Seeds of Iniquity (In the Company of Killers, #4)(14)

How much could this woman really know, anyway? So what if she knew Woodard’s full name, birthdate, birth time, and parents’ names—all of that information can be found on a handy little document called a birth certificate. She didn’t really say much about anything else, so maybe she was just bluffing. Yeah, that’s a possibility. She’s bluffing, and Woodard was the perfect person to use in order to show off to the rest of us.

I doubt she really knows anything about me, much less all of us.





5


Izabel





After punching the access code on the door panel, I enter the room armed with only my pearl-handled knife hidden within my right boot. I take my time making my way across the room and to the chair, but I don’t sit down once I get there. Nora sits comfortably with her back against the chair, her arms resting along the thin metal arms, her red-painted fingernails draped elegantly over the edges. All except for her left pinky finger.

I smile thinking about it to myself, stopping just behind the empty chair.

“Is something funny?” Nora inquires.

“Actually yeah,” I say with a grin.

I glance at her marred finger just long enough for her to glimpse what I’m referring to, and then back up at her bright brown eyes framed by dark eyelashes and bruises.

“Did someone get tired of hearing your shit and cut it off?”

She smirks.

Then she raises her left hand and moves her long fingers about in a delicate fashion.

“I do miss it,” she says nonchalantly and then sets the hand back down on the chair arm. “But I’m not the one answering questions here.” She motions toward my chair. “Have a seat.”

“I think I’ll stand.”

“No, I think you’ll have a seat,” she says calmly, but with an air of authority.

She smiles.

I don’t. And I don’t sit down, either.

“I really expected you to go last,” she says. “I mean, seeing as how your secret is one of the darkest.”

That gets my attention.

She tilts her head. “I really hope for your sake that no one is listening in on our conversation this time.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” I snap, unconfident. “My real name—so what. That’s not hard to find out. Just like James’s birth record information. I think you’re a fraud.”

Nora smiles and motions to the chair again.

“A fraud, maybe,” she says, taunting me as always, “but a fraud who controls whether Dina Gregory lives or dies, nonetheless. Please, have a seat, so we can be at eye level.”

I round my chin, gritting my teeth, but once again she has my attention.

“Are you asking or telling?”

“I’m asking,” she says calmly. “Please. Sit.” She opens her hand in gesture.

Her strange change of attitude catches me off-guard, but it’s only after I finally sit down that I realize she still got me to do it. She doesn’t say anything in the way of mockery, but I know, just by that faint look of satisfaction in her eyes that she’s jotting down another win in her mental notebook.

I say nothing, and try to maintain my own influence; what’s left of it anyway.

“How about this,” I say, crossing my legs and my arms, “you tell me a little about you first, just so we can get more…comfortable with each other. And then I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

“Did my blood not suffice?” she asks with a knowing smirk. “I gave it to them freely, you know. Because they’ll find nothing on me.” She holds up both hands, palms facing me. “Fingerprints?”—she chuckles elegantly—“won’t find anything on those either, I’m afraid.”

“So then let’s talk,” I say.

Nora leans forward, laying her arms across the table, though they only reach from the middle of her forearms, the chains hooked to the handcuffs preventing them to go any farther.

“I told you,” she says, “I’m not here to answer your questions.”

I stand up and boldly move my chair the rest of the way over and place it at the table within her reach. I’m not afraid of her and I want her to know it.

She grins looking up at me and her eyes follow mine all the way back down as I take my seat again, just a couple of feet across from her. Then I lean forward just like her, laying my arms across the table in front of me and enclosing my hands.

I glance at my fingers and then look her dead in the eyes. “I have all of mine,” I say with cruel mockery. Then I lay my hands flat on the cool metal tabletop, spreading my fingers outward—unpainted manicured nails, a white-gold ring on my pinky finger with a three-carat diamond, another one—silver with a black onyx stone—on my right thumb. I slide the ring off the right pinky finger and place it on my left, afterwards holding my hand up in front of me as if to admire it.

Then I turn it around, my palm facing me, so that she can see it, too.

“There’s something about a woman’s hands that’s irresistible to some men,” I begin, taunting her in my most controlled tone. “The same kind of men who love the shape of a woman’s neck, or the slope of her shoulders, or the daintiness of her wrists. These are the sophisticated men, the kind of men who can offer a woman a more…intelligent relationship.” I turn my hand back and forth slowly in front of us, looking at that ring shining on my pinky finger, and the more I talk, the more a sort of darkness begins to shift in her eyes—I’m pulling at straws here, but it seems to be working. “Then there are the breast and ass men. Most of them just horny amateurs who have no sexual control.” I glance at her pinky finger again. “You’re a beautiful woman,” I say. “Nice breasts, nice ass, but that hand of yours really isn’t doing you any favors. I hope the one who took your finger got what was coming to them.”