COLE
After the coroner examined the body and Flynn instructed the guards to remove it, I retired to my quarters and stood alone in my study. I hadn’t bothered to light a candle. The room was cloaked in darkness, the only illumination coming from the dim light of a cloud-obscured moon outside the window. The window had been left ajar, but no breeze drifted through. The air was stagnant and suffocatingly thick.
I closed my eyes, and the image of that poor dead girl filled my mind—her pale skin splattered with thick red blood, her stormy blue eyes wide and bloodshot, staring blankly from the floor.
And that smile.
That dreadful, terrible smile, still plastered on her face.
But it wasn’t the grotesque image of her death that stirred the uneasy tangle in my chest. It was the truth the cor
