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Everything was preserved, carefully and with reverence. There was no dust on the surfaces, everything was spotless, yet the hairbrush still contained strands of dark hair.
It was very clear what this was when I entered the closet, seeing dresses, blouses, shoes … all cluttering the space, thrown the way a teenage girl would, discarding them haphazardly while deciding what to wear.
A shrine.
My fingers trailed along the fabrics, getting a taste for who this girl had been. The girl Cristian loved. Who he’d kept alive in a sick and twisted way.
She was innocent. Pure. She wore Mary Janes and listened to boy bands. If she had survived, she definitely was not being fucked by a forty-year-old in her cheerleading uniform. She wasn’t a cheerleader. I imagined she’d be part of the honor society, heading debate, loved by all. She wore fucking ribbons in her hair.
My hands stopped when they landed on a white sundress. It was expensive—that prim, rich girl look you saw in ’80s movies. Demure. The rich girls of my generation were all about showing as much skin as they could, presenting pierced belly buttons as a middle finger to their conservative parents.
The girl who wore this dress did not give a middle finger to her parents, figuratively or otherwise, that much was clear.
The girl who wore this dress had the love of the most ruthless man in the city, if not the country, before he’d turned into a monster.
This was it. This was Cristian’s one weakness. The softest part of him. Where I could draw blood, get revenge for everything he’d done to me thus far. For everything he was going to do to me.
I snatched the dress before I changed my mind, taking it to my room and burying it in my closet. That would be used later.
For now, I had to find something that Detective Harris could use.
Something that would put Cristian away for good.
Chapter Fourteen
It wasn’t a smart idea.
And I’d considered myself a smart woman.
To get to where I was, from where I came from, I’d had to be. Smart and manipulative.
Skills that were remarkably useful when trying to find incriminating evidence on my mafia Don fiancé.
But I was no sleuth. And Cristian was exceptionally shrewd. Cunning. You would need to be to get to the top and stay there. So he’d likely have cameras in the house, even if I couldn’t see them. I was being watched. We were being watched. When he took me on the dining room table, maybe even in the bedrooms.
That didn’t bother me in the way it should’ve.
My only hope was that someone wasn’t monitoring the footage in real time, and that by the time they did review it, it would be too late. If I was caught, I’d try to come up with a bullshit excuse.
No one patrolled the hallway down to Cristian’s office. I half expected Felix to melt out of the shadows. Half hoped for it, even.
But my journey to Cristian’s office was uninterrupted.
The door wasn’t locked.
I didn’t trip a silent alarm as I walked in, no booby traps took out my ankles. Nothing. Silence hummed through the office. It felt like a tomb without Cristian’s presence, even though it smelled faintly of him.
She watched me from her perch on the wall.
The girl with the closet full of expensive, demure dresses. Who smelled like innocence, purity and cheap perfume. Who was once loved by a boy who became a villain.
I hated her.
The need to rip that portrait off the wall and destroy it was almost overwhelming. But that was not the assignment.
I traipsed around the room slowly, like I had every right to be in here, just in case a guard from outside caught a glimpse or if someone came bursting in. My heartbeat was rapid, taunting me against the silence of the room, roaring in my ears. I hated that my hands shook as I opened the drawers of his desk.
There was nothing on top of the desk save for paperweights, a brass lamp and a snake plant in a brushed terracotta pot. I wondered about the plant, its purpose in here. Who watered it? Sure, snake plants were among the easiest to keep alive, but they were still living things, requiring a small amount of care and attention.
I reasoned the same person—or team of people—who kept the house immaculate were responsible for the small but vibrant plant. Cristian wasn’t one to care for and nurture anything.
The lack of computer surprised me. He had one at his office in the city, that I remembered seeing. There must be a laptop he kept with him at all times. It was impossible to exist in this world, and be as rich and powerful as he was, without something as essential as a computer.
Even if he did have one, I’d imagine it would be encrypted or at the very least, password protected. I was not a hacker, I could not break encryptions. I did know quite a few hackers, thanks to the more nefarious things we had to do to keep the elite out of prison, help them avoid alimony and hide assets, but I wasn’t about to haul in more people to this depraved world, endanger them.
