Page 202
“Mr. Lazarev, did you kill your wife?”
“Mr. Lazarev, is this where you’ve been hiding?”
“Mr. Lazarev, what do you have to say to the family of your victim?”
He looks straight ahead and doesn’t acknowledge any one of them.
The arresting officers guide him toward one of the waiting squad cars. One ballsy reporter shoves a microphone in his face and gets promptly shouldered aside by a cop. A camera flash explodes. Then another.
And then, somehow, across the chaos and the noise and the crush of bodies pressing in on all sides, Lukas looks out into the darkness like he knows exactly what he’ll see…
… and his eyes find mine.
The world narrows to just the two of us—the beast in handcuffs, the woman who loves him standing still on the corner.
Go, his eyes seem to say.Run.
I don’t move.
An officer’s hand presses down on his silver head, folding him into the backseat of the cruiser. Lukas holds my gaze until the very last second, when the door swings shut and tinted glass hides him from view.
Then he’s gone.
The engine turns over. The cruiser pulls away from the curb, parting the sea of reporters, who keep shouting and screeching until he’s finally disappeared.
I fall to the ground, my back against a muddy tire, ass in the melting snow, and I weep for all the things I thought I’d have that have been taken away from me.
Again.
Again.
Again.
69
RAE
NYPD MEDIA RELATIONS — PRESS ACCESS
ACCREDITED MEDIA ON SCENE:
NY1, ABC7, CNN, NBC, FOX5, CBS, AP, Reuters, NY Post, Daily News…
I don’t get to cry alone for long, though.
“Hey! Are you…?”
My head snaps up, wet cheeks burning in the cold, and I see a guy in a puffy jacket breaking away from the media scrum. He’s got a press badge dangling from his neck and recognition lighting up his face like he just won the lottery.
“That’s her!” he bellows over his shoulder to his fellow hawks, pointing a grubby finger directly at me. “That’s the woman from the auction! The five-million-dollar girl!”
Oh, no.
No, no, no, no, no.
This is the last thing I need right now.
But there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. The horde pivots as one. Dozens of heads swivel in my direction. Camera lenses glint under the streetlights like the eyes of predators peering out from the underbrush.
