Kovit was silent.
Gold wrapped her arms around her knees, sadness whispering through her voice. “I don’t know you at all, Kovit. Just the masks you’ve worn.”
Kovit let out a long breath. His hair fell across his eyes, and Nita wasn’t sure she wanted to see what expression they held right now. Because Gold, whether she knew it or not, had called all of his online friendships fake. She’d isolated him even more.
“I understand.” Kovit’s voice was dead.
Gold tried to straighten and cursed.
Nita let out a long breath. They’d dallied enough here. “Kovit, take Gold and go to wherever Henry’s staying. Message me the location, and I’ll see you there later.”
“Wait.” Gold’s eyes widened. “You can’t leave me with him. What if he hurts me?”
“I won’t hurt you.” Kovit’s voice was frosty.
“My shoulder and knee tell a different story,” Gold snapped, turning back to Nita.
“May.” He turned to glare at her. “I get that you don’t like me. But just pretend you’re with Kevin from the chat.”
Nita laughed. “Your online name is Kevin?”
He shrugged. “I wanted something close to my name that sounded American-y. I don’t know. It was stupid, I wanted to blend in. And it wasn’t like they could see me over the internet.”
Nita frowned, imagining a small desperate child wanting nothing more than to fit in. To belong.
She thought of Adair’s comment—that if Kovit hadn’t been hunted by INHUP, he never would have become who he was. And she thought about all the things he probably did to try and belong in the Family. She wondered if perhaps Adair was right.
Not that it would change anything.
Nita turned to Gold. “Look, he’s not going to hurt you. You’re going to be fine. I need you guys to go ahead while I deal with the bodies.”
Kovit’s face shadowed as he looked up the stairwell toward the room where Henry’s body lay. Nita reached over, grabbed his chin, and turned him to face her.
“I will deal with the bodies.” Her voice was firm. “You will go and find Henry’s computer and get rid of all trace of those incriminating videos he was emailing you.”
Kovit swallowed. “Adair can deal with the bodies—”
“Adair,” Nita hissed, “is going to be one of the bodies soon.”
Kovit’s eyes widened.
Nita leaned forward. “No one sells me out and doesn’t pay for it.”
Kovit swallowed. “Do you need—”
“Backup?” Nita shook her head. “Oh no, I can deal with Adair all on my own.”
Adair was going to learn that Nita didn’t need to dissect a kelpie to know their weaknesses.
Kovit hesitated, then nodded. “What will you do with the bodies?”
Nita raised her eyebrows. “Do you really want to know?”
Kovit looked away. “No.”
Nita’s smile was tight as she turned away.
“Nita?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t . . . I mean . . . Henry’s body . . .”
Nita sighed. “I’ll get rid of it. Respectfully.”
“But you won’t do anything . . . unnecessary to it.” His eyes couldn’t hold hers.
“No. I won’t dissect his body. I promise.”
She didn’t say anything about the other one.
He gave her a soft smile. “Thanks.”
“Always.”
He knelt beside Gold, hauled her up by her good arm, and acted like a crutch so she could walk. She was tense and tight, and Nita couldn’t tell if the thought of being touched by Kovit made her skin crawl or she was in a lot of pain. Kovit wasn’t reacting, but he had a lot of practice controlling himself.
Kovit smiled at Nita, a soft, sad expression that reminded her that while they’d had their moment, he’d still broken something inside, and it ate away at his soul. She had the most horrible feeling that he’d taken a step toward the darkness, and he could never take that step back.
It was a feeling she knew well.
Then he was gone, hauling Gold along with him. Nita forced herself to turn away from them and return to a room with two dead bodies.
Nita let out a breath as the shop door slammed behind them. The world seemed emptier without him there.
Sighing, she opened the apartment door and examined the scene in front of her. The only sign of violence was the bloodstain on the wall. And obviously, the bodies.
Nita nodded. She could do this.
First, she would set up a trap for when Adair returned.
And while she waited . . . well. She had a scalpel. She had a body. And she had all the time in the world.
Forty-Eight
N ITA TOOK HER TIME with her dissection.
It was hard to slow herself down, to not punch a hole in the body’s chest and start ripping out organs. But she didn’t. She was controlled, contained.
She sliced the skin of the chest in a Y incision, and used her enhanced muscles to crack the rib cage with brute force. Greedy fingers reached in, and her eyes shone with a desperate hunger.
When Adair came in and interrupted her, Nita was nearly done.
The door opened, and Nita rose from the floor, her arms up to her elbows covered in blood from where she’d ripped the man’s organs out of his chest and lined them up alongside him like she was preparing to embalm an Egyptian mummy.
Adair stopped in the doorway. His black hair was mussed, and his skin pale, stretched tight by the frown across his face, which melted into shock as he took in the room. His eyes flicked between Nita, crouched over one gory body, and Henry’s body, still lying on the bed where it had fallen.
In that second of staring at each other, the tub of hot water Nita had perched on top of the cabinet beside the door slowly tipped over, tugged by a string attaching the basin to the open door.
Scalding hot water poured over Adair.
He gasped as the water hit him, and steam rose where the water made contact with his cold skin.
He began to melt.
Kelpies were designed for cold. Adair needed to regulate his body temperature—that was why the shop was so cold, why he ate ice cream, why kelpies only ever lived in northern climates. Which meant he was very susceptible to sudden climate changes.
Put a reptile in icy water, and its body would shut down. Cold-blooded, they called them.
Put Adair in hot water, and well . . . the idiom didn’t come from nowhere.
The melting started with his head. His face flickered a few times before becoming completely translucent and shimmery, like he was wearing a liquid mirror. The hot water melted it off his skin, dripping down and off his face like some sort of mucus. And Nita finally saw Adair for what he really was.
A monster.
Black scales rippled across his skin, almost crocodilian. His head was a little too long, and more than half of it was filled with a giant mouth, large enough Nita could probably stick her whole head in, if not for the teeth. Razor-sharp teeth, each one as long as a finger, but half as thin. Hundreds of them, each overlapping, creating layers of jagged, vicious teeth.
His eyes covered the rest of his face, yellow and slitted, like a dragon. His nose was flat and almost invisible, and he had no ears or hair, just smooth black scales and a ridged, bumpy spine starting just between his eyes, going up over his head and down along his back.