But my mouth wouldn't work.
The darkness deepened. Not the dark I was familiar with. No. This was different. This was the darkness beneath the darkness. The one that had no floor, no walls, no ceiling. The one that erased sound and sensation and time and swallowed everything whole.
His quiet sob was the last thing I heard.
Then that went, too.
And there was nothing.
CHAPTER 21
MILO
I'd picked this place for a reason. It was just south of Bastrop, forty minutes from anything, surrounded by nothing but scrubland and silence. An abandoned building made up of the poured foundation and wooden walls. The kind of place where sounds went in and didn't come out. I'd cleaned up two bodies here, maybe three years ago, from an Italian job. The concrete still had faint discoloration near the west wall if you knew where to look, and I knew where to look.
I'd been here since noon, preparing.
The chair was positioned center of the room. Metal. No armrests. The kind you'd find in a church basement or a community center, which is what this building might have been in another life. Now it was a stage, and I was building the set.
The camera sat on a tripod eight feet from the chair, angled to capture the full frame. I'd tested the recording three times. Checked the battery twice. Adjusted the height so the lens would catch her face, her body, the full scope of what was about to happen. Konstantin wanted proof. He wanted to see her breakand he wanted to watch it on a screen and feel satisfied that the problem had been resolved.
I was going to give him exactly what he fucking wanted.
Or close enough.
The syringe was in my jacket pocket. Midazolam and fentanyl, dosed by a doctor who hadn't asked a single question once he saw the amount of cash I paid him. The cocktail would slow her heart to nearly nothing. Make her breathing so shallow it would be invisible to anyone who wasn't pressing fingers to her throat. Her pulse barely discernible to the touch. To the camera, to a man watching from across the room, she would look dead.
She needed to look dead.
The substitute body was in the trunk of a car parked behind the building. Jane Doe from the county morgue, close enough in build and age that they'd believe me when I pulled it out of my trunk to get rid of. I'd even found a green velvet dress similar to the one Raven was wearing. And I'd handled the acquisition myself. No middlemen. No loose ends.
The fire accelerant was staged in the northeast corner. Gasoline and acetone. Hot enough to corrupt DNA. Fast enough to gut the building before anyone noticed the smoke.
I'd thought of everything.
Everything except how I was going to live with this.
I stood in the center of the warehouse and stared at the chair and breathed and built the mask, layer by layer, the way I'd been building it since I was eight years old and my father handed me a mop and pointed at a dead woman's blood and said,Clean it up, son. It's just a mess.
Just a mess.
That's all this was.
***
Viktor's headlights cut through the warehouse windows at 8:47 PM. I heard the crunch of gravel, the engine dying, a car door. Then his footsteps. Measured, heavy, and absolutely unhurried, like he had nowhere else to be.
He stepped inside and surveyed the room the way a restaurant critic surveys a dining room. The chair. The camera. The concrete floor. Me, standing by the far wall with my hands in my pockets and my face expressionless.
"Good," he said. Just that. An approval of the stage I'd built.
He crossed the room and sat in a metal folding chair I'd placed against the wall to the right of the camera. He pulled a cigarette from his coat, lit it, and I watched as the smoke curled up into the stale air.
"When?" he asked.
"After her set."
He shook his head, taking a drag from his cigarette. "Now," he ordered.
