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Echoing noises from the hallway floated into the cemented room, and I strode back to the limp bed stationed by the wall. Someone screamed, and a bunch of unidentified others threw curses at a few officers passing by.
I blocked them out, tuned off every one of their desperate attempts to rile up the policemen, and focused on the litter in front of me.
Laying on the dusty brown sheets were balls of paper,crumpledpaper—testaments of an hour of wasted efforts—because, somehow, I wasn’t getting the edges right. But in the midst of the failures, staring up at me, was the golden goose.
Well, thealmostfinished golden goose.
I crossed one leg over the other and sharpened the pencil with a rough brush on the cemented ground.
Four nights ago, I never thought I’d be sitting in a jail cell, using a sketchbook tossed into the room by a frightened cop.
But here I was, filthy, in stinking clothes that could have passed off for rags, and idle, with all my concentration on the black pencil and white piece of paper as I slowly sketched the soft curve of her jaw and the hard lines over her eyes.
As fast as the seconds ticked by, the quicker the drawing came alive. Each stroke provoked more thoughts in my mind, like, for instance, what fucking evidence could she have against me?
I shaded her left eyebrow, remembering how it arched when I’d challenged the veracity of her claim.
How the fuck did she even know?
The pencil glided to the corner of her eyes, detailing the crinkles when they’d narrowed dangerously.
I always,fucking always,made sure to never leave any incriminating thing behind at the scene of the crime. Including the latePahkan’s study.
I remembered it like it was yesterday: the pretense of a warm welcome but a guarded look on his face when I paid him a surprise visit, his sudden caution when I pulled out my gun, and the anger radiating off him when he realized my intent. To prepare him for an early grave.
“What is this? Put away that fucking gun now.”
I waved it in the air, strengthened my resolve, and said, “No.”
His confidence wavered then when he knew there was no changing my mind. He’d seen how it was going to end and tried to plead. “Why will you betray me like this, Egor?”
“Your gimmicks won’t work on me, Uncle. Your time is up.”
He’d started talking….
And I’d pulled the trigger.
I remembered watching the light leave his eyes and seeing his body crumple to the ground, and after I sent the second bullet through his skull, I remembered walking out of that study without leaving any trace behind.
Just his lifeless, bloodied body on the carpet and nothing else. No one would have had the capacity or intellect high enough to trace his death back to me.
Two years later, Detective Freya Fox popped up from out of fucking nowhere like a mole to shatter the memory in my head and disprove that theory.
Many thoughts poked the back of my brain like a needle. Her identity seemed plain and simple, but I knew women like her had background stories. The type that fueled their motivation to do shit like this.
She was like a silent bomb, an unexpected one. Dropped in the middle of a town going about their normal business. Just before the explosions happened.
She’d disrupted everything. Managed to waltz right in and shake the foundations of a structure I’d raised over the years. And I wanted to know everything about her.Neededto arm myself with enough information to teach her the basic lesson every amateur needed to learn: No one messed with Egor Yezhov and got away with it.
Not even if they had pretty brown eyes and could speak four languages.
I finished the shade on her right eyebrow, added an extra dark stroke to the messy curls hanging over her eyes, and dusted the sketch with the back of my fingers.
I looked at her, and she looked back at me, fierce and fearless, just like she had done back then in the interrogation room.
My lips tilted up.
At the same time, the steel bars rolled backward with a loud clank, and two buffy men marched in with puffed-up chests.
