Vladimir
Dmitri pressed the off button on the recorder so hard that it cracked.
The silence that followed the cruel woman's pronouncement weighed a ton as we both registered it. Even Dmitri had gone still despite having been there when she had spoken. He had yet to recover from it.
And I doubted that he ever would.
For a moment, in the breath of a second, I saw her body strung up like pork in a butcher's shop. I grit my teeth hard enough to hurt as I forced down the bone-deep hatred that had lived in my marrow since my initial investigation of her family.
I curled my hand into a fist, the entire desk freezing over until it was nothing but another block of ice.
I took a breath in and gestured for him to continue.
His gaze turned assessing, the face of his own still-ever-smoldering ire. As uncertainty flickered in his eyes, he asked, "Maybe we should take a step back—"
The temperature plummeted until heat became only an idea.
