As I suspected, the longer the quiet drags on, the pinker her cheeks become. She shifts in her chair.
After almost a full minute, she says, “Do you not intend to speak to me? The guards said you consented to this meeting.”
I answer at last.
“What do you hope to accomplish, Ms. Nightingale?”
Even though she was trying to provoke me into answering, the roughness of my voice in this small space makes her jump. She’s angry with herself for startling, her cheeks flushing brighter than ever.
“I’m here to help in the process of rehabilitation,” she says. “By meeting with me regularly, I hope to help you pass your time here more effectively, and to prepare you for a successful return to normal life.”
“Return to normal life.” As if I or any of my brothers ever had that luxury.
She’s a crusader.
One of those women who thinks they can make a change in the world. The more dramatic the change, the more satisfying it will be for her. She could be vaccinating orphans in Guatemala, or sifting plastic out of the ocean. Instead she’s here trying to reform the scum of the earth.
I look at her gleaming shoes, her leather briefcase, her tailored suit. All deliberately simple and unadorned, but discernibly expensive, nonetheless.
“What’s a little rich girl like you doing in a place like this?” I say. “Surely there were better options once you graduated from… Columbia, I’d guess?”
Her lips bleach white as she presses them tightly together.
This is too easy.
“We’re not here to talk about me,” she says.
“But you think I should bare my soul to you. A stranger. Who doesn’t want to answer a simple question about herself.”
I can see her chest rising and falling under the modest blazer. I see the flutter of her pulse in the delicate hollow of her throat.
“Anything you say to me is confidential,” she says. “It can’t be used against you in legal proceedings.”
“That’s closing the barn door after the horse fled,” I say. “I’m on a twenty-five-year sentence.”
“Yes,” Clare says, her fingertips flexing ever so slightly on the manila folder that surely contains a record of all my misdeeds. All the ones they know about, that is. “For the murder of your fiancée, Roxanne Maguire.”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” I snap, rougher than I intended.
“We don’t have to talk about it today,” Clare says, with a slight emphasis on the word today, implying that it’s a topic she will certainly return to in the future.
She won’t like the response she gets if she tries.
Irresistibly, her eyes are drawn to my two massive hands folded on the tabletop. The thick, calloused fingers. The blunt nails. The tattoos on my knuckles and the backs of my hands. Her eyes roam up my heavily veined forearms and then to my biceps which are straining the limits of the XXXL prison uniform that still barely fits.
The words in that folder must be echoing inside her head.
Sexually assaulted…
Skull fractured by a wine bottle…
Cause of death: strangulation…
“Isn’t it an impediment to your work to be beautiful?” I ask her.
She lets out a huff of air, half disbelieving, half flustered.
“I’m not—please don’t try to manipulate me with flattery.”
“I’m not flattering you. You’re a stunning woman, trying to work with murderers and rapists. You’re telling me that’s not a distraction?”
She frowns.
“It’s not an issue.”
“That’s impossible.”
Now she looks almost angry.
“I’m nothing special,” she says, bluntly.
I don’t know why she’s so intent on considering herself plain—she may not have the obvious flashiness of a certain sort of woman, but Clare’s beauty is all the more powerful for its subtlety. The delicacy and luminescence of her skin, like the slightest touch would bruise it… those large, dark eyes, so liquid that they almost seem tearful…
Her fragility makes me want to do terrible things to her.
And yet, I almost want to protect her, too… like a little bird that could fit in the hollow of my hand… a nightingale, singing only for me…
“Don’t be modest. You’ve seen the way men look at you. Tell the truth, Clare.”
She bites the edge of her lip, irritated at my use of her first name, and at my commanding tone.
Still, I see the way that tone takes hold of her, compelling her to answer me.
“Men always stare at women,” she says.
“They stare at you more… how could they not?”
“Mr. Rogov,” she says, sharply. “I told you, we’re not here to discuss me.”
“I remember,” I say.
But I think she will discuss herself if I push her. Because no matter how hard Ms. Nightingale tries to be stern, to maintain professionalism, I see the truth behind her thin façade. I see how she flinches when I bark, how she squirms under my stare. How her eyes flit up to meet mine when I use a gentler tone, and how her cheeks flush pink when I compliment her. Clare has been raised to respect authority. To crave it, even…