Page 119 of The Ripper

“Grimm,” I held out my hand, and she took it with a firm grip.

“I know who you are. I’m Midnight,” she introduced herself. “Actually, I know you all,” she approached Klaus. “You’re the cleaner, big fan,” she shook his hand. “You’re my favorite hacker,” she winked at Hannibal and the boy almost fainted in his chair. “And you are…” she tilted her head to the side and pretended to think about it for a second. “The sexist Italian wanker.”

Damiano rolled his eyes and simmered in his seat. He opened his mouth to attack her, but no sound came out as she glared at him like she’d just found her new favorite toy, which she wanted to torture beyond its breaking point.

Interesting.

“Why are you all so tall?” she asked as she sat down on the table next to Hannibal’s hand, which froze on the mouse for a moment.

“You’re too small,” Damiano replied, rolling his eyes.

“You know what they say, the bigger they are,” she grinned at him and didn’t finish her sentence as she turned her attention to the screen. “What have we got so far?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I sighed, sitting back down and taking the cup in my hand, stroking my fingers over the unicorn head drawn on it.

“Nothing doesn’t exist, Ripper,” she said as Klaus sat down next to me. “You’re looking at the picture the men who took her painted, what happened before that?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re looking at the kidnappers, but you’re ignoring her,” she began. “Nikolai told me that she was hiding something. Did you try to find out what?”

“No, I couldn’t convince her to tell me,” I said, and I bit the inside of my cheek, wishing I had something more to go on.

“What happened in the days before the kidnapping? I want to know every step she took.”

I sighed.

I thought in detail about all the time we had spent together, feeling the knife shift in the wound, then I started telling her everything that had happened from the moment I made myself known, and at some point, she stopped me.

“Wait, you said you kissed her at the hospital?”

“Yes, and that night someone tried to break into her home, that’s why I moved her things to my place…”

“So, this shit started when you made your so-called relationship public?”

“Sort of. I initially thought it was one of my enemies who wanted to hurt her to get revenge on me, but no… it’s someone from her past, that’s all she told me after she got fired.”

Something seemed to add up in her head, then she jumped from the table and snagged the cigarette Damiano was lighting up, taking a long drag out of it.

“Don’t you find it weird that she was fired a day before she was kidnapped?” The air got stuck in my throat. “It seems oddly convenient, I mean… if you get fired, no one asks why you didn’t come to work, right?”

~ Why didn’t you think of that, idiot?

“You think the director might have something to do with this?”

“Well, he’s the one who fired her, so there could be a connection there.”

Things seemed to line up in my head as I remembered the preposterous reason Arella had been fired for. She would have never offered herself up like that for a surgery, and since she worked in that fucking hospital for three years, that director should have known that she wasn’t the type. While it was a stretch to believe that her boss could have had any involvement with her kidnapping, it was a lead worth following.

“He wasn’t there when I kissed her.”

“He’s the director,” she shrugged. “He has unlimited access to all surveillance cameras in the facility, and I think we should have a chat with him,” she grinned, then took another drag of the cigarette before giving the bud back to Damiano, patting his back. “Thanks, pretty boy.”

*

Director James Colt was a man of medium height and questionable morals.

It took Hannibal ten minutes to find all the rottenness that lay inside him, namely the fact that he owed tens of thousands of dollars to drug traffickers, money he lost while gambling in the casinos used as money laundering facilities.

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