Why was she in Stockholm?
That didn’t matter.
He raced through the city, the streets familiar yet foreign. He hadn’t lived here since his second wife died.
He found the first drops of blood on the steps of the austere central bank. He didn’t pause to check. He didn’t have to. He knew it was Nikolett’s blood.
He burst through the doors, stopping when he found himself in a massive round room nearly five stories high. Elevated walkways circled the walls which were lined with three levels of books. Above that was a band of arched windows on what would be the fourth floor.
Not the bank then, the Stockholm Public Library.
There was no circulation desk or computer stations, only a single round table directly under the massive, curved chandelier.
A woman lay on the table, naked, arms and legs spread like the Vitruvian man.
Eric ran for her, desperately sure that he could still save her.
Even as he saw the blood. The exposed bone and muscle.
Nikolett lay face-up on the table, dead.
Her right arm was severed at the elbow, though the detached limb lay in place, the gap between the pieces just wide enough he could see the exposed ends of her arm bones peeking out from below the neatly severed skin and muscle. Her lower leg was also detached mid-shin, but here it looked like it had been torn away. Ragged flaps of skin dangled over mutilated muscle. A few bone shards dotted the blood pooled in the gap between the pieces of her.
She was thin, her ribs, collarbones, and hipbones starkly visible under her pale, blood-marked and tightly drawn skin. She’d starved before she died.
The skin of her thighs and abdomen was destroyed—cuts and burns partially hidden by blood that had dried black.
The tri-spiral symbol of the Masters’ Admiralty had been branded into her breast.
He’d known it would end like this. He loved her and that would be the reason she died. There was an odd comfort in that—the terrible thing he knew would happen had finally happened, and now he didn’t have to live with that dread anymore.
Eric followed the curve of the table to her head. Nikolett’s pale hair was spread out like a halo around her.
He felt nothing except cold acceptance until he saw her face.
She looked terrified.
Nikolett’s eyes were open, one staring sightlessly up at the ceiling. The other was a messy, bloody hole. Her mouth too was open in a scream, her tongue missing. Her face had frozen inthe moment of her death, perfectly preserving the terror that wrinkled her forehead and widened her eyes.
That blessed, numbing cold fractured as Eric bent over her broken body.
Eric sat bolt upright, heart racing.
The roar of rage and grief he’d been about to release in the nightmare tightened his throat muscles, and he swallowed down the sound.
It took several minutes for him to orient himself—he was in his apartment, apparently having fallen asleep on the couch despite the fact it was midday. That wasn’t surprising since last night, he’d woken up three times due to the nightmares, though those had been fragments with vague shadows compared to the graphic detail of this one.
He could still see her in his mind’s eye, the dream refusing to fade the way it should.
“Fuck you,” he muttered at his subconscious.
Eric rested his elbows on his knees, head bowed. He shivered a little as the heat that had gripped his body during the nightmare faded, leaving behind a layer of cold sweat on his skin.
His phone chirped and a second later, the panel mounted on the wall by the door echoed the sound. Someone was paging him using the intercom that was built into their security system.
He wanted to ignore it. Fuck, he wanted to ignore it.
But maybe someone else’s crisis or problem was exactly what he needed.
