There Are No Saints (Sinners Duet #1)(10)

This can’t be happening. It’s too surreal. I can’t be one of those girls raped and murdered in the woods. Nothing exceptional has ever happened to me. The irony that this could be my one claim to fame is too much to bear.

Without warning, he dumps me on the ground.

I fall like a sack of potatoes, unable to put up my hands to protect myself, chin slamming against the dirt. The air wheezes out of my lungs and I taste blood in my mouth.

“I know you’re awake,” a male voice says.

The voice is utterly flat. The lack of emotion makes it sound almost robotic. I can’t tell how old he is, or if there’s any hint of an accent.

I can’t answer him because of the tape over my mouth. I can’t see him either—the hood is so thick that no light passes through. I know we’re outdoors from the sound of his shoes on the rough ground, and the dirt and pebbles beneath my bare skin. But I have no idea if we’re still in the city or hours from civilization.

I hear him crouch next to me, knees popping.

“Hold still,” he growls.

I feel his hand on my bare right breast and I howl against the tape, the sound smothered and trapped inside my mouth.

Red-hot pain stabs through my nipple. I’m choking and screaming, thinking he sliced it right off.

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” he says. “It’s not that bad.”

Before I can draw breath, he roughly seizes my left breast. The same pain stabs through it, and this time I understand that I’m being pierced, not severed. This motherfucker put rings through my nipples.

My tits are on fire, the cold metal fixed in place no matter how I squirm. It’s so much worse that I can’t see what he’s done—I can only imagine.

“There,” the flat voice says. “Much better.”

I tried so hard to maintain control.

It’s all splintering away.

I’m rolling and wrenching against the ties, thrashing helplessly, howling against the tape. I’m raging, screaming, though hardly any sound leaks out. The hood is wet with tears.

He’s standing there watching me, the way you’d watch a worm twitching. I can’t see, but I know it’s true.

If I could see his face, I’d find no pity there. No hint of humanity.

I scream harder, flail harder, knowing it’s all for nothing. I can’t do anything to help myself.

I’m about to die, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

My life has been a fucking disaster at times, but I wanted to keep it. I always believed it would get better.

I guess I was wrong.

“One more thing,” the man says, turning me over on my side, his heavy hand gripping my shoulder.

“GRAHHHHHH!” I scream against the tape.

A vicious slash burns across each arm as he slits my wrists.





3





Cole





It takes several weeks for the rumors of Carl Danvers’ disappearance to begin swirling around the art world.

I’m sure the Siren office reported his failure to arrive at work.

Maybe the cops even visited his pretentious apartment in Pacific Heights. They won’t find anything there.

I’ve already heard whispers that he was deeply in debt, that he was depressed, that he once made a joke about throwing himself off a bridge.

Nobody’s saying the word “dead.”

That’s the thing about murder: no body, no crime.

It’s devilishly difficult to prove that someone is dead if they simply disappear.

I’ve made every trace of Danvers vanish.

The last of him resides in the industrial bin I brought out to the mine. I doused it all in bleach. Not just any bleach—highly concentrated oxygen-producing detergent. It causes hemoglobin to degrade, destroying the ability to harvest DNA.

I dropped the bin down a three-hundred-foot deep shaft, hidden inside a cave. There are 47,000 abandoned mines in California, nine hundred just in the Bay Area.

I doubt my dumping ground will ever be discovered. If it is, the remains I’ve deposited are unlikely to be identified, and impossible to link to me.

The bones within Fragile Ego are, of course, a different story.

Creating the sculpture was an action of uncharacteristic flagrancy. Accepting the purchase offer tonight was even more hubristic.

But there is no art without sacrifice, without risk.

The fact that Danvers’s bones will be displayed in the lobby of a tech firm gives me even greater pleasure than removing his annoying existence from my life.

I felt deeply peaceful as the bin disappeared down the shaft.

I’m hollowed out, cleansed, ready to rest.

The night is misty and cold. I’ve never seen another soul within a dozen miles of this place. The bare ground looks blue and ink-soaked, like an alien planet.

Not alien to me. I know every foot of ground, which is why the bundle deposited on the path catches my attention like a flaming neon sign.

There was no bundle when I walked this way before. No cars parked anywhere along the road leading up to the trail.

Instantly my eyes dilate, my nostrils flare. I listen for the slightest sound of movement, of someone close by. Every blade of grass, every pebble, stands out in acute detail.

The only thing I see is the bundle itself.

It’s not a bundle at all, but a girl, contorted and bound.