Page 118 of A Taste Of Darkness

It felt as if a tight knot in my chest suddenly unraveled—as if the anchor that was forcing my heart to drown was being pulled back up.

The muscles in my face wanted to smile because I could only imagine her grumpy face as she was ordering everyone around. Demanding Sterlie was so hot, but she barely showed up. However, I kept my face neutral.

“Carbon monoxide poisoning?” I repeated, not quite wanting to believe it.

I checked the entire place before I left. She didn’t have a single appliance at home that was a carbon monoxide hazard.

Sterlie didn’t have any heaters, which frankly, made no sense to me. Flora kept complaining to me about how Sterlie would spend every winter with her because Sterlie’s building management refused to install a heating system. The tenants had to freeze or buy portable heating.

She had an electric stove, so it couldn’t have been that either.

That didn’t matter right now. I just wanted to leave the penthouse and get to my girlfriend.

“Yes,” Kai confirmed, sounding as interested in a conversation with me as ever. “Only two apartments are affected by the leak. Sterlie’s, and the one above. However, I checked the security cameras?—”

“Security cameras?” I interrupted, holding up a hand to stop him. “Did you look at the building? It doesn’t have security cameras. It doesn’t even have a heating system.”

Kai’s head tilted sideways as his arms crossed over his chest. “If you’d let me finish talking, you would’ve realized that I checked the security cameras from the house across the street.”

Okay, that made more sense.

I gestured for him to continue, even if his voice gave me a headache, and even though all I wanted to do was get in my car and race to whichever hospital Sterlie was staying at.

“I checked the cameras because something seemed weird about the whole situation, and that’s when I saw someone who didn’t belong there enter the building just after you left.” He pulled out his phone and hit the screen a couple of times before turning it around to show me a zoomed-in picture of a woman entering the building.

It was dark, and she wore all black, so she was kind of disappearing into the background. And to be honest, the camera quality wasn’t the best. Still, I recognized my sister’s boots.

It could’ve been a coincidence, but after finding out that Adriana had been trying to harm Sterlie for a while now, I was sure it wasn’t.

“Why did you think something seemed off?” I asked, trying not to give away that I knew exactly who entered the building.

Now more than before, I knew I had to find Adriana before I went to see Sterlie.

“I was on my way home from Tartarus, and I drove past the building. Sterlie was lying outside, mostly conscious but also absent in a way. I got her to a hospital while calling my people for?—”

“Why not the fire department?”

His eyes rolled and he took a deep breath. Oh, how I enjoyed annoying him.

Kai cleared his throat. “I know people who work there, so I called them because I don’t trust anyone else.”

That sounded like something Kai did. “Okay, continue then.”

“Even if the other apartments weren’t affected by the leak, someone must’ve noticed Sterlie was crawling her way down the stairs and out of the building, but nobody did,” he said, trying his very best not to walk away. He already regretted coming here, I knew that. “Nobody could notice because, for some strange reason, nobody was at home. Just Sterlie.”

That was odd, indeed.

As far as I knew, Sterlie’s building had ten apartments. For all nine of them to be gone at night was unlikely, especially since a couple of those tenants were older people.

And the walls were so thin, you could hear someone breathe from outside the building, which meant not hearing her probably fall down most of the steps was also unlikely. With how nosy her neighbors were, they would’ve checked out the noises Sterlie was making.

“My people are currently checking out the building. They’ll update me once they have news,” Kai added. He stepped closer to me, his face falling into an even more serious expression. “You do understand that your stupid little family is desperately trying to kill Sterlie, right?”

How would he know the woman entering the building was part of my family?

He couldn’t have possibly known that.

Though… he was Kai after all, so it shouldn’t have surprised me.

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