Page 34 of Gilded Wicked Mirrors
Quinn huffed. He was too distracting. Distracting because she hated him but also because his face disturbed her. She changed her mind. His presence was no longer useful. She’d deal with the devastation instead of whatever this was. “You are too diverting. Please, leave.”
“How am I diverting if I am silent?”
“Your face is unsettling.” Quinn grunted. “It is too perfect. Perfectly proportionate, with sharp cheekbones and sculpted eyebrows. Your nose is just the right size to fit your face. Your lips too full. Your eyes are too golden brown to be naturally human, and even your ears are just the perfect length, like they were gifted to you by a mirror. It’s all too distracting. I want to measure it and study it.”
Emrys’s face flickered with an emotion Quinn couldn’t read. “Thanks?” he asked hesitantly.
Quinn sighed. “Perfect does not equal beautiful. Beauty is in the flaws. Which you have none . . . unless you count your charming personality.”
Emrys laughed, and Quinn gathered samples from the large and small intestines before preserving them in formalin. Then she packed up and cleaned the body.
As she was nearly finished, Emrys asked, “How was your birthday?”
Quinn glowered. “I much prefer the company of corpses. They don’t talk bac—”
Her voice drained of all its power as she pulled a note out of an intestine. It was paper, and it should have been eroded by stomach acid, yet it wasn’t. It was perfectly intact. It had to be mirror-spelled. Quinn’s brain swirled with emotions and letters, and it took all her concentration to read the words.
Find the second Blood Mirror by the Suitor Ball, or you will be my next victim, Quinnevere.
She gasped and dropped the note back into the bowels. She felt the blood draining from her face, and every muscle in her body was as taut as a harp string. Whoever killed Jane knew that Quinn would do the autopsy. They knew she wouldn’t be able to resist, which meant the killer either knew her or was watching herveryclosely.
Shivers coursed through her body, and she trembled.
The note gave her nine days to find the second Blood Mirror. An object she knew absolutely nothing about.
Her heart pounded, and beads of sweat rolled down her temple.
“Are you okay?” Emrys took a hesitant step toward her.
Quinn sucked in her emotions, sewed a smile on her face, and lied through her teeth, “Yes, everything is fine.”
Emrys couldn’t know about the note. Because if he were the murderer, she didn’t want him to see her find it. And if he wasn’t the murderer then . . . then she didn’t know what, but she needed the note not to exist, and maybe if she pushed it away, it wouldn’t.
Emrys cocked his head. “You don’t seem—”
“Everything is swell. Truly, I should probably be finishing up.”Her nostrils flared as she rolled the victim’s body toward the negative temperature chamber.
Emrys’s eyes narrowed for a moment before trailing down to her wrist automatically, almost as if he was expecting something to be there, and when he saw the tattoo, he oh-so-slightly cringed. Quinn felt naked and had the sudden urge to hide her marking. But at the same moment, she was curious to know what he knew about it.
Jane had the same one. It was a clue, and Quinn could use all the clues she could find.
So, instead of hiding, she decided to be straightforward. It was the most practical thing to do, after all. “What does my tattoo mean?”
Quinn had hers since before she could remember. Her entire family had them, and she never knew why. No one was alive to tell her.
Emrys crinkled his eyebrows in false surprise. “I have no idea what it means. It’s your tattoo.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“It would seem we both are.” Emrys's lips slowly curled into a cruel smirk, and then he did something genuinely abominable. He strolled over to Quinn’s process notes and started reading.
“Don’t look at that.” Her voice cracked. She tried to grab for the notepad, but right as she was about to reach out, she remembered body juices covered her hands and apron.
Emrys stepped back—taunting—his eyes still on the paper.
Shame pierced at the back of her throat like falling icicles. Thelast thing that Quinn wanted anyone to do was to read her notes. Because if they did, they would finally know. The girl who couldn’t read. The girl who couldn’t spell. The girl who would never succeed, no matter how hard she tried.
The slow, stupid, foolish girl.
