He’d called Gael a monster. Did that make me one too? I’ve killed—and without mercy. I might not have commissioned a portrait of myself with my victims, but did that set me apart from the man sitting in the leather seat across the aisle from me?
“How did you find out Quinn was Caruso’s wife?” I ask.
“From audio recordings,” Alexander says. “It’s somethin’ we’ve been workin’ with for the last five years or so. It’s helped us locate a good number of their places of operation. Like the deli. Though, in recent years, they started gettin’ smarter, usin’ voice changers and callin’ each other only by their codenames.”
“Do we have any other partials of her? Or her father? Or Caruso Jr?”
“We assume Caruso’s son resembles his father, though no one has ever seen the kid.” Gael nods to the tablet. “Show her, Alexander.”
“Kid?” I ask. “Isn’t he in his thirties?”
“Late twenties.” Alexander presses on his tablet’s photo app, heads into his favorites folder, and blows up an image that is so realistic it takes me a heartbeat to realize it’s a painting.
Thepainting.
The one of Gael holding Levy’s severed head in one hand, while leaning against a shelf upon which sit two other detached heads—one atop a book whose spine readsMarvels of Atlantis, and the other positioned under a glass cloche. All have their eyes wide open and terror-filled.
It’s so life-like that the tiny veins around their irises appear embossed. While they make Caruso’s dark eyes look like black holes, they make his wife’s gray ones look like shiny nickels.
I grimace as I stare into Levy’s green eyes, at the locks of his orange hair clutched in Gael’s fist, at the freckles reproduced with too much precision, and finally at the man’s ears that stick out like satellite dishes.
“Fun fact. Chairman’s wife was married to Patriot until I returned him to his maker.” My biological father’s lips quirk with amusement.
Delight is definitelynotthe emotion his “fun fact” sparks in me. If anything, the incestuous nature of the Holy Hunters’ relationships grosses me out. Much like the painting.
“AndI’m going to puke again…” Calanthe, who was just coming back down the aisle, flings her palm against her mouth and lurches back toward the restroom, her stilettos denting the plane’s beige runner.
Again?
Worry pulls me out of my chair. I push open the gaping door of the restroom and nest my palm between her shoulder blades and rub. “What do you mean again? Do you have a stomach bug?”
Calanthe dry-heaves over the metal toilet bowl, her slender fingers clutching the black marble sink top. “No.”
“Food poisoning?”
“No.”
She spits out a glob of saliva.
“Then—”
“I’m pregnant.”
“You’re…you’re…you’re…?” Shock makes me sound like a broken record.
“Pregnant.”
“With a baby?”
“No. With a stick insect.”
My blinking is out of control.
“Of course, with babies.” Calanthe splashes her mouth with water. “Plural. Three.”
I choke on my intake of air, then proceed to wheeze like I’m missing a lung. “Three?”
Calanthe pats her mouth dry on a towel. “Why areyouin shock? Your uterus isn’t about to become an overbooked Airbnb.”
