Page 26 of Only for Him
I shake my head. I feel like a teenager lying to her dad the morning after prom.
“The manager ofFabergeis dead with your name on his fucking body, G. And word isyouwere seen there last night.”
I pause. The instinct is to deny, but I know there’s no way my stalker did me the favor of wiping the cameras atFaberge.
“I went after work. Thought I’d follow up on the councilman’s connection.”
“Alone?”
“Didn’t have a warrant. Didn’t think I’d need backup to visit a sauna.”
Russo glares. “You think these guys play by the same rules as us?”
“No, I don’t,” I say. “But you know Ivan wouldn’t talk under any other circumstances.” I keep my eyes on the body, anything but Russo’s disappointment.
Russo squats next to the body. “And did he talk?”
“No.” I remember Ivan’s breath in my ear, the leer in his eyes, and the naked threat of what he wanted to do to me. “He groped me. And he slashed my tires.”
“And now his hands are gone.” Russo gives one more glare at the stumps of Ivan’s wrists, and then he looks back at me. “Awfully convenient, don’t you think?”
“It’s just another kind of threat.”
“Bullshit,” Russo snaps, patience wearing thin. “This is what happens when you go chasing leads alone. Are you trying to make yourself a goddamn suspect? If he were talking to some other scumbag and ended up with missing hands, I’d be inclined to believe that it means something. But this guy was talking toyou, G.”
Russo stands, wipes his hands on a tissue he pulls from his pocket. I stare at the body, trying to reconcile the man who groped me with the rose-stuffed corpse before me.
“I didn’t do this,” I say.
“You think I don’t know that?” He lowers his voice. “But the department isn’t going to see it that way. You met with him. He touched you. Now he’s dead with his fucking hands cut off. And we’re going to have to explain why homicide sent a detective chasing leads in the middle of the night, with no backup, no partner, and no warrant.”
You don’t know the half of it, I think.
Russo’s eyes soften, just a little. “You want to tell me what’s really going on?”
I open my mouth, close it. The earrings, the hands, the burner, the call. WhyamI hiding it? All that evidence, it’s bound to leadme somewhere, and it might lead me there a lot quicker with the department behind me.
Everything my blue-eyed shadow is doing: from the killing to the stalking to the torturing and the toying? It’s wrong.
And by keeping his secrets, I’m fully implicated.
But somehow, I know I should keep on keeping his secrets.
Like they’re meant only for me.
“You think this is a good week for me, Captain?” I say, gesturing to the body. “You think I like findingtwodead bodies with my name literally written all over them?”
We stand there for a long minute, Russo and I, him studying me and me thinking about how if my blue-eyed shadow goes to prison, then this whole thing ends.
And, fuck me, I don’t want it to end.
Not yet.
I hate myself for it, but I think I want to know just how far both of us will go.
As though answering yet another silent prayer, a chill runs up my arms, prickling the skin. For a second I think it’s just the temperature, but then I feel it: the old, animal sense of being watched. I glance up, out through the splintered window.
On the far side of the street, under a dead sodium lamp, is a man in a hoodie. Hands are deep in his pockets, he’s built like a wall—wide, tall, and brutal.
