“Why? Because you want to tell me the truth about what happened the night Erin died?”
The blood drained out of her face. “Cèsar—”
“So it’s true.”
Her lips pressed into a thin frown. “Stonecrow?”
I nodded.
She pushed her hair out of her face, closed her eyes, seemed to think silently for a moment. When her eyes opened again, she looked resigned. “You were drunk off your ass, Hawke. You’d been arguing with the waitress outside. When I saw you leave with her, I followed to save you from a drunken one night stand.”
“And then?” I pressed.
“I confronted the two of you in the parking lot outside your place. I told Erin to go home and offered to pay for a cab.” She glanced at me. Then back down. Couldn’t meet my eyes. “You had your tongue halfway down her throat, but you found the oxygen to tell me to fuck off.”
“So you shot her?”
Suzy’s eyes widened. “What? No. I fucked off, like you told me to. I went home.”
“You knew what I’d done this whole time,” I said.
“Of course I did. I’m not stupid, Cèsar. Everyone knows what you did. Everyone fucking saw you leave The Pit with Erin Karwell.”
“If you were so intent on hiding the truth from me, then why did you take Isobel and me to the morgue?”
“I didn’t think Stonecrow would actually be able to talk to the dead. I read her files. I was convinced she was bullshitting you, bullshitting everyone, and that she’d just make something up that made you happy. I didn’t think she’d tell you that you actually…” She stopped talking. Shut her mouth.
My head was swimming. I felt sick.
I didn’t realize I’d sunk into a crouch until her hand dropped onto my shoulder.
“They’re going to arrest you, Cèsar, and who knows what comes after that? We need to get out of here.”
This time, when she grabbed me, I let her. She ran toward the street behind the house. I followed her.
A black SUV stopped at the end of the alley.
She skidded to a stop. Planted both hands in my chest, pushed me the other way.
But when I turned, there was a black SUV there, too. We’d been caught on both sides. Now men were jumping out wearing tactical gear, shouting for us to freeze, drop our guns, put our hands in the air. Suzy was swearing again.
“I’ll talk us out of this,” she said.
I lifted my hands to my shoulders. My heart wasn’t even beating fast now. I wasn’t scared of facing what was to come—what I deserved to deal with.
The men stepped into the alley and circled us. Six of them, all carrying M16s and wearing ballistic helmets. Their flak jackets had bold white letters on the chest: “UKA.” It was a full unit of union kopides—and they weren’t messing around.
But when Suzy stepped away from me, saying, “He’s not a threat,” the guns aimed at her.
Not me. Suzy.
“Cèsar!” It was Fritz. He stood just outside the ring of armed men. His shirt was buttoned with a perfect double Windsor at his throat. “Approach me slowly,” he said, holding out a hand.
He was talking to me.
I blinked at him. “What?”
“Suzume Takeuchi, you’re under arrest for the murder of Erin Karwell,” said one of the union men.
“This was the subject of the conference call, Cèsar. They identified the partial fingerprints on the Glock we found in your apartment,” Fritz said, voice shockingly level. “The gun belongs to Agent Takeuchi.”
“Suzy?” I asked.
Suzy was shaking her head, her expression slowly melting into horror. “It was stolen from my house. My broken windows—they took the Glock—”
A man whipped the butt of his M16 into the back of her head. She cried out, but stayed on her feet and tried to escape. Then there were three men on her, forcing her to the ground facedown. Her arms were twisted behind her back. They cuffed her.
Fritz approached with a black bag in hand. He looked grim.
“I’m sorry, Cèsar,” he said. “I know you were close friends.”
Were—past tense. Like Suzy was already gone.
And then he pulled the bag over her head and cinched it.
Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, Magic
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Everything was a blur after that.
I was debriefed in an SUV as they took me home. Fritz rode along in back with me, fielding multiple phone calls, occasionally barking orders over a Bluetooth headset. He told me that I was totally innocent. He told me that my arrest record with the LAPD had already been wiped.