Page 20 of Emerald Malice

“There it is,” she says. “The building at the end of the street.”

I would’ve seen it myself, but I was fixated on watching her knee bounce nervously for the last fifteen minutes. When I look up, my face curdles into a frown.

“This is where you live?” I make no attempt to mask my disgust.

“We can’t all live in ten-million-dollar brownstones,” she snaps back. “Some of us have to make do.”

Shura parks and stays behind the wheel as I get out of the car along with Natalia. “I’d call it a rat-infested hole in the wall, but that would be disrespectful to rats, holes, and walls.”

“Don’t be an asshole.” She bats at my arm with the back of her hand.

It’s such a familiar gesture that I turn to her in surprise. She must be just as surprised, because she looks away from me pointedly. “Well, anyway… Thanks for the ride. I don’t think we’ll see each other again, so?—”

“You’re not going to invite me in?”

“Invite you in where?”

I answer by striding past her and through the front door of her building. After a moment, Natalia groans and follows me.

A lightbulb in what barely passes for a lobby flickers to life for a moment before it thinks better of it and snuffs itself right back out. Bugs and rodents skitter in the ceiling.

“Come on,” Natalia orders as she heads for the stairs. “This way. You’re in for a hike.”

“Let me guess: the elevator’s out of order?”

“Has been since I moved in. But on the bright side, I’ve got great calves now.”

On the seventh-floor landing, Natalia leads me to the apartment on the right—702. She unlocks the door and flips a switch. Cheap fluorescent light floods the apartment.

“Go ahead,” she sighs, sweeping an arm to encompass the room. “Judge away.”

It takes me a matter of seconds to get the measure of the place. The bones of it are as much of a disgrace as the rest of the building. Water-stained walls, cracked crown molding, windowsills dripping murky, rust-colored condensation from A/C box units.

But there is life here in spite of all that. A haphazard pile of books next to a couch with a well-worn butt imprint on one of the cushions. Floating bookshelves with carefully arranged knickknacks—shot glasses and coffee mugs, crystal balls, hand-painted watercolors.

And photographs. So many photographs.

I pull down a framed picture of a young girl with a gap-toothed grin, hedged in on either side by a man and a woman.

“How old were you in this picture?”

“Six,” she murmurs without hesitation. “It was right after I turned six.”

I peer closer. She inherited her mother’s looks—the dark hair, the heart-shaped face, the small button nose. Her father’s contribution is limited to those bright emerald eyes.

Suddenly, I’m looking at my empty hands. Natalia has plucked the frame from my grasp and flattened it against her chest. “Let me get you a glass of water.”

She walks the frame into the kitchen and stashes it in a drawer.

She’s calmer with something to do, but even as she fills a glass with water and slides it across the counter towards me, she’s tense.

“When did they die?”

She freezes. Her breath rattles in her chest. “You really need to leave.”

“You haven’t answered all my questions.”

“Ask better ones then.”

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