The guards step back, eyeing me with suspicion. I ignore them.
We duck under the tape.
The smell hits me first. Copper. Old blood. And beneath it, the faint, chemical scent of cleaning fluid.
Marco’s body is gone, taken by the cleaners, but the stain remains. A dark, jagged shape on the concrete floor.
I walk over to it. I crouch down.
I touch the floor. It’s cold. Sticky.
"Where was the coin?" I ask.
Alessandro points to a spot near the head of the stain. "Here."
I look at the spot. I close my eyes, picturing it. The body. The binding. The coin.
"It's wrong," I whisper. "Everything about it is wrong."
"I know."
I stand up. I look at Alessandro. He is watching me, his face grim.
"We find them," I say. "Whoever did this."
"We find them," he agrees.
"And when we do?"
"When we do," Alessandro says, his voice cold as the rain outside, "I will show you that I don't need a coin to send a message."
I look at him. And for the first time, I see the monster behind the mask.
And I realize that I’m not the only dangerous thing in this marriage.
"Let’s go to work," I say.
And we walk back out into the rain, together.
Chapter Nine
ALESSANDRO
Killian movesthrough a crime scene the way other men move through their living rooms.
The warehouse on Pier 7 is a cavernous, echoing space that smells of diesel, salt water, and the copper-heavy stench of old blood. It is a hostile environment, cold enough to see your breath, lit by harsh industrial halogens that cast long, distorted shadows against the corrugated metal walls. Most men shrink in a space like this. They hunch their shoulders against the cold and the cruelty of what happened here.
Killian expands.
He crouches beside the stain where Marco’s body was found with the ease of someone who has spent his life in proximity to the dead. He doesn't flinch. He doesn't recoil. His eyes track the damage on the concrete—the scuff marks, the blood spatter, the drag lines—with a fluency that is, against every rational impulse I possess, compelling.
He is wearing a leather jacket over a t-shirt, jeans that are tight across the thighs, and heavy boots. He looks like a brawler. But he is working like a forensic profiler.
"The blows to the face came last," he says. His voice is low, operational—a different instrument than the one he used to mock me in the kitchen or threaten me in the dark. It is the voice of a man reading a blueprint. "The rib work came first. Left side. Methodical. Someone took their time softening him before they moved to the face to finish it."
"The initial assessment said the same," I reply, standing back, watching him.
"The initial assessment didn't say this." He points to a set of deep gouges in the concrete, near where Marco’s hands would have been. "Look at the drag marks. Shallow, erratic. He was fighting the whole time. He didn't give up."
