Read Online Dark Sins and Desert Sands by Stephanie Draven - Free Book Online Page B

on Nate Jaffe’s door. He didn’t answer. She rang the bell. She couldn’t blame him for not wanting to talk to her right now, but this wasn’t about her. “Nate!”
    She rang the bell again and knocked at the same time. Then Layla remembered that he kept an extra key under the mat. She’d never used it when they weretogether, but while Rayhan Stavrakis lay bleeding, now wasn’t the time to worry about emotional boundaries. What’s more, the door wasn’t even locked….
    The apartment was dark and Layla felt foolish. Ridiculous. Maybe he wasn’t home.
    A sliver of light cut across the floor from under his bedroom door. “Nate, I’m really sorry about tonight, about storming into your apartment, about everything, but—”
    Her words cut off as she swung open the bedroom door and saw the swaying shadow pass over her feet. A moment later, she realized that she was staring at a dead body.
     
    This time Layla did call the police.
    Now she sat in Nate Jaffe’s kitchen wrapped in a blanket because she couldn’t stop shivering. Yellow crime-scene tape cordoned off the bedroom but forensics were on-site. They’d offered to call a grief counselor, but Layla asked them to call Isabel instead. Her assistant was the closest thing that she had to an actual friend.
    While she waited, the police officer sat beside her, a notebook in hand. “Dr. Bahset, can you tell us why you let yourself into the apartment tonight?”
    “I already told you,” Layla whispered.
    “Ma’am, you said that a guy with mind control powers abducted you, then passed out, and you were coming to get him help. Is that really the story you’re sticking with?”
    “Dude, she’s in shock,” one of the younger officers said.
    Fine . Let them think she was in shock. She probablywas. But that didn’t mean Ray Stavrakis didn’t need help. She’d already let one man die tonight. She wasn’t going to sit idly by while another suffered. “You have to listen to me,” Layla insisted. “Send paramedics to room 513 at the Golden Calf. You’ll find an unconscious man, bleeding from the nose.”
    “We already sent an ambulance over there,” the officer said, slapping his notebook shut in frustration. “There’s nobody in that room and it’s registered to an elderly gentleman.”
    Layla put her face in her hands. Maybe she’d imagined everything. Maybe she’d had a complete breakdown. That was the joke about mental health professionals, wasn’t it? That they were the real crazies of society.
    “Looks like suicide,” someone said, coming out of Nate Jaffe’s bedroom, and Layla swallowed the anguished sound in her throat. That he was dead was horrifying enough, but that he might have killed himself was unspeakably so.
    She’d seen him hanging there in his closet at the end of a rope, his eyes bulging and his face discolored. She’d never be able to shake the image of his arms so limp at his sides, gently swaying with the rest of his body. If she could have burst into tears at the memory of it, she would have. Grief and guilt lashed violently against her insides, but no tears would come.
    She hadn’t loved Nate Jaffe, but he’d been good to her. He’d been gentle and patient. What’s more, he’d been a good therapist. He counseled people who were unwell and made them whole again. And yet, no one had helped him. She certainly hadn’t. She hadn’t seen a single clue that he was capable of this. What kind oftherapist did that make her? What kind of person did that make her?
    “We just want to know what kind of frame of mind he was in,” the police officer was saying. “Did you quarrel at dinner?”
    Layla groaned, not even wanting to speak the words. “We ended our relationship.”
    And he’d seemed hurt, yes. But enough to take his own life?
     
    Sitting in the passenger seat of Isabel’s car, Layla watched the city skyline pass by in a neon blur. For two years now, she’d perfected the ruse that she was a competent psychologist.