Page 99 of Carved

When the phone's shrill ringing cuts through the post-climax haze like a blade, it rudely yanks us both back to the reality beyond these walls. Reality, where someone is using my signature to kill innocent people. The reality where the woman trembling beneath me has built a career around understanding monsters like me.

Reality where we're both in danger from forces we haven't identified yet.

Lila tries to push herself up from the table, but her limbs are still unsteady, movements uncoordinated in the aftermath of what I just did to her. I watch her struggle for a moment—not out of cruelty, but because seeing her this undone by my touch feeds the wolf howling in my chest about her.

She's always been so controlled, so precisely composed, and knowing I can reduce her to trembling need makes me want to do it again.

But the phone keeps ringing.

I smooth a hand over her hair, noting how the dark strands stick to her damp forehead, then let my palm trail down to squeeze her hip where she'll bruise from the table's edge. "Easy now, sweetheart," I murmur, pressing a gentle kiss to her slack mouth, wrapping her fingers around the knife handle still warm from her body. "I've got it."

She blinks up at me, green eyes still glazed with satisfaction, trying to process my words through the haze. It takes her a moment to understand that I'm talking about the phone, not the knife, not what just happened between us.

When comprehension dawns, she nods once, wobbly and worn out, wonderfully unable to reconstruct the professional mask that would shut me out again.

I cross to where she dropped her bag by the door, noting the expensive leather and careful organization that speaks to someone who values control in all aspects of her life. Everything has its place, every detail carefully managed—except for tonight, when I dismantled all that careful order and left her spread across the dining room table like an offering.

The phone screen shows "Finch - Metro PD," and I feel ice water replace the warm satisfaction in my veins. Detective calls at eleven-thirty p.m. rarely bring good news, especially when someone's been using my signature to kill innocent people.

"Finch," I tell her, carrying the phone back to where she's finally managed to sit up, though she hasn't yet attempted to stand. Her legs are probably still unsteady.

Lila's expression shifts immediately, all traces of post-orgasmic languor disappearing behind the analytical mask I recognize from watching her work. She takes the phone from me and swipes to answer, her thumb finding the speaker button without conscious thought—probably so she can maintain somephysical stability while processing whatever crisis Finch is about to dump on her.

"Finch," she says, her voice steady despite what we were doing ninety seconds ago. "What's happened?"

"Lila, I'm sorry to call so late." Detective Emmett Finch's voice fills the apartment through the speaker, tired and grim in ways that make my chest tight with anticipation. "We've got another body. Same signature, same positioning. But…."

He pauses, and I can hear him struggling with whatever he needs to tell her.

In that moment of silence, I watch Lila's face, noting the way her breathing has gone shallow, the slight tremor in her hands that she's trying to suppress.

She knows.

Somehow, she already knows this one is going to be different.

"Who is it?" she asks, though her voice carries the careful control of someone who's afraid of the answer.

"Casey Holbrook. Crime scene tech who's been working with you on the analysis."

The words hit Lila like a physical blow. I watch her entire body go rigid, the phone sliding from suddenly nerveless fingers. But the speaker keeps it connected, Finch's voice continuing to fill the room while she processes the implications.

Casey. The bubbly redhead who bent rules to share crime scene photos with her friend. The young woman who chatted about everything and nothing while processing evidence that could send me to death row. Someone who trusted Lila enough to risk her career sharing classified information.

Someone who's dead because of that trust.

"Lila?" Finch's voice carries through the speaker, tinny and concerned. "You there?"

But she can't answer. Can't do anything but stare at nothing while her carefully constructed world collapses around her. I've seen this kind of shock before—the moment when abstract threat becomes personal loss, when professional distance gets shattered by visceral reality.

I've never seen it in her.

For as long as anyone in this world has made for herself has known her, Dr. Lila North has been untouchable. Professional, controlled, able to analyze violent crime with clinical detachment because it happened to other people in other places. But Casey Holbrook wasn't other people. She was someone who mattered, someone who brought coffee and gossip and genuine human warmth into Lila's carefully ordered existence.

Someone who died because she was connected to Lila.

I pick up the phone, noting how Lila doesn't even react to the movement. She's gone somewhere internal, processing trauma that her professional training never prepared her to handle.

"Detective, Dr. North is here," I say carefully, staying vague about my identity or role. "She's—processing the information. I’m her…partner. Can you give us the essential details?"