Page 44 of Devoted in Death

She’d seen the faces of the dead, sitting quietly in the audience of what had been the opera house, all dripping, glittering chandeliers and gilt. With each of the dead spotlighted in icy-blue light.

See me. Stand for me.

So many of them, she’d thought. Those known victims, the others she believed had been.

And empty seats—for those yet to be known, or worse, those yet to come.

Too many empty seats, she thought as she stepped out of the warm air, took down the robe tidily hanging on its hook.

Richard Troy had walked onstage, grinning that wild grin, a conductor’s baton in his hand.

Let’s liven it up! Time for a happy tune. Killing pumps you up and puts a spring in your step. You should know that, little girl.

“Fuck you back to hell,” she muttered, and heard her dream voice echo the sentiment.

That made her smile, if a little fiercely. He couldn’t get to her anymore, couldn’t make her quake and shake.

But the dream, or the memory of it, told her nothing she didn’t already know. There were many, and there would be more.

She went back into the bedroom, noted Roarke had two covered dishes on the table.

It would be oatmeal—something else she’d resigned herself to.

When she walked over, sat beside him, he took her chin in his hand, turned her face to his for a kiss.

Another fine way to start the day. Even when oatmeal followed.

When he removed the warming lids, she saw she hadn’t been wrong. But he’d added a side of bacon, a bowl of fat berries, and another bowl of the crunchy, caramelly stuff. When you added the berries and the crunchy stuff to the oatmeal, had bacon, it all went down easy enough.

“Why does stuff like oatmeal that’s good for you have to be weird?”

“There are many among us who don’t consider oatmeal weird at all.”

“I bet there’s more of us who do,” she mumbled, and disguised it with the berries and crunch.

“It’s a fine way to start a snowy day.”

“Snow?” She looked up, looked toward the window into the gray and the white.

Not the thin spit of yesterday’s snow, she saw. But thick, fast white flakes.

“Shit.”

“It’s lovely from here, with breakfast on the table and the fire crackling.”

“Which would be great if we could sit right here until it stops.”

“Is there anything you can’t do here through the morning?”

She could probably work at home. Her equipment here—and the other equipment available to her—put what she had at Central to shame. But—

“I need Peabody,” she began.

“I can arrange transportation for her.”

He could, she thought, and would. And still but.

“I just got back from leave. My people need me around, as much as I can manage. And Trueheart takes his detective’s exam tomorrow. Baxter’s a wreck over it.”