Chapter 166 CHAPTER 166
Offed her!
The Morning the Street Stood Still. Tessa woke to a silence so loud it thrummed behind her ears. The kind of silence that presses against your chest and makes each breath feel like it must be earned.
For a moment she lay still, fingers threaded through the soft cotton of the bedspread, trying to convince herself the quiet was ordinary, the hush of a weekend morning, the calm before errands and calls and the small rehearsed dramas of her life. But the quiet did not feel ordinary. It felt like the pause before something broke.
She dressed without looking into the mirror, fastening the last button of a blouse she had chosen for no reason other than it made her feel steadier. When she stepped out onto the balcony that overlooked the street, the view that met her should have been a normal one, vendors setting up, a dog walker hurrying by, a taxi glinting under the early sun. Instead, the street had become a tableau of motion and alarm: clusters of people gathered in tight, uneasy circles; a thin column of blue and red lights flickering like a wound; the urgent footsteps of uniformed officers as they threaded through the crowd. Tessa felt a coldness slide down her spine.
She hurried down three flights of stairs, almost running into the lobby where neighbors were pressed to the windows, their faces mapped with confusion. Someone’s phone was held high, the glow of the screen carving a pale rectangle into the morning.
A man muttered something about an ambulance. A child cried once, small and brittle. The building’s security guard stepped aside when she brushed past him, his eyes asking without words if she had seen what had happened.
The street outside was cordoned off by a line of bright plastic tape, and officers kept the crowd back with practiced authority that could not hide their own tension. Tessa approached the line, heart racing, and pushed through the knot of people to find the sight that would root itself in her memory: Chloe lying still in the center of the street, a smear of dark staining her clothes, her limbs splayed in an awkward, final pose.
She looked smaller than the last time Tessa had spoken to her, a woman who had swaggered through rooms with a laugh as loud as the music at parties, suddenly shrunken, impossibly ordinary in death.
For a suspended second Tessa could not process the scene in front of her. The air smelled faintly of petrol and something metallic. Someone in the crowd said, “She’s been shot,” and the words hit her with the force of a hand to the face. She had known Chloe’s temperament, the petty rebellions, the sharp commentary, the dangerous little games she played with other people’s vulnerabilities but she had never imagined this. Not a gun. Not blood.
The ambulance that arrived was a moving blur of focused urgency. Paramedics moved with a competence that suggested rehearsed steps, their voices clipped and professional.
They knelt by Chloe’s body, their hands checking for signs she might still be pulled back from the edge. A paramedic’s face was soft for a moment as she checked a pulse and then shook her head. Another pressed fingers to Chloe’s neck and then closed a pale mouth, the small gesture making the crowd around them inhale as one.
Tessa watched as the cover was folded carefully over Chloe’s face. The sight of it was a wound in itself. Someone somewhere had to call a name, her name, Chloe. The sound of her name on those lips made the crowd hush and then swell with noise again: women sobbed, men whispered theories, children stared as if at a broadcast.
A voice near the barricade said something about a single bullet, about execution style, and then that phrase—execution style—made the murmur swell into the raw, hungry kind of speculation that turns grief into rumor.
Detectives arrived, their presence slicing through the confusion with the quiet command of people who knew how to look without letting the spectacle alter them. They paced the scene and began the methodical work of questioning.
Someone from the police shouted instructions into a radio. Officers photographed the position of Chloe’s body and the scene around her, the small close ups that would later be referenced in reports and muted morning news cycles.
A man who introduced himself as Crime Scene walked in wearing gloves, his movements deliberate. He stirred the air with a long rod, lifted a scrap of fabric, nodded instruction to an assistant.
It was all work that would eventually be catalogued in the cold logic of evidence. Right now, to Tessa, it felt like sacrilege, the innards of a life being pried open in full daylight.
People began to identify themselves to the officers, trembling voices offering something—names, fleeting observations, where they’d last seen Chloe, who she had spoken to the night before. An elderly woman pressed a hand to her chest and said she had seen a black sedan that skidded away from the curb.
A teenager in a hoodie said he thought he’d heard two bangs but had thought them fireworks. A delivery driver said something about a woman stumbling out of a shop and then collapsing, and his voice cracked on the last words. Every account was a thread the detectives would knit together to create a narrative that would either lead them to justice or to dead-ends.
Tessa felt a presence near her, a familiar set of shoulders and the sharp scent of cologne and she turned to see Ares. He stood at the edge of the throng, surprisingly composed, his jaw set, eyes distant. For a beat their gazes met, and she saw something in his face that made the breath leave her: a careful, brittle restraint, like a man learning to hold back a tempest in a teacup.
He looked away, as if the sight of Chloe under that tarpaulin were a mirror he could not bear. When Tessa stepped closer, he did not move, and that refusal to approach stung more than any physical absence of affection had done in recent months. Where other men might have shown visible grief, anger, words, a hand over a mouth. Ares went still, a statue of control.
“Are you all right?” he asked finally, voice low.
Tessa had to tilt her head to focus. She could feel the blood thudding in her ears, the world’s edges sharpened to painful clarity. “I—” She could not find a truthful answer. “I’m… I’m fine,” she said, because what else could she say when the world had clearly reconfigured itself without asking?
Ares’ hand hovered near the barricade for a second and then fell to his side. He was not the only person in view of those cameras and phones, someone was filming, someone else would post, and the images of Chloe’s body, the blue tape, the ambulance lights would be spread before there was time for the police to form a hypothesis. The rumor mill would be merciless. The blackmailers who h
ad used secrets like knives would feast on this.