Page 4 of Girl, Accused

It sat on her desk, three steps away. Her body unfroze and she lunged for it, but a sound like splintering bone filled the office as the door ripped free from its frame. The rush of winter air extinguished Evelyn's scream before it could form as a figure in the vague outline of a human tore across the office. No mask, but no clear face either. Just shadows beneath a dark hood. Evelyn caught a glimpse of something silver, a metallic flash that registered asbladeorwireordeath– but her psychiatrist's talent for analysis died as quickly as her cries.

She and the figure became tangled in an instant, and Evelyn could only chide herself for not locking the door behind her. A liquid line of fire opened across her throat, and Evelyn Summers – Harvard graduate, author, proud collector of others' broken pieces – collapsed to the floor in a heap.

Blood painted art across the hardwood floor she'd spent weeks selecting. Such meticulous attention to detail, such pride in appearances, and now she was analyzing the grain patterns through a crimson filter.

The figure crossed to her fireplace – the one she'd insisted on despite the contractor's protests about load-bearing walls. Heat bloomed in the darkness as flames sparked to life. Evelyn felt their warmth on her face, an odd counterpoint to the growing cold in her limbs. Through dimming vision, she watched the figure hold something metal into the fire. The object caught the light and reflected it back in ways that made no sense to her oxygen-starved brain.

Fascinating presentation of ritualistic behavior, her professional mind noted, even as consciousness began to slip away.Subject displays clear pattern of –

But analysis failed her at last, and darkness claimed Dr. Evelyn Summers before she could complete her final diagnosis.

CHAPTER TWO

Luca Hawkins could sleep through a hurricane, and one time in his youth, actually did. But sleep hadn’t come at all last night, because a different kind of disaster had raged war, and even the clarity that came with eight hours of lying horizontal couldn’t help him make sense of everything.

He reached over and grabbed his phone for the hundredth time since last night.

Nothing. No texts or missed calls from Ella. Her side of the bed remained undisturbed. A perfect crime scene – no signs of struggle, no evidence of presence. Just absence photographed in high definition. The indent in her pillow had long since smoothed itself out, like her head had never rested there at all.

No. She hadn’t come home, because if Luca’s suspicions were correct, Ella Dark was still locked in a room on the top floor of the Hoover Building, and nobody would tell him why.

He hauled himself out of bed, grabbed his blue robe and made for the kitchen. He rested against the worksurface and considered switching on the coffee machine, the heating, the television. Anything for that semblance of normalcy, but doing so didn't feel right without Ella to shout her coffee requirements or pester him to lower the temperature ('it’s not cold enough to be on that high’).So Luca just stood there, chilly and uncaffeinated, while he ran through the events of last night in his head again.

He and Ella had apprehended accountant-turned-serial-killer Lawrence Winters in an old medical museum out in Virginia. Their fight had taken them to an elevated walkway, from which Winters had plummeted twenty feet through a table full of old specimens. Once Winters was in cuffs and handed over to Virginia police, Ella and Luca had begun driving back to D.C., but a text from Director Edis had summoned them to HQ around midnight.

Upon their arrival at HQ, Edis and two cops had ushered Ella into a conference room. Meanwhile, Luca had been taken to a different room, where Deputy Director Marshall had told him not to bother coming intothe office tomorrow, because Luca was on leave for the foreseeable future.

Luca had demanded an explanation, and Marshall told him that the Bureau needed to launch an investigation into Luca’s takedown of the suspect earlier that evening. The police report claimed that Winters’ positioning on the table suggested Luca had thrown him off the walkway – a potentially fatal maneuver – and then Luca had admitted to doing just that. Luca had then received a brief lecture in excessive force, as though it was something that could be quantified and measured in neat little units of necessary violence. Marshall reminded him that Luca had a gun on his hip, and that it was easier to justify a bullet to the head than a million shards of glass to the spine.

Any resistance on Luca’s part had been futile, because while he might be a newbie at the Bureau, he knew this missive had come from directly from Edis, and a spot on the director’s shit list was best avoided. Luca thought it was remarkable how quickly he’d gone from golden boy to rogue agent, but at the end of it, Luca wasn’t about to apologize for what he did. If he hadn’t thrown Winters off that walkway, it might have been him or Ella leaving on gurneys instead.

So now Luca had pending administrative leave in his future. For how long? He had no idea. People around HQ said that paid leave was like a lottery win in this game, because you got the money without the risk, but nobody signed up to become an FBI Special Agent for the money.

And really, the biggest question on Luca’s mind was – did Ella’s incarceration have anything to do with this?

He checked his phone again. Checked the last time Ella was online. 11:36 PM last night. He fired off another text.

‘Where are you? Call me.’

The message joined its siblings in digital limbo.

Something was wrong here. Not regular wrong, but the kind of wrong he swore he’d never get himself into. The way those uniforms had blocked him from following Ella into that conference room. The look on Edis's face - not anger or disappointment, but something closer to dread.

Luca mustered up the willpower to switch the coffee machine on, then paced the kitchen while it brewed, though his stomach rolled at the smell. His tactical brain kept circling back to those final moments at headquarters. The way Ella had squeezed his arm before disappearingbehind that door. Like she knew something he didn't. Like she was trying to say goodbye without words.

Then three sharp knocks shattered his spiral.

Not Ella – she had keys and wouldn't knock anyway. Not Marshall – he'd have called first, if only to maximize the psychological impact. Probably some fresh-faced agent sent to collect his badge and gun, make his suspension official with all the warmth of a tax audit.

The knock came again. Harder. The kind of knock that saidthis isn't a social call.

Luca moved to the door and peered through the spyhole.

Three men in suits.

Notthe tailored FBI kind, but the off-the-rack variety that state cops lived in. Luca’s stomach performed a free fall. His mind jumped to every scenario possible. What the hell was going on?

Before he could worry himself to death, he yanked the door open.

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