“I’ve got a system,” Keltan responded, clicking a video file. “And order and cleanliness is left over from the army. Can’t shake that out of me.”
“But I guess it doesn’t translate to computers,” I muttered.
“System,” he muttered back.
The video file came up, the preview a still from a large, cluttered space that looked like a design studio. Lucinda’s, if the decorating style was anything to go by.
Keltan hovered the mouse over the Play button before glancing up at me. His eyes were hard. “I don’t like this,” he told me.
I returned his stare. “I’m not asking you to like it.”
He glared.
“You’ll find a way to get this video anyway if I don’t show it to you, won’t you?” he surmised.
I nodded once. “And you most likely won’t like my other methods.”
He sighed and muttered a curse under his breath.
It took a little bit for Keltan to find the day in question, once I explained Monica’s description of the scene and of Lucinda herself. He had a knowing look on his face when I mentioned the similarities she’d alluded towards a certain dictator.
Then he pressed Play.
Lucinda walked with the men, her murderer included, into her cluttered workspace. She leaned over her computer and had what looked like an erratic conversation, then rattled off some numbers that they documented on a phone.
“You don’t have sound?” I asked Keltan, leaning in to squint at the screen to try and read their lips. Although the image was crisp—they had some good cameras—the angle of their bodies made it impossible to make out their words. I doubted an actual lip reader could.
Keltan had been watching the screen intently too, his jaw tight. “No,” he clipped. “Our shipment of the latest audio devices got held up.”
I pursed my lips. “Well that was decidedly bad timing. For Lucinda, anyway. For moustache man, it was good, I’d say.”
Keltan rubbed the back of his head. “That’s him? The one you saw? The one who almost fuckin’ saw you?”
I nodded, watching the figure. I might not have gotten the best glimpse of him through the slats of the closet, but it was well enough to know almost beyond any doubt that the man on the screen with the bad suit was the same as the man who’d reeked of Old Spice and liked to slit throats.
“Fuck,” Keltan muttered.
He yanked me to his side, moving his chair to accommodate me sitting in his lap. I didn’t exactly object to the new position. It was rather nice, actually.
Keltan rubbed my jaw with his thumb. “Goes against every instinct inside me to let you anywhere fuckin’ near this shit,” he mumbled. “Every part of me. This shit is bad, Lucy. It’s not somethin’ we’ve just stumbled on. This shit has been on our radar for months. It’s bigger than a story. Not worth you riskin’ anything for. Not worth me riskin’ you for. Shit, nothing on this planet is worth risking you for.”
I eyed him. “Are you telling me I can’t do the story?” I asked in an even voice. Underneath, it was not even. I didn’t do well with being told what to do. Ask any teacher, parent, or employer in my life.
Not since Gray. Not since before that. It had always been there, my aversion to authority. But him trying to use his love like a weapon to control me, then beat me, then damage my soul kind of amped up that aversion.
“No, babe,” Keltan said with a small grin. But it was full with melancholy. “May be an army grunt, but even I have enough brains to know you can’t tell a wild thing not to do anything. Unless you put it in a cage.” His hand tightened. “No fuckin’ way am I ever putting you in a cage.” He paused. “I’m asking you not to do the story. If not for your own survival, then for mine.”
I bit my lip. That was a low blow, wording it like that. Making it seem so easy. It wasn’t. “You don’t know what this means to me,” I whispered. “This is it. Me finally being able to swim out from clothes and bags and superficiality and actually do something. Be something more than that.”
He frowned. “You are more than that.”
I gave him a look. “You’re slightly biased. And I don’t want to be more just through your eyes or your opinion. I want to be more by my own. I want to do it for myself.”
He paused and it was long. “Fuck,” he muttered.
The curse was a win. Though the fear in his eyes, the fear I put there, was a loss.
“You’re going to do this shit, aren’t you? Unless I handcuff you to my desk?” he asked, resigned.
“You handcuff me to your desk, you better plan on doing it till I’m old, gray and dead. Because that’s the only way you’ll manage not to have me burn your house down and your little security club of hot guys,” I said.