When she finally went quiet again, Lainey turned away from her and paced three steps. Her brow drew together tight, and her eyes pinched.
“Mayhem.” I kept my tone even and quiet. I didn’t want to surprise her.
The torment in her hazel eyes gutted me. “She’s alive.”
“That’s good.”
I was waiting for the but.
“But there are auctions coming up and she’s fresh, and new. Perfect for the right clientele.”
My upper lip curled as I stared at the pale sobbing woman in the chair. “How is she a part of this?”
“A chaperone. Exactly what Margareta said she was. She goes to Germany regularly for her shop, so she brings back girls when they need a ride. She’s also ‘safer’ for them because she seems so friendly.”
Disgust filtered through him.
Katerina snapped something out and Lainey whirled. In one smooth movement, she struck her across the forehead. The blow cracked audibly. The second came out meatier. Then Katerina sagged as blood spattered the paper beyond her.
It was a wild burst of rage, directly focused on the shop owner. Lainey’s arm lowered, the two-by-four dangling from her fingers. I closed the distance, checked Katerina’s pulse.
Dead.
My phone buzzed. I let it go unanswered for a moment as I took the heavy strip of wood from Lainey. She closed her eyes and when she reached for me, I dragged her close and just held her. Dropping the wood to the side, I pulled out my phone.
Bodhi was here.
I eyed the dead woman and then the shop.
Good, we were gonna need help with the body cleanup.
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
LAINEY
For what felt like the hundredth time, I checked my watch. Bodhi and Milo took care of the shop, while we made some payments to deal with the CCTV. Fletcher couldn’t be here, but Vienna had a number of connections. So did Bodhi.
We used all of them.
Three hours after clearing the scene at the print shop, we were back at the apartment. Bodhi had poured me a drink but I didn’t want the alcohol. I couldn’t sit still.
It was like someone had dropped me into a bell and then struck the side of it. Everything under my skin vibrated. The trembling kept translating to my hands unless I kept moving.
So rather than sit there and stare at the photo of Andrea, I paced. The photo itself was in a plastic bag on the table. Face up.
Each time I made a pass, I looked at her beautiful face and the gong rang again. Every single time.
“Mayhem,” Pretty Boy tried. He’d stopped asking me to sit down. But he had made me change. It was a compromise. They wanted my bloodied clothes and I wanted to be ready to leave as soon as Adam and Ezra were back.
“How much longer?” I asked, glancing at my watch, though it hadn’t changed in the twenty seconds since I last looked at it.
“They’re close,” Bodhi answered. He stood with his hands braced on the back of the sofa. Since arriving to help us with the body, he’d been steady as hell. I’d killed before. Katerina was not my first.
When I poisoned King and slit Wallace Graham’s throat, it had been thought out ahead of time. Planned. Well, to be fair the slitting of Graham’s throat had been a bit more of an impulse for how we would kill him. Killing him had been at the top of the list since I learned what he’d done to Ezra.
However, those impulses had been tempered by planning and foreknowledge. When we went to the print shop today, I’d been more curious than anything. So far, every avenue we’d taken to find Andrea found us at an impasse.
What could a print shop possibly have to do with anything? The woman had sputtered a bunch of half-formed lies when she found us inside. The fact that her gaze kept sliding off and she went from defensive to belligerent back to defensive told me a lot.
Grandfather once stressed that finding the truth meant listening to more than just the content of what was being said. Observe how it was being spoken. How direct were the speaker’s actions. Did they make eye contact?
Beyond the physical cues, there were also the nonverbal, verbal adjacent cues found in tone and word choice. Liars tended to use far more hyperbole. They cursed more, used distracting word choices, and hedge words.
Nothing was ever their fault. A dozen different explanations. Conversely, when that didn’t work, go on the offense. Attack the interrogator. The strangest part of it all… Liars tended to use far longer, more convoluted sentences than people telling you the truth.
Katerina had checked off every single box. Evasive. Abusive. Pleading. When she finally gave me the name of a school, it had been more in terror and pain than anything else.
The realization that I’d pulled out all of her nails without hesitation began to sink in. When I would have retreated, taken a breath, she’d taunted that I was probably too late anyway. There was a huge auction coming and little virgin westerners were very popular.
Rage spilled into my veins. Without an ounce of cool contemplation or remorse, I’d swung the wooden brace I’d been holding. Not once, but twice.
The first time had been a reaction. The second? Pure action. Both had come from the frenzy of pure fury. Selling people in the first place was disgusting. The fact she’d actually participated in getting my sister here just—
No, Katerina needed to die. We’d wrapped the body in shrink wrap from one of her many machines. A crew would come to deal with the scene, while another took care of the body. It had all gone surprisingly smooth.
