Red Widow (Vivian Xu, Book 1) (37 page)

“
Don’t you fucking touch
her!” Keung screamed. Nikolai fished a pair of handcuffs out of his
jacket.

“
It ends tonight, Vivian. I
did my best to guide you, but it obviously wasn’t enough. And for
that, I am truly sorry.”

Vivian felt devastated by the future
that awaited her. No matter how she tried to outrun the
consequences of her actions, reality always handed down a guilty
verdict. She was guilty of running away from home, abusing drugs,
selling herself in the streets, and murdering an innocent woman. No
amount of penance or rehabilitation would allow her back into
society.

There was nothing she could do to save
herself now, but perhaps she could spare her parents. She
submissively held out her hands.

“
No!
” Keung threw his body in front of Vivian and pushed her
toward the kitchen. Gunfire ignited and a bullet ripped through her
father’s chest.

“
Dad!” she screamed. She
rushed toward her father, but someone seized her. Her heels slid on
the kitchen floor as her mother thrust her out the back
door.

“
Run!” Meilin screamed.
Before she knew it, the door slammed shut. The lock twisted with
finality and once more she was banished from home.

Red and blue lights flickered beyond
Vivian’s house as more squad cars invaded her neighborhood. She
charged toward the door to break it down before Nikolai killed her
parents. She may as well open the iron bars to her prison cell if
she entered.

A second gunshot pierced her ears,
sending her tumbling on her buttocks.

“
Mom!
” she screamed.

Adrenaline burning in her veins, she
scrambled away from the door. She wouldn’t let her parents’
sacrifice be in vain. With a final look at her house, she
ran.

Vivian raced through the
streets as sirens filled the night
.
She tried to think of anything other than her
parents trapped in the same room as Nikolai. He was a mindless
animal backed into a corner, proving he would gladly cross any line
to protect himself.

Just then, Vivian noticed a warm glow
hovering above the horizon. She slowed to a stop as the source
became clear.

“
No…”

Vesely Manor peeled away in the
embrace of inferno. Gnarled flames devoured the gardens once tended
by the manor’s heiress. The smoke proved the worst of all, sending
her into a dizzying high. She clutched the gates as the inferno
drew ever closer.

Tonight, the Sea of Fire was truly
aflame.

* * *

The night passed without any sign of
Vivian. Nikolai roamed the alleys up and down before coming to a
stop in the ashes of Vesely Manor.

He didn’t return home that night or
surrender to the cooing spell of sleep. He spent every second
staring into the night, wrapped in fear and loathing. He finally
left the unhallowed ground when he was summoned to the morgue in
the early hours of morning.

Another day, another
autopsy,
thought Nikolai dryly. Except this
time the woman lying on the necropsy table was someone he
intimately knew. Tatiana’s naked body patiently awaited
dissection.

“
Tatiana Pražakova. Five
foot eleven, black hair, green eyes, a hundred and thirty pounds.
Her residence was listed in Prague.”

Nikolai didn’t even blink as Jezebel
rattled off the basics. How strange that a person’s existence could
be summed up in a smattering of superficial characteristics. That
morbid ritual reduced every man, woman, and child to a pile of
flesh to be measured and weighed.

The hairs on the back of his neck
prickled as the filters hissed above his head. He could feel the
atmosphere growing thicker and danker with every breath he tasted.
And all the while, the hole in Tatiana’s chest seemed to squirm and
grow bigger, an infinite pit that would swallow him
whole.

“
Nikolai!
”

Her voice jolted him back to reality.
He almost tripped over the hose extending from the autopsy
table.

“
What?” he
snapped.

“
You really should put on a
face mask.”

Jezebel dangled the flimsy surgical
mask in front of him.

“
You turned white as a
sheet when we dissected Natalie. Tatiana won’t smell nearly as
awful since she didn’t die in the sewers, but this will still be
unpleasant. Trust me.” One glance at the tools arrayed by the
corpse was all the incentive he needed. He swiped up the mask and
strapped it on.

