NICOLAI
“Stop the video.”
“That woman is—” The crack in her voice was disgust and terror, and she finally dropped the phone onto her lap. “She’sscreaming.It’s muted, but my God, thewayshe’sscreaming. That wasn’t real.Please tell me it wasn’treal.”
I snatched my phone from the rumpled sheets, its screen flickering with horrors, and thumb-tapped to stop the video. An unfortunate close-up of the woman’s sliced, screaming face filled the glass before I swiped it away and clicked the side button to turn off the screen.
“That wasn’tyou,though,” Lexi insisted, staring at me. “That man who was hurting her, it wasn’tyou.”
The attacker in the video had a more wiry build than I did, paler brown hair, and twitchy shrugs and shoulder jerks, while I tended to remain quiet, physically. “It wasn’t me.”
“You haven’t—ever—you haven’tdonesomething like that.”
“I have not, and I would never do such things to anyone.” And that was my foible.
“Thenwhy?”
I couldn’t meet her gaze. She would be unnerved that I might be the kind of person who would casually receive such atrocities on my phone. Any halfway decent person would be repulsed. “It’s a threat.”
“Do youknowthat woman? Is sheokaynow?”
“No.”
“Which question did you answer?”
My heart was thrumming again. “I never met her.”
“We have to find out where she is. We have tohelpher.”
My voice was quiet, but I had to push air past the hard clench in my throat. “She’s beyond help.”
Her tears were starting, deep moral pain crumpling her face. “You don’tknowthat.We have to help her.”
I’d felt the same earlier, but the human body can’t sustain such rage, especially when one is utterly helpless. “We can’t.” The phone’s screen remained dead in my hand. “The video continues. You don’t want to see it.”
“It couldn’t get any—” Her face glitched, froze, and she swayed before she crumpled over, her hands smashed over her face.“No.”
“You don’t want to see it.” Repeating it felt stupid, but my mind was quaking as hard as her shoulders. “The video was filmed a few months ago. Probably February.”
“But how do youknow?”
Because she and her husband had disappeared around Valentine’s Day. The news of their murder had been whispered in disgusted hisses in March as the horses had thundered over the hedges and fences at the springtime Cheltenham Festival in Gloucestershire, as our attempts to close ranks hadn’t succeeded.
I shouldn’t have reached for her, but Lexi was sobbing in a miserable little heap. My hand stole across the gulf of blankets between us, hovering over the few inches that felt like a force field because Ishould nottouch her. This grief, this rage, this agonizing moral injury would force her to leave me, and she had to.
My fingertips touched down on the softness of her tee shirt first, then spread, and my palm settled on her back as she gasped and shuddered with sobs. “You shouldn’t have seen that,” I murmured to her.
“No,thatshould have never happened!Notthat I shouldn’t haveseenit.Notthat they shouldn’t have gottencaught.We need to throw them in avolcanoor something. We needto stop themfrom doing this to anyoneeveragain.”
That video was not the very worst of the rumors. “It is why you need to pack your things right now and leave. This video is a threat.”
“You can’t tell me that you live withthreatslike that.”
“Not usually this . . . explicit.” I leaned back, steadying myself with my hand stroking her back. I laid my phone on the nightstand and snagged the box of tissues beside it with one finger, offering it to her while I rubbed her spine. “The only way I can protect you from them is to divorce you, annul the marriage, and remove you from my life. You need to go somewhere else,anywhereelse. Don’t try to contact me.”
She snatched a tissue from my offered box and dragged it into the miserable ball she’d curled into. “They shouldn’t have done that to her. No one shouldeverdo that. There’s noreasonthat shouldeverhappen.”
“Her husband was a journalist who was writing about criminal business enterprises, certain heinous crimes, and the politicians and other powerful people they were extorting for engaging in illegal actions.”
