Face of Fury (Zoe Prime #5) - Blake Pierce
CHAPTER ONE
Zoe closed her eyes, tilting her head to lean against the back of the sofa. It didn’t matter either way. Outside her open curtains, darkness had fallen over Bethesda, and she hadn’t bothered to get up to turn the lights on. In the distance, yellow pinpricks in the skyline told her that Washington, D.C., was still awake, and she was tired of staring at them.
That was not her world anymore. All she saw when she looked at it were the numbers: the floors in every building and how many windows they had, the distance from the ground, the amount of time it would take a falling object to hit the sidewalk from any given window. The number of buildings, the divisions of streets and the angles at which they intersected each other, around and around in her head, until all she wanted to do was bury herself in darkness and shut it all out for good.
And then, with her eyes closed, her other senses would take over. The seconds ticking audibly from her watch, which she had days since taken off and thrown across the room so that she would not be able to hear it anymore. She could still count them. Even the bubbles popping from inside the bottle of her beer began to take on a pattern of their own: calculating the time between pops, the volume left in the bottle, the velocity of the bubbles’ movement when she squinted at the liquid in the half-light.
Zoe took another swig, thinking that finishing the bottle would serve two purposes: one, removing the popping bubbles from her immediate vicinity, and two, dulling her senses. Maybe the next bottle would not pop quite so loudly.
One of her cats, Euler judging by the particular sound of his delicate claw-grips in the fabric, eased himself casually along the back of the sofa and spread out behind her, making almost no noise as he settled his furry warmth against her short-cropped dark hair. But he did make noise. He had a heartbeat, a breathing rhythm. As quiet as they might be, they were there, and with everything else shut out, Zoe knew she would soon begin to count them.
She stirred slightly, reaching for her cell phone. It lay uselessly on the arm of the sofa, turned off. She hadn’t turned it on in days. At the beginning, when she first came home from the case that had gotten her suspended, she had left it on. There had been messages, notifications, alerts, all ringing and buzzing and annoying the hell out of her until she switched it off. Then she would turn it on once a day, read the messages, turn it off. Now she didn’t even want to do that. It was too much.
Zoe wasn’t expecting anything new anyway. She had cut everyone off, shut them out, and over the weeks they had stopped trying. There would be nothing from work—after she had badly beaten the murderer who took the life of her partner, Special Agent Shelley Rose, SAIC Maitland had had no choice but to send her home. Not before she’d solved the case, and she took grim satisfaction in that. Not that it was enough. She’d still let it happen.
Let him kill Shelley right under her nose.
Zoe shifted her weight on the sofa, staring at the phone, calculating its dimensions, weight, the outline of each button on the side. Even the numbers were better than thinking about that.
And it wasn’t just the FBI who weren’t contacting her anymore. Zoe had been dating John for long enough to start trusting him, to think about telling him about the numbers; she’d even planned it, set a date. But after Shelley’s death, there didn’t seem to be any point in seeing him again.
He’d called daily at first. Then texts, three a day, two a day, one a day. They had petered out rapidly, until John stopped trying. He’d sent her a message that she had by now memorized: I’ll be here if/when you want to talk.
Nine words. Thirty-eight characters. And that was the last message he had sent, twenty-seven days ago. Zoe knew without looking, because her internal clock wouldn’t stop counting, that it was a few hours away from being twenty-eight. Each day slipped away with the same intolerable length, an equal measurement stretching out behind her and in front of her, the same thing over and over again for as far as she could see.
Zoe was reaching for her second beer of the