“
A single bullet was fired
into her left lung at close range. As you can see, the bullet
entered medial to the left nipple and exited just below the left
scapula. Based on the size of the exit wound, the bullet was fired
from a nine millimeter pistol. Unfortunately, the bullet was never
recovered from the crime scene. What intrigues me the most is the
sheer measure of damage the bullet inflicted. I’ve never seen a
nine millimeter do anything like this.”

“
Tatiana.”

“
What?”

“
She has a
name.”

“
You didn’t grow attached
to her, did you?” Jezebel smiled. “I thought you disliked
babysitting agents from rival agencies.”

“
I just don’t like how
detached ‘victim’ sounds when we’re dealing with someone we both
know. She worked on the LaCroix investigation, for God’s
sake.”

Spying movement out of the corner of
his eye, Nikolai looked upon the medical examiner’s assistant. He
was a gangly fellow with platinum blonde hair slicked over his
dome-shaped head. He had a camera clutched in his hands to
photograph the body, eager to engage in the most perverse kind of
voyeurism. Nikolai withdrew as the assistant’s finger furiously
pumped the camera, rendering the last portrait of Tatiana that the
world would ever see. It certainly wasn’t her finest moment with
the makeup washed away, eyeliner bleeding down her cheeks, powdered
with the cruel pallor of death. Even her lips gleamed with a waxy,
blue color from the absence of nutrient-rich blood.

“
Do you expect to find any
bullet shrapnel in the tissue?”

“
Let’s find out,” Jezebel
said, brandishing a scalpel. She carved a Y incision below
Tatiana’s breasts, forever scarring a body that aspiring models
would surely die for.

The rush of air from the corpse’s
chest startled Jezebel.

“
Pneumothorax,” she
whispered.

“
What?”

“
After the bullet ruptured
the left lung, air began to accumulate into the pleural cavity. The
pressure could have potentially shifted the heart and blood
vessels.” With a steady grip, she continued to carve down Tatiana’s
belly, taking her precious time like a sculptor.

She spread the butterflied chest flaps
to reveal a mass of coagulated blood. It clotted into a
berry-colored gel that obscured much of the internal organs. She
worked furiously among the sea of red, shearing through the ribs
with pruning shears she once used in her garden. Now instead of
pruning roses, they sawed through the armor over men and women’s
hearts. Once the ribs were removed, she thrust her hand into the
warm, slippery bundles of muscle, working efficiently with the
scalpel in search of her prize.

“
To be more precise, CT
scans revealed a hemopneumothorax in the left lung. Blood spilled
into the pleural space after the bullet ruptured her left
lung.”

While much of the blood pooled in the
lower body, evidence of the hemothorax lingered vividly. The blood
thickened around the lungs like a disease feasting on its
membranous walls.

Nikolai coldly observed as Jezebel
severed the esophagus and trachea. The sternum clattered onto a
metal basin as she hollowed out Tatiana like a human
bowl.

“
It’s a cruel irony, isn’t
it? To succumb to the very substance that accomplishes so much to
keep us alive?” The scissors bit into Tatiana’s lungs, teething for
any remnants of bullet shrapnel. Nikolai silently agreed. To drown
in one’s own blood defied the mind’s concept of horror. There would
be no escape from such a claustrophobic fate. In fact, the very
notion made him want to escape his own skin and float freely
without restraint.

With scissors in one hand and forceps
in the other, Jezebel probed the lungs for foreign
objects.

“
Aha,” she said, retrieving
her bloodstained hand from the thoracic cavity. A twisted piece of
metal gleamed between the notched forceps.

Nikolai showed little emotion as he
stared at the bullet fragment. He didn’t even blink as the morgue
assistant’s camera flashed with seizure-like speed. Nikolai found
it hard to imagine that this corpse was the same vibrant woman who
made love to him only nights ago. How she stripped down his armor
and breathed new life into his cold, apathetic heart.

