Page 23 of Looking Grimm (Marionette #4)

After several rounds of magical healing and enough blood to feed all the starving vampires in Africa, I bolted awake in the Capitol infirmary. Holland stood at the bedside, facing away. Clearly, she had taken it upon herself to keep an eye on me. With handcuffs on both of my wrists and a shock collar around my neck, it was clear they were taking no chances with their public enemy number one.

The investigator wasn’t alone. Her political alliance of a fiancé, Preston, stood beside her. He was the first to notice I had roused, probably because I was giving him one hell of a stink eye.

“Look at you,” the ambassador crowed. “Quite the comeback kid.” His skin was too smooth from a thick coating of foundation. It cracked around his eyes as he smiled.

Holland whipped around. With her aviator sunglasses perched on top of her head, there was no masking her narrow glare. She didn’t say a word, and the quiet was somehow worse than anything that could have come out of her mouth.

Preston, in contrast, had no shortage of thoughts to share. “Does the press know he’s here?” He jerked a thumb at me.

Holland shook her head.

“Somebody really ought to interview you while you’re still alive and kicking,” he told me. “It would make a compelling addition to your 60 Minutes special. Do they do that here?” He glanced at Holland, who had yet to break her visual lock on me.

“Mister Farrow has made plenty of news,” she replied curtly.

My hand and shoulder were bandaged, and I wondered why they bothered. Maybe they shared the same reasoning Ripley had when he fixed my broken nose in prison. Everybody wanted me to look pretty in my casket.

They gave me clean clothes, too, mint green scrubs that smelled like chemicals. I shifted on the thin mattress, too aware of my body as sensation returned. Pain wove through my chest like a ribbon, tugging here when I moved there until I resolved to lay still and let the investigator and her beau silently judge me.

The shock collar remote rested on the tray table next to a Styrofoam cup and water pitcher. Preston grabbed the remote and passed it back and forth between his hands. Every time his fingers strayed near the controls, I tensed.

“You know, I never thought you looked much like a killer,” he mused. “More of a ratty thug than anything. Wouldn’t want to run into you in a dark alley, though.” He snorted a laugh .

I smirked. “Don’t worry, Pres. I’m not contagious.” My smile turned wolfish as I added, “But I do know a guy.”

Holland sighed loudly. “Preston, I can take this from here.”

“You sure you don’t want me to protect you from the big scary criminal?” The ambassador postured, seeming to swell inside his suit. It was starched stiff and predictably navy with a red tie and a new flag pin on the jacket lapel.

Holland plucked the remote from his grasp, then tossed it onto the tray table. “I think I can manage,” she said.

Preston cast another glance at me. I definitely didn’t look like a killer now, shackled to a bed smelling of smoke and crusted with my own blood. Disconcerting as it was to know they’d changed my clothes while I was unconscious, it would have been worse if they’d bathed me, too.

The ambassador gave Holland a parting kiss on the cheek. His lingering eye contact with me sent a message of possessiveness that I was half-inclined to respond to. But telling him I preferred to take dick than give it to Holland or anyone else would only fuel his masculine rage, so I kept my thoughts to myself.

His exit left a void in the room.

Holland remained in place, fidgeting with the silk tie on her blouse until I asked, “You still gonna marry that asshole?” The question was superfluous considering the diamond solitaire glistening on her left hand.

She rolled her eyes toward me. “He doesn’t care for you, Fitch. That doesn’t make him an asshole. It makes him discerning.”

I sniffed.

Quiet resumed .

My awareness of the room trickled in gradually. It was a familiar scene, including Holland’s presence. She’d kept vigil after Jax’s interrogation room attack when I was hooked up to the same IV tree and blood bags that now hung overhead. The monitors beeped, and clear tubing ferried plasma and saline and a half dozen other things to the needle jutting out of my arm. A pulse monitor was clipped to a finger on my left hand, communicating a steady heartbeat.

I looked beyond the medical equipment to the rest of the room. The blinds were drawn over the lone window, and a watercolor painting hung on the wall beside it. A tiny television was mounted in the corner, dark and lifeless. Returning to Holland, I found her standing with her shoulders uncharacteristically slumped. She looked miserable, and not just because her fiancé was a Grade A douchebag.

