Page 68 of The Ripper

“What am I going to do now?” she asked calmly.

“You’re going to lie low for a while,” Grimm replied, his eyes staring at the phone for a second before lifting it to his ear.

“Yeah, you can stay with me as long as you want and…”

“No,” he interrupted me, raising his index as he turned his attention to his call, “I’d like a laundry pickup.”

I frowned as he typed something, lighting a cigarette for himself as well.

Laundry pickup?

What did that mean?

He gave the person on the other end of the line the address we were at, then hung up. I was about to ask what was going on, but he spoke before me.

“She can’t stay with you, and even if I can make this go away, we’re still dealing with a dead police officer. She will be a person of interest in his disappearance, and every person she’s ever come into contact with will be questioned about her whereabouts, and since you’re her friend, your apartment will be the first place they’ll look,” he explained.

“Okay, so where do you want her to stay until they get bored of looking?”

“Klaus is on his way.”

“What does Klaus have to do with…”

“The warehouse is the safest place for her right now, until I can pull the right strings to sweep this under the rug,” he stubbed out the cigarette and lit a new one. “Don’t argue with me.”

“Grimm, Klaus was stabbed last night,” I argued. “He should stay home and rest, not come here to help you pick up a body.”

“You don’t know him,” he grinned, dismissing my concern.

“And you don’t know medicine,” I rolled my eyes, a vein in his temple pulsing.

“Arella,” he spoke through clenched teeth, glancing at Fleur.

The way he looked at me told me to shut up, and for the first time, I listened, because this wasn’t the man who spoke about children and kissed my insecurities away. This was the criminal, the man who operated outside the law, and I dug my nails into my palm as I stared into his eyes.

Ice cold, and I shivered.

I looked at my tattoos briefly, running my fingers over the sentence on my left wrist, and started to understand why he’d told me I could never be ice. It was because he was cold enough for the both of us, and my eyes welled with tears as the second sentence gained new meaning.

Too much warmth.

Did he see me as his warmth? Did he hope I could melt away the ice?

“What’s a laundry pickup?” I blurted.

His head snapped up, his eyes narrowing as he sighed.

“Laundry is code for dead body,” he explained, “Klaus is our cleaner.”

I got an answer that only raised more questions, but I wasn’t sure if it was the right time to ask them. He had people who cleaned after murder. He’d killed sixteen people - that I knew of - and never been caught.

Was he part of the mafia or something? How could he get away with so much? Why weren’t the police a threat to him?

“Who’s ‘we’?”

He shook his head, then stared at me. “Not now,” he gave Fleur a quick glance, then got up from the coffee table and went to the window.

My friend seemed to fall into a trance. She was sinking deeper into shock and there was nothing I could do to help her, so I contented myself with holding her while we waited for Klaus. I wondered how he would pick up a corpse in his condition, but then I remembered all the guards at the warehouse and realized he probably had help with his “cleaning” business.

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