He stared at the wedding ringer coiled
around her finger.

“
Yes, she has a husband,”
Jezebel chimed. “Or
had
, I suppose. And by the sight of those 14-karat diamonds, she
caught herself a wealthy one—a business attorney who dabbled in
real estate. Not bad at all. We’ve already notified Mr. Pražak
about Tatiana’s demise.”

Nikolai felt as empty and hollow as
the young woman’s corpse. So she hadn’t felt anything for him at
all. He was merely something to be used and discarded.

“
It’s a shame…” Jezebel
piped up. “They had a three-year-old son together.” Nikolai
repressed the visceral reaction deep inside. Her son would grow up
wondering where the woman was who carried him inside for nine
months. Why had she abandoned him to this unforgiving
world?

“
So a girl named Vivian Xu
did all this?” Jezebel said, tapping the entry wound with the
forceps. Nikolai solemnly nodded.

“
Tatiana tried to approach
the girl in the downtown alleys and an altercation ensued. Vivian
pulled a gun on her and fired a single round. I cornered the girl
last night but she fled on foot. A police unit is canvassing the
downtown area as we speak.”

“
That’s odd,” Jezebel said,
sewing the cavity shut. “Tatiana was supposed to be investigating
the abductions and murders. Do you suppose this girl Vivian is
somehow involved in the case?” Nikolai bit his lip.

“
I’m not sure.”

“
If only we had the firearm
and the rest of the bullet—and Vivian, of course—we could confirm
the suspect. In the meanwhile, this fragment will tell me a little
more about the bullet our perp used.” Jezebel glided toward the
sink to wash her hands free of death. Nikolai approached the corpse
raised on this unholy altar of cold steel. Tatiana was little more
than a sacrifice to the otherworld now. But which realm would claim
her soul? Heaven or Hell?

He could see the horror crystallized
in her amber eyes, crying out for mercy. From Vivian? Did Tatiana
beg a drug-addled Vivian not to pull the trigger before the bullet
punctured her lungs? Tatiana would never utter the truth
now.

Nikolai stroked her forehead and
tenderly closed her eyes.

* * *

The alley outside was even colder than
the autopsy room. Nikolai slumped on the steps just beyond his
office. The wind showed no mercy as it bit through his jacket and
tickled his heart. He rolled the syringe between his fingers, the
same one Jezebel tested on the lab rats.

What did he see when he looked at the
liquid inside? Despair. Devastation. The lives of six innocent
women.

A glimmer of hope.

Nikolai began to suspect Syllax played
a role in the homicides after the third victim rolled into the
morgue with distinctive needle marks on her body.

The injection site always bore a red
rash and a black vein. Nikolai looked down at his own wrist. A nest
of black veins snaked along like serpents, broken by the constant
injections. He shamefully pulled his sleeve down. So the migraines
were linked to the tumor formation. Millions of neurons and
star-shaped astrocytes were imploding in the crevices of his brain,
laying the groundwork for disaster. How many years remained before
this malignant mass took its toll? Maybe “years” was too
optimistic.

“
Only months remain,” he
murmured as his sweating hands began to shake uncontrollably. He
closed his eyes and dropped the syringe down the sewer grates. It
rattled through the pipes and siphons to a place far below where
Natalie perished. The instant it tumbled away, he longed to plunge
the needle into his veins, eliciting a curse from the pits of his
soul. He would resist the insidious pull of Syllax for as long as
his sanity allowed.

Vivian was merely a tool to track down
the killer and contain the “Syllax outbreak” before the media
exposed the truth. He truly meant it when he promised to help her
rise above this cesspool of poverty, but the situation had
drastically changed. Now she knew too much and placed his life in
peril.

No one could know the truth behind
Syllax. No one could know he abused Syllax to cope with Emily’s
loss.