“In an ideal world, we would not have done this.” She gulps. Puts the car lights on, scrunches her eyes up, and starts to drive. “But we sure as hell don’t live in an ideal world.”
I don’t know what an ideal world is.
Maybe it’s one with daddies.
CHAPTER ONE
Aeron
Vicious Circle (noun): a carousel for grown-ups. Roll up, roll up!
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a fucking great day to be me.
I love my top floor board room; the way today’s sunrise melts through the windows, carnage echoed in its translucent crimson hues. I love Leo, who sits beside me near the top of the table, her lip gloss fresh and her hair smelling like butter and honey. I love the acidic edge my authority casts over the other people in the room; six of my Lore Corp news editors, my attorney, Detective Posner. And God help me, I love the smell of empathy in the morning.
You just wait for the good detective here to spill the beans. By the time he’s done, I’ll not only be able to taste the empathy—and the fear—smoking off every other human being in this room; I’ll be able to carve myself a slice. If there’s one thing the public eats up with a spoon, it’s gruesome murder, and Detective Posner is about to give us the scoop. Let’s go for a swim in the bloodbath, shall we?
Posner’s barely swallowed his water before he begins speaking, and it gives his voice a choked, gurning quality that makes me want to flinch. “I hope you guys don’t mind me calling in this early. I got a lot of shit on my plate.”
I give him a vague smile. “Understood.”
My staff remain silent, shifting their tired bodies in their hastily ironed suits. It’s barely six a.m., and most of them worked late last night—the cleaners only left twenty minutes ago and the upholstery still reeks of Lysol. But the scoop we’re about to get, it’s worth losing sleep for. And Posner, bless his tainted heart, is always keen to keep the line of communication open in case NYPD needs anything from SilentWitn3ss, our social media app. It allows the public to stream their own news clips directly to our site, and since we take each clip offline after twenty-four hours, NYPD needs a warrant to get their hands on anything useful…unless they offer exclusives as a trade. This is an entirely deliberate strategy on my behalf, because you’ve never stopped squeezing the opportunity out of something until you’ve outdone your own expectations.
Posner rubs at his thick black moustache. “So here’s the thing. We got another body in the early hours, and not just any body. We’re thinking it’s a second Honey murder.”
A different kind of quiet falls over the room. This is the ice bucket challenge of silences—sudden, sharp, and frigid. It makes my guts clench and ache, stitched back together in the wake of Leo’s pretty little bullet.
I knew it would be Him.
Judging by the way she stiffens, Leo knew it too. Her discomfort is obvious: hunched shoulders, narrowed pupils in her dark eyes. Her knee, which until now grazed mine beneath the table, is swiftly pulled away. I’d mourn it, but every cell in my body is spitting with excitement. I’m carbonated on the inside.
For the past two weeks, our primetime slots have been soaked in the grotesque glory of the Honey murder: a woman in her mid-forties was left sprawled in a play park for the kindergarteners to find, naked and spread-eagled, eyes open, mouth wide. The culprit had painted Honey down the side of one inner thigh in the woman’s own blood. Above that lovely term of endearment—which, if I say so myself, was fucking deranged—she’d been attacked with a scalpel. America, boys and girls: a place where man can now detour on the school run and treat the kids to Genital Mutilation 101.
That was a busy morning, but not as busy as this one is about to be.