He shakes his head but there’s nothing about his tone that convinces me he gives a shit.
“She’s obviously a sex worker,” he continues, nodding toward the incriminating photographs. “No idea why. She trained in a perfectly respectable profession and could get a job at any New York hospital. But for some reason, she chosethat.” He shrugs. “She always was a little slut, mind. I thought it best you knew. Don’t want a scandal like that rocking your…business, right?”
A small but highly flammable ball is forming in the pit of my stomach, drawing in heat like oxygen to a flame.
“Pfeiffer is not a sex worker.” My voice sounds like it’s languishing in the bowels of hell.
“Not now, maybe, but?—”
“Shut the FUCK up while I’m speaking.”
The ball is growing bigger, filling out my stomach, leaching into my chest, filling me with red, raging lava.
“Pfeiffer is not and never has been a sex worker,” I grit out low and slow. “You wanna know how I know this?”
Callum takes a small step back and I realize I’ve risen from my stool, taken three slow strides toward him and am now bearing down over his measly, pathetic frame.
“Because I’ve had eyes on her the last fifteen years and up until two nights ago, she was avirgin.”
A thin, nervous laugh bursts from his scabby mouth. “You can’t know that. I’m telling the tru?—”
“Oh really? You wanna know how I know that? Huh?” I fist his shirt in one hand, pulling the fabric tight around his neck. His eyes pop, and finally the arrogant sneer he’s carried up to now slides off his face.
“I know her virginity was still intact, becauseIwas the one who took it.”
My molars grind.
“È stata la cosa più bella che qualcuno mi abbia mai regalato.”
It was the most beautiful gift anyone has ever given me.
He tries to swallow but can’t because my fist beneath hisAdam’s apple is pressing against his windpipe. I let go and shove him backward before returning to the photographs.
“Now tell me again, where the fuck did you get these photographs?”
“Th—they were in her bedside drawer.”
“Ah,” I nod. “Hers.”
I scan the pictures again, not looking for proof that it’s her, because it is—that’s obvious. I’m looking for something else. The reason why. Why would she pose like this for someone? It seems extremely out of character for her—for a virgin.
Tuning out his whiny explanations, I zone in on the shape of her limbs and the lines of her muscles. She’s lax, everywhere, which suggests she wasn’t engaged in the moment—she wasn’tthere.
It hits me. She was unconscious.
With that clarity, I look again, flicking through each image with the lens of a forensic assessor, not someone who… cares.
The sixth sense I honed during those years of utter darkness snaps into gear and I search for the signs. Her skin is slightly greyish and waxy, her limbs too loose and contorted into unnatural shapes.
She’s been posed.
Oh so slowly, I rake my gaze back to the scrawny bastard.
“You did this,” I growl.
He takes another step back, bumping into Lorcan who snickers and stays rock still.
I prowl toward him, enjoying the widening of his eyes and the stutter of his lips.
