“Oh my God,” Nysus says in my ear.
Beyond the half wall, in the bedroom area, a young woman—a girl, really—drifts silently in the darkness, above the king-sized bed.
Her slim legs and vulnerable-looking bare feet peek out from beneath the gently undulating hem of her white dress. Frenzied slashes and cuts mar the tight torso of the dress and the girl’s arms and chest, reducing both skin and fabric to ribbons, but strangely, there’s little blood.
The nails on her toes have gone blue. Her thin blond hair hovers in a cloud around her head, and her bulging eyes are open and unseeing, filmy with death and frosted over in tiny crystals. Her hand is locked at her throat, fingers looped inside… something.
Gold buried deep in her frozen skin winks in the light, and I trace the line of it. A necklace, more of a chain, is around her neck and looped over the brass light fixture on the wall above the bed, holding her in place. She’s hanging, or would be if there was gravity. A key—heavy, metallic, and a now-familiar shape—bobs at the far end of the chain, near the fixture. Her fingertips remain caughtinside the chain, as if she changed her mind at the last minute, or as if she wanted to be sure it would hold.
Fuck.
I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment, but the image hangs behind my darkened eyelids. Her mouth moves, trying to speak, her fingers wiggling at her throat in an attempt to gain air.
No. None of that.I open my eyes immediately, focusing instead on the carpet, a diamond pattern in cream and brown.
“That’s Cattie Dunleavy,” Nysus says quietly. “Her sister, Opal, is out in the atrium.”
Opal with the knife taped to her hand?
“What…” Kane rasps. Then he clears his throat and tries again. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Nysus says, his voice trembling. “I…”
“She was already dead,” I say slowly, putting the pieces together and glancing up at her to confirm my theory. “That’s why there’s no blood. Someone stabbed her after she died.” After she hung herself or someone else hung her. I suppose it’s impossible to know for sure.
But going after someone with a knife like that, when they’re already dead? That’s rage, both excessive and personal.
Did her sister hate her that much?
I look up to Cattie’s face, not even sure what I’m searching for. This time, though, I notice red parallel lines etched into her face, above her eyebrows and just below her lower lids.
“Nysus, do you see that?” I ask, squinting. Maybe it’s burst blood vessels or the start of decay. Depending on how long the heat and air were on after this happened, that could be. But the lines are so precise…
“What, exactly?” he asks, uncomfortable. “The video feed from your helmet cam isn’t exactly high-res and I, uh… kind of…”
He doesn’t want to study her that closely. I don’t blame him. But in spite of everything we know—or suppose—I’m still on the hunt for answers as to what went down and how.
I push off the half wall to move closer for a better look. Unfortunately, I miss my grab for the edge of the bed, and I collide with her legs, which are disturbingly solid in a way that human flesh should not be.
Her frozen body dangles and shifts on the chain from the collision, and an involuntary shudder racks me within my suit. But I manage to catch myself on the nightstand, bringing me nearly face-to-face with Cattie.
Up close, the damage to her neck is even more horrifying. The necklace looks like a wire cutting through clay.
Her face, though… The lines on her skin are actually thin bloody gougesinher skin. Her eyes are open, so it’s not possible to tell for sure, but I’m guessing the wounds are continuous from above her eyebrows, across her eyelids, and down. “I think someone tried to claw at her eyes.” Jesus, her sister again?
“Claire,” Kane says behind me. “Her hand.”
Automatically, I look to the fingers wrapped in the chain at her neck, but then I see what Kane has noticed: on her other hand, the one floating gently at her side, her manicured nails are broken and ragged and her fingertips are bloodied.
“You think she did this?” I ask in disbelief. “Why would she claw at her own eyes?” Especially if she was already planning on hanging herself.
“I don’t know,” Kane says, tension in his voice.
“Oh, Cattie,” Nysus says mournfully. “She was always the nicer one.”
His sadness makes me feel slightly less gruesome about the next portion of our task. At least someone here knows her—sort of—and cares about her specific fate beyond a general mourning for the loss of life.
Trying not to look too closely at Cattie herself, I examine the loops of chain over the brass fixture. Getting her untangled from that will be next to impossible. It must have taken extreme determination to succeed. Or extreme desperation.
