Part One
“A diamond is forever.”
—Francis Gerety of N.W. Ayer & Son for De Beers
RAYNA
My eyes snap open on a jolt, and I blink into a room that’s as dark as a cave. For the first few blissful seconds, my body relaxes into a scene that feels all too familiar. The spicy scent of male on thousand-count sheets. The cushion of a criminally expensive mattress cradling my bones. A down-filled comforter skimming my naked skin like a lover.
And then I remember.
Not my bed. Not my home. Where the sheets were criminally soft but the bed cold and lonely, even though there were two people in it.
Correction: there were three people, though you better believe I didn’t know it at the time.
Stop. Abort. ;This is not the time to be thinking such things, when you find yourself in another man’s bed and when there’s definitely another woman in your old one. Fourteen months and a whole ocean between me and the ashes of my old life, and that man can still muscle his way into my head when I least want him there. Despite everything that brought me here, to a new life on the other side of the planet, Barry still holds that power, dammit.
I shove him from my mind and swipe my limbs across the rumpled cotton, making an angel on the feather and foam. On the other side of the bedroom wall, water clatters onto slick marble tiles. Xander, owner of this fine bed and plush penthouse apartment, taking a shower.
Snippets of last night flash in my head, lighting up some of the darkness that’s lived there since the divorce. The bar, the restaurant, the fish washed down with a bottle of perfectly chilled Chablis, champagne bubbles tickling the back of my throat, making out with Xander on the freezing terrace, our bodies tangled under his thick duvet, the sky and the stars and the glittering lights stretching into the darkness like a carpet of diamonds. My head rolls on the pillow to face the far wall, where the tiniest strip of daylight pushes through the floor-to-ceiling drapes. The fabulous but freezing terrace on the other side of that wall of windows where I stood, pressed against the glass railing, staring out at the view.
I push up onto an elbow and blink around the dim bedroom, wondering how long Xander’s showers typically run. My gaze drifts to the open bedroom door, and a strip of lit-up runner in the hallway. Puffs of steam waft across the plush burgundy carpet like a nightclub fog machine. Apparently, pretty long.
“Does this hookup come with coffee? Oat milk if you’ve got some, and I wouldn’t say no to a croissant.”
This new Rayna, she’s cheeky. The kind of girl who wakes up the morning after a drunken one-night stand with no regrets. Zero. Not a single one.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand, and I roll onto a hip and pluck it from the charger. My roommate, Ingrid, the gorgeous, lanky blonde I met on craigslist when I answered her ad for a spare room. Ingrid works in the city center, at a shop that doesn’t open until late morning. In the few months we’ve lived under the same roof, I’ve never seen her conscious before ten.
I frown, swiping with a thumb to answer. “What’s wrong?”
“Well, seeing as I’m here and you’re there, I’m guessing nothing.”
She yawns, loud and breathy into the phone. “I take it the date was a success.”
Ingrid knows all about the date because she was there, eating breakfast in the kitchen when the notification hit my phone that Xander had swiped right. She plucked my cell out of my hand to study his profile picture, a close-up of his face bathed in late-afternoon sun.
“Cute,” she said, handing my phone back. “If you don’t swipe right, I will. Though I’m not sure about that bio. 73% gentleman. 27% rogue. What does that even mean?”
I took in Xander’s sharp jawline, wide-set eyes, crooked, close-lipped smile that made him look like he was holding on to a secret.
“I don’t know, but I’m intrigued.”
He was handsome enough that I swiped right, too. Almost immediately, another notification pinged my phone: It’s a match! And two seconds after that, a message.
Hello, Rayna with the red hair. How is your day so far?
Perhaps a bit overeager but friendly enough, and not the least bit icky. The perfect first message as far as I was concerned.
After that, the day was a blur of back and forth. First via Tinder, then on WhatsApp, then through comments on my Instagram.
Nice wings, he left under a shot of me last summer in Nashville, standing against a wall with a painted mural of a butterfly. Next time you go to Music City, #ImIn.
I smile into the phone. “Yes, Ingrid. The date went very well.”
“Are you still there?” she says, her voice perkier now. “Are you with him right now?”
I wriggle higher on the pillow, listening to the water on the other side of the wall. I hadn’t heard him slip out of bed, hadn’t so much as stirred when the shower started up, which says a little something about the state I was in last night.
