Page 142 of Devious Knight

“He’s not your type. I am. You liked me first, remember?”

Her eyes fill with tears. “Yes, I remember. I liked you first.”

I nod and take her hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. She stares back at me, but then the smile in her eyes fades and they cloud with sorrow and pain.

“I said some stuff to you last night. About my mom.” She speaks in a careful tone, as if she’s scared the walls will hear her.

“That was real, wasn’t it?”

Slowly, she nods and brings her hands together in her lap. “I…didn’t mean to talk about it, but it was like I was there again.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you saw it happen.”

She drags in a breath. “Not many people know that. I wasn’t going to bring it up again, but I thought I should because I said so much. In my state of craziness, I really thought you could save her.”

“I would have if I could.”

“I know.”

“Isabelle, you said there was someone else there and no one believed you.”

Something dims her eyes, but she nods. “It wasn’t just the shooter, but I never saw the other man. He spoke in Russian, and they left after they killed my mother. I was so scared I couldn’t move. I watched her die from my hiding place, and I kept thinking the men would come back to kill me.”

“No one has been able to identify the other guy?”

“No. No one. There’s no evidence. Everyone tried everything. Even me, and I nearly made everything worse.”

“What did you do?”

She takes a moment to think before speaking. “When I was fifteen, I worked at a gallery with a man I thought was him. I didn’t have a plan other than to get close to him.”

The moment she says the word gallery, my interest piques.

Is she going to tell me what connection she had to Nikoli?

It has the same circumstance. She worked in one gallery when she was fifteen. The same gallery my father was hosting the exhibition.

“What happened?”

“Nothing at all. I met a man there who told me he could help me get information on the man I was tracking. I was desperate, so I believed him. You’ll believe anything when you’re desperate. He claimed that the paintings in the exhibition were stolen, and he wanted to get them back. So, he needed my help. In return, he’d help me, but he turned out to be a hacker. He used me, and when he hacked the system, he left me high and dry with nothing.”

My stomach flips and my insides churn. Fuck. That’s the answer on how she became involved.

The answer I never bothered to seek.

That is the thing I never cared about because I considered Isabelle as guilty as everyone else who pulled the trigger and slaughtered my family.

That hacker must have been from the Malina. He used her to get to my family by preying on her desire to find her mother’s killer. “The hacker just left?”

“Yes. I never had a name, and no one knew who he was. No cameras picked him up. It was like I made him up. I couldn’t even identify him properly with a drawing. I could have gotten myself and my family in some serious trouble. And it was all for nothing. That was the last time anybody tried to find the man who wanted my mother dead. That was the last time I tried.”

She only helped the hacker because she wanted the truth. A lead.

I can’t blame her for that.

What she did is something I would have done. It’s something I would do now for justice.

She releases a heavy sigh. “Apart from my father, I’ve never told anyone that story.”

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