“You could do better,” I told her.

“Why do you care?” She pinned me with a scathing glare, then held up her hand. “Don’t answer that. In fact, don’t say anything at all.” Shaking her head caused her paper-white locks to swish across her shoulders. She moved away from the bedside and began a slow circle of the room, seeming to feel as trapped as I was.

While she walked, my brain played catchup.

Nash turned me in. He called the Capitol to save my life or, more accurately, to delay my death. I couldn’t fault him, just like I couldn’t shake the look of desperation I’d seen on his face moments before I blacked out.

He was a good man, and I still couldn’t fathom his affection for me. I was, undeniably, the furthest thing from boyfriend material. I was allergic to commitment and weighed down by a mountain of baggage that came in the form of Wanted posters and would-be assassins.

Not that any of that mattered since the next time I’d see him would be from my knees on the Capitol stage, waiting for the guillotine blade to drop.

“I don’t enjoy this.” Holland had stopped at the foot of the bed to stand framed between my sheet-covered feet.

My brows furrowed. “You think I do?”

She gripped the beige plastic footboard, twisting her hands around it in a worrying motion. She was taking too long to get to the point, wasting time. Though, with me arrested, I imagined her schedule was looking mighty clear.

I was about to ask what she was really doing here—she certainly hadn’t come out of concern for my wellbeing—when she spoke again.

“The man who called us, Nicholas Nash, who is he to you?”

A loaded question, and I had options for answers.

My whole world? My reason for living? The only good thing left in this shitty town?

No, I couldn’t say any of that. Being caught with me was enough to put Nash in hot water. Giving me a place to stay and providing me with anything more than friendly customer service could make him accessory to my crimes. The less the Capitol thought of our relationship, the better.

“He’s just a bartender,” I replied. It hurt to reduce him to that. “And I have a drinking problem.”

Holland hummed a low note. She looked unconvinced. “We brought him in for questioning. He had a lot to say about you.”

Keeping my expression neutral became more challenging as Holland carried on. “He said you were with him when the Capitol was attacked. And that he’s willing to testify to the fact.”

But I hadn’t been with Nash. I was at Ripley’s, which made any testimony Nash might give an opportunity for the opposing counsel to rake him over the coals for my sake.

“I didn’t know you had an alibi,” Holland said.

“You didn’t ask.” I shrugged one shoulder, then hissed as pain stabbed sharp.

Despite my attempted dismissal, Holland pressed, “ Do you have an alibi?”

Or was I willing to use the one Nash offered, regardless of the consequences?

I chewed my lip, clicking my lip ring against my teeth.

“No.”

She hummed again.

I lay still. Mostly because my limbs felt like they’d been cast in concrete but also because the cold metal ring around my neck was the nearest thing to a noose, and I couldn’t shake the fear of it choking the life out of me.

The investigator appeared deep in thought until she surfaced at last to say, “That scene at the bar where we found you. The fire? The bodies? What was all that?”

“I was cleaning house,” I replied. “Mine, not yours.”

“Funny you need to specify.”

Her continued scrutiny made me wonder what they’d walked in on. The last thing I remembered before losing consciousness was being in Nash’s arms, carefully held. If the investigators had pulled up to that, greeted by Nash insisting they save my sorry ass, it shot holes in my “just a bartender” excuse .

“Can I see him?” The question slipped out unchecked, and the fact that Holland didn’t need to ask who I meant implied they had indeed, found Nash and I in our sorry state.

All the scorn left Holland’s face, and she looked almost sympathetic. “Fitch, I don’t think you’re in any position to be asking for favors.”

I nodded. It was stupid to ask, and even worse to tip my cards like that. Grimm already knew that Nash was a pawn to be played against me. I didn’t need the Capitol knowing it, too.

Speaking of stupid questions, I had another that wouldn’t allow itself to go unasked.

“What’s gonna happen to me?”

Holland pushed off the footboard and turned away, resuming her circuit around the room. “It takes at least a week to organize a trial, so you’ll be sent to Thorngate for holding till then.”

I twisted my wrists in the chaffing handcuffs. “Hope I get a decent cellmate.”

The memory of Clyde hunched over his desk, doodling me in any one of a dozen compromising positions, tempted me to smile.

