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Then where was his body?
Oh God, had she had some sort of psychotic breakdown and imagined she’d seen a dead body with its throat cut?
Maybe that was why her mother had abandoned her all those years ago. Because the condition was hereditary, and she’d known she couldn’t cope with the fact that at some stage in her daughter’s life, she was going to start seeing things that weren’t there?
It would certainly explain— “Honey?” Mia looked around frantically for the dog but couldn’t see her. “Where is she?” she demanded of Darius, terrified something might have happened to the dog.
“Here she is, miss.” A second man stepped forward. “She was shut away in one of the bedrooms.” The golden Labrador tried to break free of the hold he had on her collar.
“You can let her go,” Darius instructed. “She and Mia are friends.”
Mia gave a cry of relief and threw her arms about the dog the moment she was released, burying her face in the warmth of Honey’s neck. She immediately felt Honey’s aura of calm smoothing out the jangling of her shredded nerves.
Enough so that seconds later, she felt able to look at Darius sitting on the floor beside her, his hair dishevelled, a worried frown creasing his brow as he watched her.
Could she tell him what she’d seen, even though Giles Fletcher’s body was no longer there?
In that case, she would be telling Darius what she’dthoughtshe’d seen.
Obviously, someone had wrecked the apartment and shut Honey in one of the bedroomsandhit Mia on the head. But would Darius believe her if she told him she’d also seen Giles’s body lying on the floor, the wound on his throat gaping open—
“Oh God!” Mia pushed away from Honey before scrabbling to her feet and rushing down the hallway to the bathroom. She bent over just in time to be violently sick into the toilet bowl.
Every time she thought about that unnatural gaping wound in Giles’s throat, another wave of nausea overtook her, until there was nothing left for her to bring up but bile.
“Thank you,” she murmured a minute or so later as a cool cloth was placed on her forehead. By Darius? She doubted it was the man with him. “I’m so sorry about this. I just— I saw— There was—” She didn’t get any further as another wave of nausea launched out another stream of bile from the depths of her stomach.
* * *
Darius waited to speak to Mia again until the waves of sickness had passed and she’d pulled herself into a sitting position with her back against the bath. Her knees were drawn up defensively, her face deathly pale, appearing even more so against the frame of her black hair. “Do you have any idea what happened in the apartment— Whoa.” He moved quickly up onto his knees to curl his hand about Mia’s nape and pushed her head down between her knees as her face took on a grayish tinge.
Whatever Mia had seen here this morning, it had obviously affected her so deeply, she was hardly recognizable as the cheeky imp of yesterday.
Had Fletcher attacked her, as Darius had feared a client might one day do, and the broken furniture and other destruction in this room were a result of that?
The extent of the damage to the furniture and paintings seemed a little extreme for that to be the case. Mia also didn’t look as if her clothing had been ripped or otherwise disturbed.
Besides, there was something about the apartment that gave him an uneasy churning in the bottom of his stomach.
“Deep breaths,” he instructed Mia before looking across at Ron. “Is the rest of the apartment like the sitting room?”
The other man nodded. “Both bedrooms and the ensuite bathroom and main bathroom. I haven’t looked in the kitchen yet, but I’m presuming that will be the same.”
“Could you check, please? And bring a cold glass of water back for Miss Smith?” He waited until the other man had left before prompting. “What did you see, Mia?”
She raised her head to look at him with beautiful and haunted green eyes. “It was so… I still can’t believe…” She swallowed hard. “I’m worried you won’t believe me.”
“I’ll believe you,” he stated firmly. At no time during their admittedly brief acquaintance had Mia given him the impression she was in the habit of lying or becoming hysterical. Besides, that uneasy but familiar churning in his gut told him, unlikely as it might seem, he already half knew what she was going to say.
Her gaze warmed slightly, but her throat moved as she swallowed before speaking. “I saw— I saw—”
“Take your time,” he encouraged as he rubbed soothing circles on her back, hating to see the tears that had started to fall down her pale cheeks. “The kitchen?” he prompted Ron as he handed him the requested glass of water, which was immediately taken and drunk down quickly by Mia.
The other man immediately nodded confirmation the kitchen was in the same chaos as the rest of the apartment. “I checked in with Dave while I was in there. There have only been residents coming and going into the apartment building since we arrived, with three visitors logged before we got here, sometime between seven and ten o’clock. They were Miss Smith and two delivery men, who arrived separately to her. Except the men weren’t delivering anything.” He frowned. “They took something away.”
“Was it a large rolled-up rug?”
Darius turned to look curiously at Mia, having noted the strain in her voice and her now-hopeful expression as she gazed up at Ron.
