The Lover’s Promise (No Exceptions #3)(5)
Author: J.C. Reed

The detective turned the knob and closed the door behind him.

Now we were alone.

Just he and I—behind a closed door.

Dum. Dum Dum.

No, make that doom. Doom—as the imaginary drums continued to pound in my head.

My whole body began to shake slightly as he slid into Grayson’s seat and pulled out a notepad from his pocket. The whole situation felt surreal, like I was starring in a horror movie. I almost expected him to retrieve a string of rope and tie up my wrists to the chair, maybe even switch on a neon lamp, or hang me upside down to torture me into giving him the answers he wanted.

Only, I had no answers.

Let the witch hunt begin.

Sighing, I crossed my arms over my chest, ready to face whatever the detective would throw at me.

He glanced around the room and his eyes came to rest on the model pictures on the wall. Grayson’s glory. The gems he’d shaped into diamonds—as he liked to proclaim. Every one of his models was up there; everyone but me. It wasn’t that much of a surprise, given that I was new and had yet to book a job. A short silence ensued, during which Detective Barrow assessed me, his right hand stroking his neck in a strange manner. I twitched uncomfortably in my chair and crossed my legs, waiting, assessing him back.

“So, Mr. Grayson told me you joined two days ago. Is that correct?” he started eventually.

“Yes.” I nodded, staring at him blankly and gradually relaxed, happy that he didn’t ask about the hotel. Maybe he didn’t remember me after all. Maybe it was just a normal investigation and his frown came as a part of the job description, meaning it had nothing to do with me personally.

“All right.” He smiled politely and opened his notepad. “Let’s start with the last time you saw Gina alive and we’ll take it from there. You mentioned you went out?”

It wasn’t a question, but rather a statement. I had mentioned no such thing to him.

I nodded. “After Grayson offered me a trial period to see whether I was cut out for the job, Thalia invited me and Gina for a drink at the La Rue Bar. We had a few drinks, then Gina suggested we visit the Hush Hush bar, and we had some more drinks there.”

God, why did it sound like I was a complete party girl when it couldn’t be further from the truth?

The detective nodded and scribbled a few words on his notepad without looking up. “What happened after?”

“Gina tried to hook me up with a guy.” Cringe. I didn’t need to hear the detective’s thoughts; I could read them from his expression and they weren’t pretty. I brushed my hair out of my face and continued. “I started to feel sick so a guy brought me home. And that was the last time I saw her.”

I repeated the same story I had told Thalia: that a stranger drove me home, and then left. “Thalia said she had one last drink with Gina after I left. What happened after that, I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her.”

“The man who drove you home—” He stopped scribbling and looked up from his pad, his eyes the color of brown parchment assessing me. “—what did you say his name was?”

“I don’t remember,” I lied. “I was too drunk.”

The detective pressed his lips in a tight line. The way he was drumming his fingers on the table made me nervous, so I looked away, mentally counting the seconds until I could get the hell out.

“Did anything strange happen yesterday? Such as a fight, not necessarily between you and the victim?” I shook my head and he continued, “Can you think of anyone who might have held a grudge against her?”

A new spasm of nerves coursed through me.

“No, of course not.” I brushed my hair out of my face as I considered my words carefully. “I only just met her so didn’t know her particularly well, but it seemed Gina is…was friendly with all the girls here. I think everyone liked her.”

“How was the relationship between Gina and Thalia?”

I paused, taken aback by the strange question. “Good, I guess. I think they were good friends. Like I said, I only met them both recently.”

“If anything unusual happened, no matter how trivial you think it might be, I need you to tell me. It’s the little things that often carry enough weight to break a case. Do you understand?” He stared at me. “They’re often relevant.”

His tone worried me.

“I wish I could be of more help, but I don’t remember much, except that Gina brought us drinks,” I said carefully. “We got drunk. We had fun. And the next thing I knew a guy drove me home.”

Even though I omitted quite a bit, I stuck to the truth. My mind had been a blurry mess. Yesterday’s events seemed so far away, they almost resembled a dream. The only thing I remembered was the way Jett had broken my fall, and the fake name he had given me, but I couldn’t share that with the detective. For some inexplicable reason, I couldn’t tell anyone about the Jett incident. It was like my brain wanted to lock that episode away forever.

When I finally finished my account, the detective opened a folder on the table. “Maybe these pictures will jolt your memory.” Slowly, he began to sort through countless sheets of paper and pictures.

“Did Gina wear this makeup when you last saw her?” He slid over the first picture and I shrank back in shock.

It was a headshot of Gina. For a second, it looked like she was sleeping, until I registered that her eyes were slightly open, and a dried trail of blood marked her chin. There was no doubt the picture had been taken after her death and the discovery of her body. The rest of her body from the neck down wasn’t in the picture. If there were, I knew I would have needed therapy for the next few years.

“What do you mean?” I asked slowly. Her face and lips were so pale they almost had a blue shimmer to them. I had never seen a corpse in real life, not even when my father and my sister died.

The detective pointed his finger to her left cheek. “Did she have the two spots on her face?”

I narrowed my eyes in concentration and finally grasped the meaning of his words. There were two dots on her cheek—like two little moles or freckles. Come to think of it, they didn’t really stand out. They had been painted onto the skin in a fashionable but realistic way so that it wasn’t glaringly obvious that they weren’t real.

“No, “ I said and shook my head. “Not as far as I remember.”

He nodded, as if my answer confirmed his suspicion, and handed me the second picture.

“Do you recognize this man?” he asked.