In contrast, Holland showed no hint of good humor. “No cellmates this time, Fitch,” she replied succinctly.

“Solitary?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And then?”

She shot me a sideways glance, and an echo of her earlier sympathy returned. “Do you really want me to say it?”

Would it do any good to plead my case one last time? Would it feel better to go to my trial and execution with at least one person believing I’d tried to do the right thing? Granted, my version of the right thing involved a fair amount of murder. I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that Holland would overlook it as long as I was using my powers for her version of good. But she wasn’t her father. She wasn’t even Briggs, who’d agreed to look the other way and let me do what I did best. In hindsight, I hadn’t done anything very well.

A lung-swelling breath fled me, and I shook my head.

Holland had stopped moving again, this time staring at the drawn blinds over the window as if she could see through them.

She stood so long, her arms crossed and her back to me, that I wondered aloud, “Why are you still here, Investigator?”

Her head tipped my way.

“You caught the bad guy.” A rattle of my handcuffs emphasized my point. “Your work here is done.”

She worked her jaw like she was chewing up and spitting out responses before finding one she liked. When she turned to face me fully, shadows darkened her features. “You know, you didn’t have to be a bad guy,” she said. “You had the chance to change.”

“You really believe that?”

If so, she was more delusional than I thought.

“I tried to help you,” she retorted, sounding severe. “I even forgave you for what you did to my father—”

“Keeping him alive when Grimm wanted him dead?” I shot back. “Or setting him free with a squeaky-clean memory? Which did you object to more?”

Holland bristled, and her hands tightened into fists. “You only wiped his memory so he wouldn’t send us to gun you down.”

I rolled my eyes. “Maybe.”

I wished she would leave then, but misery loved company so maybe she thought I needed some. Her posture relaxed, and her gaze traveled from me to the shock collar remote on the bedside table.

“It’s sad,” she said at last. “You used to be a good person. I thought you could be good again. I see now that I was wrong.”

The comment dumped salt in a very deep, very old wound. She’d said something similar outside her father’s house months ago. Claimed she missed the me she’d known when we were kids. I’d had no response then, but this time I was prepared.

“You know what, Holland?” I glared at her. “Fuck you.”

She blanched, then a blistering flush chased the pale from her cheeks.

I struggled to push up on my elbows, still feeling weighed down but angry enough to fight it. “Fuck you and all your self-righteous bullshit.” The words slid between gritted teeth. “You didn’t do shit for me besides make my life harder and get my brother killed to make a goddamn point. I trusted you more than you ever trusted me, and all it got me was fucked.”

Her nostrils flared, but she didn’t respond before I continued.

“You say you tried to help me, but you had no clue what I was dealing with. You think leaving the gang was easy? Grimm owned my ass.” I snorted a laugh. “Hell, he still might.”

Holland’s expression became a war between anger and shock, and I couldn’t decide which was winning .

I stabbed a finger at her, rattling the handcuff chain again. “I risked my life to help you and your dad. I gave up everything trying to be better. Trying to be good. It wasn’t in the cards.”

My momentum was flagging, overcome by the exhaustion from losing half my blood then being pumped full of someone else’s. My hand throbbed, my shoulder ached, and my heart twinged with the pain of an irrefutable truth.

“I’ve been headed toward this end for half my life. Damned and doomed to fail. And you can’t fathom that, Investigator .” I sneered the word. “Be glad you can’t.”

Silence filled the room as I drew shallow breaths. Holland’s gaze traveled everywhere except to meet mine. She ended on her own feet, stuffed into a pair of pointy-toed stilettos that she tapped against the linoleum floor.

“I should go,” she said quietly. “Your bartender friend is waiting for me in interrogation.”

I perked at the mention of Nash, suddenly willing to take back every scornful and slanderous thing I’d said if it meant changing her mind about letting me see him. But she was already headed toward the exit, detouring only to scoop the shock collar remote off the table and tuck it in her slacks pocket.

Before she cleared the doorway, I called after her.

“Are you going to watch? When they kill me?”

She paused with one hand on the doorframe. She didn’t turn around, but her head angled back so I could see her profile as she answered. “I suppose I’ll have to.” A sigh caused her narrow shoulders to rise and fall. “And I won’t enjoy that, either.”