue had been cut from her mouth, and neither of the arms resting by her sides had hands.
“Oh God, it’s Kathy!” Charles clamped both hands over his mouth and turned away from the corpse.
“Who is Kathy?” I demanded, growing impatient with his weak-stomached theatrics.
He refused to turn back around. “She is—was—the file clerk. She kept all the Council’s records. She was so nice…”
Rook glanced around until his eyes landed on a filing cabinet against one wall. He moved to it and opened drawers, flipping through folders.
A file clerk. I doubted she was someone with particularly powerful magic, nor anything rare. If that were the case, I was wrong about who the killer was hunting.
“Got it,” Rook said, pulling a file from the drawer. He opened it and skimmed the page. “Fifty-nine, employed by the Council. Hands and tongue were removed postmortem. No sedation spells or other magical traces on her.”
“Just like the others,” I agreed.
“Look at this.”
I moved to peer over his shoulder, where he pointed to a line with an asterisk next to it.
*wait 4 your demise, 5alvation denied
The message, marked casually in neat handwriting on the report, added like an afterthought. I wondered where the Council was keeping the originals that were found with the bodies.
“Why do you think they used numbers here instead of letters?” Rook asked, voice low so Charles wouldn’t hear. He was still cowering in the corner.
“I don’t know, but I think I was wrong about who he’s targeting. She and Blackwell weren’t exactly equals in the Council, and I’ve never heard of her, which means she probably wasn’t doing anything nefarious after hours.”
“There has to be some connection.”
Nothing immediately came to mind, so I stood over the body to examine it more closely before we returned it to its compartment in the cold wall of corpses.
Her hair was tattered and muddy from wherever she was killed.
Her office casual clothes were equally grimy.
The skin had shriveled around her wrists where her hands had been dismembered, and while I knew none of the victims had visible killing wounds, I verified it for myself.
Something blue snagged the corner of my eye as I examined the jagged cuts where her left hand was severed.
“What’s this?”
Rook slid over from whatever he’d been reading to see what I meant. There were smudged blue letters on the skin of her forearm.
“Ballpoint pen,” he said. “She probably wrote a note to herself.”
“No, look.” I pointed at them. “They’re all backwards. They rubbed off on her from something.”
Rook shrugged. “She works in an office. She probably rested her arm on a report too long or something.”
I turned the letters around in my head. Most of them were too smudged to be legible. It had been raining for days.
do sso
no no gar
lat extra am
I took out my phone and snapped a photo.
“Can we please get out of here?” Charles begged from where he now curled up in the corner with his knees to his chest and refused to lift his head the whole way to look at us.
Rook and I exchanged glances, then nods.
We had everything we were going to get from examining the body and the morgue’s report.
Quickly, quietly, we returned the body to its compartment.
Charles practically ran to the top of the stairs to get out of the morgue, and Rook and I stood side by side watching him climb into his junky little car and drive away.
“It’s going to rain again,” he said, tilting his head skyward. “We should get inside somewhere.”
“We?”
He turned to me and grinned. “Don’t tell me you’re tired of my company already.”
“Most of that was unhelpful,” I said. “I’d rather go home and try to sleep for two hours before I have to get up for work.”
He stepped toward me, invading my personal space, and slid one hand up my arm and back down my chest, stopping at the waistband of my pants. “Is that really what you want?”
Exhaustion ached in my spine, but his hand was warm, sitting on my stomach, just above where I needed him. I grasped his hand in mine and slid it down over the zipper, so his fingers cupped my growing cock.
“That’s what I thought,” he said, as if he always had to have the last word, and he kissed me roughly. His hand threaded through my hair, pulling me closer and disheveling it in a way that felt obscene.
His lips were addictive, and that citrus scent, with just a hint of salty sweat underneath, wasn’t helping matters. His lips tugged something in my chest like a magnet and held there, the pull between us snapping tight.
“Not here,” I said in a hoarse whisper. I glanced at the sky, which was still blackened with concealing darkness. “Meet me at the penthouse.”