King Among the Dead - Lauren Gilley Page 0,61

But these wide, glossy tiles held them silently.

They went down a short hallway, where a lamp burned on a side table: a waste of electricity; a comfort to someone, she thought, should they wake and go wandering in the middle of the night. A photo sat beneath it: a couple sitting pressed together on a sofa beneath an elaborate art installation. Both middle aged, though the woman was trying to look younger, breasts about to spill from the tight bodice of her dress. Bot held champagne flutes and wore wide smiles – that didn’t touch their eyes.

Rose wondered who they were, even as she followed Beck up a flight of modern glass steps, across a landing, and to a closed door.

He paused there a moment, rolling his shoulders. Produced a knife from one of the holsters inside his jacket.

When Rose saw the wink of its edge, she drew her own. Was ready when he met her gaze, and nodded.

He nodded back, took a breath that flared his nostrils – then turned the handle and swept into the room.

It was pitch black. Rose was aware of furniture, could tell the shape of the room based on the startled gasp and the rustle of sheets. The hallway had been dim, but offered enough light to lay a panel down on the floor, on the foot of the bed. Enough to see kicking feet, and flying blankets.

Beck was ahead of her.

“What the hell?” a man’s voice roared. “What do you think you’re–” The words morphed into a choked-off sound of pain.

A woman screamed.

Rose caught a glimpse of flashing white satin, and she didn’t think – she struck. Her knife bit into flesh, and there was another scream, this one ear-piercing. A punched-out sound of pain. She withdrew the knife, and struck again, higher, and the scream became a liquid gurgle.

She stepped back, and heard the body drop; heard it thrash against the fibers of the shag rug.

The lights came on, and she squinted against the brightness.

Two bodies lay on the ground, the man dead, the woman still dying. The man had been killed swiftly and neatly, a puncture in the side of his throat that had sent a waterfall of blood down his bare torso. He’d fallen back against his nightstand, sitting upright, eyes glassy and unseeing, hands open in his lap, wet and crimson where he’d flailed at his wound before weakness overtook him. The blood dripped down onto the cream rug; it had smeared on the cream bed linens.

The woman – Rose’s kill – died as she watched, her face going slack, her hands uncurling. She was not the woman in the photo downstairs, but a much-younger blonde. Rose had gotten her between the ribs, first, and then found her throat on the second try, a messy, inelegant cut that had nonetheless done the trick.

Beck came to stand beside her, surveying their work. She could feel the energy pouring off of him, tightly-leashed; knew that if he met her gaze now his eyes would be sparking.

But he nodded, and wiped off his knife with a cloth that he then passed to her. As she cleaned the blood from her blade, he produced another knife: a cheaply-made thing she hadn’t ever seen before. He pulled it from its plastic bag, with gloved fingers, and carefully went to both bodies, wetting the blade with blood.

“Let’s go.”

He left the lights on, and went back out into the hall, and halfway down the stairs, where he set the knife, carefully. The plastic bag got crumpled up and put in his pocket, and he motioned her along in his wake.

Back through the kitchen, back out the window – he replaced the bars, adding an extra screw from his pocket so they were fixed securely: no signs of forced entry. He led her along the backs of several townhouses, and pulled her down behind an artificial hedge, where they crouched on the wet tile of a darkened patio, and waited. For what, she didn’t know – and then she saw headlights.

A sleek, expensive car rolled past, turning in at the house they’d just left. It disappeared inside the garage, and a moment later, a light came on in the kitchen window they’d used as an entry point.

“His wife,” Beck explained.

And then she understood: the wife would go inside, and when she started up the stairs, she’d find the knife. She would pick it up, and it would hold her fingerprints, and the blood of her husband and