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She’s getting closer to speaking in sentences. That’s good. But she’s still staring at the computer screen like it’s a nest of fucking tarantulas.
Now’s as good a time as any to shut that goddamn email. I’m pretty sure Alix doesn’t notice when I ease her hand off the mouse, but she sighs when the message closes. We’re both left staring at the Diamond Freeport logo, centered on the screen.
I say, “I can’t keep you safe, if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”
Her eyes finally meet mine. The whiskey warmth I’m used to is gone, replaced by something cold and lonely, like the dirt on top of a new grave. “I’ve got to go,” she says.
“The fuck you do.”
“They’re after me,” she says. “I’m the one who killed their brother. They won’t care about you after I leave.”
She’s talking in a weird voice, like she’s reading words printed on the wall behind me. She’s got a ghost-look in her eyes, same as she did after Herzog bled out on my dining room floor.
She’s not in her right mind. I know that. But something jackknifes inside me at the casual way she says it—after I leave.
“Not gonna happen,” I say.
“You don’t know these men.”
“I know men like them.”
She shakes her head. “Youthinkyou do—”
I cut her off, fueled by rage that she ever needed to deal with those jizzstains on her own. “You’re not leaving.”
“But I—”
“Not a chance.”
“You’d be safe—”
“No.” I cut off her immediate argument. “I spent three years looking for you, waiting for you, praying to a god I don’t believe in that you’d come back.” Her face softens just a little, but I have to go on. “I just spent two weeks without you. Two weeks not sleeping. Not eating. There is no way in hell I’m letting you walk out that door now.”
She still protests. “But I’m the one who did it. I killed Herzog.”
“AndI’mthe one who covered up what happened. Your leaving now doesn’t get me off the hook. We’re in this together.”
“Because of what I did.”
She wants to be guilty. “Society” and “rules” say taking another life is wrong. But some fucking cumwipes don’t belong in society. Some rules don’t apply. “You just read their goddamn demands,” I say. “A billion dollars and a freeport gallery. You think they’ll give up a chance like that without fighting?”
And that’s the argument that wins, at least for now. Acceptance—or maybe it’s resignation—relaxes every muscle in her body. I recognize a similar response in my own. She’s not leaving. I’m safe.
Safe enough, anyway, to ask, “What are their names? The brothers?”
“Jonas,” she says, using the German pronunciation. “And Ansel.”
“Where do they live?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I only saw them at his house.”
Him. Klaus, the rat-fuck bastard. “They’re in the same business?”
This time she shrugs. “They didn’t spend their time talking.”
She’s hugging herself, rubbing her arms like the temperature on this August morning has dipped somewhere south of zero. I think about that copper pitcher, the one that made her catatonic. I don’t know what they did to her, but I’ve got a pretty twisted imagination.
They’re going to pay. Pay until it hurts. Way past that point. I’m going to kill the cocksuckers. I could do it with my bare hands. That’s what krav maga’s taught me, Beast or no fucking Beast.
