Brotherhood in Death (In Death 42)

What a marvel her mind was, he decided, and slipped into sleep after her.

—

The dream grippe

d her with sharp, digging claws. Even knowing it for what it was, she couldn’t break free of it. It held fast, dragged her down.

Into the study in the Spring Street brownstone.

Edward Mira sat in the desk chair dressed in one of his senatorial suits, his glossy black hair swept back from his stony face.

“I’m dead.”

“I’m aware.”

“Yet you make my murderers my victims.”

“The way I see it, you did that. Did you rape them, Senator Mira?”

Leaning forward, he banged his fist on the desk. “I’m dead. Your responsibility is to me. But you’d smear my reputation, destroy my legacy? This is how you stand for the dead?”

“I’ll do my job. I’ll do my best to identify and apprehend the person or persons who killed you, even if doing that smears your rep.”

“Your best?” He sneered at her. “Your best to paint me as a monster so those who took my life are coddled and stroked.”

“My best to uncover the truth, whatever that means.”

“The truth?” He banged the desk again, but this time with the gavel he held. “I know the truth. I know what you are, what you did. You’re just like them.”

He struck the desk again, and on the explosion of sound they stood in the room in Dallas with the ugly red light flashing.

“No. No.” She backed away as panic coiled up, struck like a snake. “I’m done with this. I don’t come here anymore. It’s finished for me.”

“It’s never finished.” The senator sat, wearing his black robes, at his raised judge’s platform. “Murderer!”

At the next bang of his gavel she saw herself, the terrified girl she’d been, struggling with, pleading with Richard Troy. With her father as he raped her.

She heard her own high-pitched scream, felt the pain in her own arm as the bone snapped when he broke her arm.

Felt the horror and the hope when those small fingers closed around the little knife.

“Guilty!” the senator shouted when the desperate girl plunged the knife into flesh. “Guilty, guilty, guilty.”

Stabbing, over and over and over. The inhuman sounds growling in her throat, and the blood, all the blood washing warm over her hands.

“Blood on your hands. Guilty. Murderer. Just like them.”

“Kill the bitch.” Richard Troy stared at her with glassy eyes as blood bubbled from his lips. “Give her what she deserves.”

With the next strike of the gavel she was back at the crime scene, the noose around her neck. She dragged at the rope with her blood-smeared hands, but it only tightened, tightened as the mechanism hummed the chandelier higher.

“Now,” the senator said, “justice is served.”

“Wake up! Eve, you bloody well wake up and fucking breathe.”

Roarke’s words, his rough shakes finally got through. She sucked in air, still dragging at the dream noose around her throat.

“It’s a dream. A dream. Do you hear me? Come back now.”