Page 22 of Better the Devil

She stopped wittering.

Stopped explaining.

She’d seen something.

Something on the body. Something unexpected. Something that hadn’t registered yet. Not fully.

But, she’d seen something.

Her blue vinyl gloves creaked as she opened the bag a little wider.

Her gaze went first to the throat, to the dried blood, to the raw red line drawn through a cluster of tattoos, like it was scoring them out.

It went to his chest, still firm and muscular beneath his blood-soaked T-shirt.

It went to his open eyes. To his face. To the expression of horror now permanently etched upon it.

And then…

‘Oh!’

Shona saw it again. Consciously, this time. She leaned in closer. Even through the mask, she could smell the musk of death.

She clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth.

‘Oh, now thatisinteresting.’

Nobody had moved.Nobody had sat. Not Eleanor, not the two arseholes with the matching cigars and sunglasses, and definitely not the young lad, Jack, who continued to scream his way up and down the hallway, making fighter jet noises.

Logan had broken the news of Victor’s death with his back to the dead man’s brothers, facing Eleanor directly, watching her reaction.

Or lack of one, as it turned out.

She continued to bounce the baby on her hip, blinking slowly, her expression barely shifting at all.

When Logan had arrived, she’d been speaking like she believed her husband was still alive. Had that been an act? Hadshe known the truth? Or was this just a brave face for the benefit of him and her in-laws?

‘What do you mean, he’s dead?’

It was the older of the brothers who asked the question. His accent, which had been faint a moment ago, reared its head a little further. Eastern Europe somewhere. Somewhere formerly Soviet, at a guess.

Eleanor looked past Logan to the brothers, her expression still not changing. Hardening in place, even. Blank. Controlled. Giving nothing away.

Jack was getting nothing there, so he turned to face the two men. Four tiny versions of himself looked back at him from the mirrored lenses of their sunglasses.

‘Sorry, I didn’t catch your names,’ he said.

‘Because we didn’t tell you,’ the older brother said, tightening the leash on the accent again.

Eleanor sighed. ‘He’s Sergei, he’s Mikhail,’ she said, pointing to the older brother, then his near-identical younger counterpart.

Both men glowered at her from behind their lenses, but she didn’t appear to care. Logan couldn’t quite get a handle on the relationship dynamics between the three of them. Not yet. At first, she’d seemed intimidated by them, but he was less convinced of that now.

‘You got astigmatism or something?’ Jack asked. ‘You know, with the glasses indoors, and everything. Awful condition, you have my sympathies.’

He stared long and hard at his twin reflections in the older brother’s lenses, before turning his attention to the younger man looming behind him.

‘You might want to stop cracking your knuckles like that, son. I hear it can lead to arthritis.’