Page 13 of Love Me Darkly
“I was sorry to have to read her file. No one deserves to die that way.”
He wondered if Donovan had grown sick to his stomach at the sight of the pentagram carved into Mari’s belly—so deep that the fascia protecting her organs had been exposed. He wondered if the man had counted the fractures and breaks of Mariana’s bones—her wrists, her ribs, her fingers. Had he shed tears like Mateo had at the evidence that she had literally been broken to pieces while fighting for her life? Had he retched into the toilet until he felt as if he would heave up his spleen at the images of the bruises on her inner thighs, the violence of rape painted across her skin in a mingling of purple and black?
He still felt Donovan’s gaze burning into him but refused to acknowledge it. He respected Donovan, felt he might even come to like the man. He had spent some time reading the other agent’s personnel file and found himself highly impressed. A West Point graduate who had spent the first years of his career in military intelligence, Donovan had joined the bureau only four years ago. To date, he was the youngest agent to ever receive the FBI director’s Citation for Exceptional Service. He had proven to be so good at his job that he’d been hurtled to his position as a Special Agent years ahead of the typical timeline. His jacket was full of reports on extraordinary capabilities that made it difficult to forget the guy’s young age. A career like his was practically unheard of.
Squeezing his eyes closed, Mateo drew in a deep, slow breath. He couldn’t succumb to the rage boiling in his blood, heating him from the inside until he felt like a furnace roared in his belly. His teeth ground together, his jaw winding painfully tight.
“Okay,” Donovan said when Mateo merely stood there seething. “Message received. I’m sorry for bringing it up.”
God damn it. Now, he liked Donovan even more.
“It’s fine,” he ground out, even though it was most certainly not fine. He had been so immersed in untangling the threads connecting the Seal of Azrael to his UNSUB, which might also connect him to Solstice and a potential human trafficking ring, that the mention of Mari and the unspeakable things that had been done to her seemed to come out of nowhere. He felt as if someone had punched him in the gut, hard enough to send the fist clear out his back, allowing all his grief and pain and wrath to pour out of him in rivers of red-black blood.
“What are you doing tonight?”
Donovan’s question hit him like a cold dash of water in his face. The abrupt change of subject was welcome, though, so Mateo latched onto it.
“Nothing. Probably going over more of the surveillance footage from outside Solstice. Why?”
“I was thinking … we may not have any new leads to go on until tomorrow. But if you’re anything like me—and our limited interactions lead me to believe you are—you’re not going to want to sit around waiting until then. So, let’s check out Solstice tonight.”
Mateo groaned. “I haven’t been to a club in … fuck, I don’t even want to say how long.”
Donovan laughed and nudged Mateo with his elbow. “Oh, my bad. You probably have an early bedtime or something. I know how important sleep is when you’re in your?—”
“I will push you down these steps,” Mateo growled, though his voice was laced with humor.
“Think you can manage to stay awake long enough to help me do some recon? We can get a sense for who hangs out in the club. Might even see something useful.”
Mateo gritted his teeth. After a long and trying couple of days, the last thing he wanted was to hang around some nightclub full of drunk tourists and rowdy college kids. A solitary evening in his hotel room with a fresh bottle of Scotch had already been on his agenda. But then, his mind would never allow him to sit still. Every piece of new information that had been uncovered the last two days were like marbles in his brain, rolling around and knocking into each other and setting off ripples of ideas and assumptions that filled him from corner to corner. He would never be able to relax. Never be able to enjoy his Scotch. Never be able to find any kind of peace in sleep now that the case had been injected with new life. His need to know how it all fit together superseded his desire to be left the fuck alone.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “I’ll meet you there at ten.”
Glancing around the interior of Solstice, it didn’t take long for Mateo to remember why the clubbing phase of his life hadn’t lasted. Nothing was less enjoyable than being crammed into a dark room with hundreds of other people, paying outrageous prices for watered-down drinks, and risking disease inside the filthy bathrooms. The air around them vibrated from the bass of the music, which injected itself through Mateo’s skin and sank into his bloodstream. He was thrumming with anxious energy, his leg bouncing beneath the table he shared with Donovan. They had been here for barely half an hour, after having waited at the velvet rope outside for about fifteen minutes. The line of people waiting to get in was stretched around the building by the time they’d made it inside.
Apparently, Solstice was popular among tourists and locals alike. The room had already been filled wall to wall when Mateo and Donovan entered, yet they conveniently managed to find a place to sit. They had discussed their strategy, which involved sitting in a position where they could observe the VIP section to see who came and went. Mateo had already adjusted the settings on his camera phone so he could snap decent pictures in the dark interior of the club. If Darcy helped identify the VIPs, it might lead them to something important.
So, here he sat, drinking a barely acceptable Scotch and scanning the room with Donovan at his side. He had to admit that the setup made the crowd a bit more tolerable—two levels separated those dancing and socializing from those wanting to drink and relax. The dance floor took up the entire first floor, with two bars on either side. Flashing, colored lights cut through the dance floor at intervals, leaving beams of pink and orange through white mists of fog. Hanging over the dance floor was a round sphere meant to resemble the sun. Its LED-screened surface danced with swirling red, orange, and yellow light and prisms of black, as if the orb had descended from the galaxy itself. The lights of the sphere pulsed in time with the music, as if setting off a signal that sent the dancers below it into a frenzy.
Multiple sets of steps led to the second floor, which overlooked the first. It was on this second level that he sat with Donovan, in one of the several tables situated near the bar. Velvet ropes cordoned off the VIP section, where leather booths circled round tables. Only one section had been filled, but it was still early. From the looks of things, the group of women taking up the booth were here for a bachelorette party.
“See anyone yet?” Donovan asked, beer bottle halfway to his mouth.
“Not yet. You?”
“No. Do you think they’d use a back entrance?”
Mateo shrugged. “It’s possible, but unlikely. The kinds of men we’re looking for have made a lot of money selling women, and they’re not shy about flaunting it. They’re going to want their bottle service and a bunch of women fawning all over them. It’s still early. They’ll come.”
Finishing off his beer, Donovan slouched, his gaze sharp as he glanced around the room. His posture and expression might have fooled someone else into thinking he was simply bored, but Mateo knew better. His eyes missed nothing.
“How’s your Scotch?”
Mateo scowled into his glass, pissed he had spent so much on what might be the worst Scotch on the planet. “Fucking awful.”
Not that it mattered. The drink was only part of his cover for the night. The last thing he needed was to get wasted on what was essentially an undercover mission.
“Ask for something else.”
