Page 102 of Villains Never Die

“This?” I cradled it in my hand. “Take it. I’ve got like ten of them.” I placed it in his palm and he set it aside on an end table until we got the rest of our clothes off and he changed into something dry. I breathed through the arousal that hit me at the sight of him in my clothes, especially my shirt that was a bit tight on him. I tossed our wet clothes in the dryer and sat down next to him on the couch, the folder open and spread halfway between our laps.

“What do you think it means?” I asked as we observed the killer’s message.

“Well, it’s six messages, counting the ‘4 ever’ that we found on Clark. Emmett got away or faked his attack to cover his tracks. Six messages—there were supposed to be six bodies.”

“And me,” I said. “Perhaps I won’t merit a message.”

He leaned forward to grab a pen from my coffee table. On the edge of the paper he scribbled 17451884.

“It’s just a random number. It probably means nothing,” I said. I looked over the paper again, searching for meaning in the mess. “Wait, why are these letters capitalized and the rest aren’t? THMA. Put the letters and numbers together in order.”

“THM1745-A1884,” he read aloud.

“Bloody hell,” I muttered.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s not a message, it’s a Council law.”

He squinted at it. “What kind of law?”

“I don’t know, but it’s old. The numbers are years—it was passed in 1745 and amended in 1884. I’ll have to do some digging to find out what it pertains to.”

“Maybe it’s something Emmett wanted to repeal,” Rook said. He set the sheet aside on my lap and flipped through the next few pages in the folder. “These are all autopsy reports, like the one we found at the morgue.” He piled the pages on top of my lap with the other one. “What the fuck?”

“What?”

He jabbed his finger at a paper with a single sentence typed out on it.

All victims had heroin in their system; cause of death was overdose.

“That wasn’t in the other autopsy report.” I glanced over the ones in front of me. “It’s not in any of these autopsy reports. Why drug them instead of using a sedation spell?”

“It would mess with their magic. They couldn’t fight back.” He hummed, gears turning in his head. “That’s why there were no traces of magic on the bodies.”

“Either the Council is covering it up or Emmett was investigating this on his own.”

“Or he’s got a stash of heroin somewhere in that house,” he said.

I stood to pace the room, reaching for something to tie it all together, but I needed to find out what that law was. That had to be the key. I stared idly out the window at equipment left behind by a company in the process of cleaning the graffiti off the building’s windows.

“What about that thing on that lady’s arm? Kathy, or whatever her name was.”

“I doubt it was anything,” I said, but I pulled it up on my phone anyway and bent to show him.

do sso

no no gar

lat extra am

“Probably nothing,” he agreed. “Text me that picture, anyway.”

I did, and his phone vibrated somewhere in the room. He stayed another hour, curled up on the couch with me, warming the chill in my body and talking about idle nothingness. Then he left to prep for the weekend at his club, and I was left with more questions than I’d started the day with.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Monday morning was business as usual, as usual as it could be without Gray. A new buyer sat across the desk from me, young—probably new money—and not smart enough to be wary of me yet.