“No.” There’s a soft whirring and the wall to my left shifts, the blackout shades working on what I assume is a timer. They travel up a wall of steel-and-glass windows, letting in a mauve, early morning light. “He’s currently in the shower.”
Ingrid squeals, and the sound does something to me. My old life was filled with moments like these, early morning gossip fests about the night before, trading anecdotes about our lives and families and men. Since moving to Amsterdam, my address book has become a lot slimmer, but whoever said women in Amsterdam are notoriously difficult to befriend has never met Ingrid. From the moment I wheeled my suitcase into her apartment, she’s been nothing but friendly—and Lord knows I could use a friend.
“Why did you answer the phone?” she says now. “Get your ass in there. What is it you Americans say? Do it for the team.”
She hangs up before I can correct her.
I toss my phone to the bed, telling myself that Ingrid is right. I should get in there, mostly because it’s the opposite of what the old Rayna would do. The old Rayna would be chastising herself for spending a night with a man she just met and slinking out of here in shame. The new and improved Rayna, though—Rayna 2.0—she knows how to have a good time.
On the other side of the wall, the shower is still going, the steam still creeping along the hallway runner. New city, new life, new me.
I push back the covers and slide out of bed. “Hey, lover. You got
room in that fancy shower of yours for me?”
LIKE THE REST of this place, Xander’s bathroom is a work of art. A great wash of veiny brown and cream marble stretched across the floors, climbing the walls, plopped onto floating cabinets and molded into sinks. LED lights blaze down from sleek spotlights in the ceiling, a light so bright it stops me in the doorway. I stand there for a minute, blinking into the steamy space.
A towel is tossed carelessly on the floor next to a bath mat. A tube of toothpaste lies on the edge of the sink on the left wall. The shower is still going, tucked behind a marble wall and a door of steamed-up glass, a steady clattering that echoes in the room. A tiny frisson of electricity crackles under my skin. He’s been in there an awfully long time.
“Xander?”
No answer.
I take a tentative step forward, and my bare foot lands in a tepid puddle. That’s when I notice the rest of the floor is wet, too, big pools of water like someone sprayed the marble with a garden hose. Next to the big square tub, a dented shampoo bottle lies on its side, burping up a purple-tinged goo, thick and slimy. A good ten feet from the shower door.
“Everything okay in there?”
Everything is not okay. Of this I am certain. I know it with every ounce of my being even if I can’t quite name what’s wrong. An instinctual kind of alarm bell, like running up to the edge of a cliff. I know it long before I step onto the drenched bath mat and tug open the shower door.
The first thing I see is a foot, male and knobby. Don’t look don’t look don’t look. It’s like an out-of-body experience—me screaming the instruction at myself from above, but it’s too late because I’ve already seen the foot and the angle is all wrong.
Xander’s toes are pointed to the sky. Like he fell, maybe, whacked his head on the way down. Knocked himself unconscious and landed flat on his back.
Except no. This is more than unconscious. This is utterly, horrifyingly still. Despite the steaming water beating down on his motionless body. Despite me nudging his bare foot with mine.
My gaze wanders up his body. His long, lean legs, his athletic torso. One hand is curled in a loose fist on his chest, the other arm, his right, is stretched across the floor as if he’s reaching for something. For a full five seconds, I watch swirls of pretty pink spiral toward the drain before I realize what it is: blood, leaking from the stump where his pointer finger used to be.
But the finger isn’t the worst, not by a long shot. Xander’s eyes are open, but they’re wide and red and empty. His mouth hangs in a yawn or maybe a deep breath he can’t catch because his neck . . .
Oh my God. His neck. A thin band of opaque plastic is wrapped around it like a tourniquet.
It’s a zip tie. A fucking zip tie.
I scream and lurch backward, one foot catching in the mat, the other skidding across the water-slick floor. My arms flail, and my feet fly upward. I land on a hip, hitting the marble hard enough to rattle my teeth.
Holy shit.
I scrabble forward on my hands and knees, and maybe it’s all the booze, but last night’s dinner comes up in a sudden and sour wave, a perfectly cooked piece of halibut on a bed of creamy peas and haricots verts. It lands on the marble with the water and the blood and the purple-tinged shampoo, splashing on my knees and thighs.
I stagger to a stand and stumble back toward the hall, but the floor is wet and the bathroom is spinning and this is really happening. Xander is really dead. Someone really killed him while I was sleeping in the next room.
Not dead. Murdered.
|
