Broken Prince: A New Adult Romance Novel by Rose Aubrey

Author:Rose, Aubrey [Rose, Aubrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-12-22T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Brynn

Brynn went into the office. Csilla's mom was there. She didn't seem drunk, although there were bags under her eyes, covered with heavy makeup.

"Mrs. Deveny?"

She saw me looking at her and turned away too quickly.

She motioned for me to follow her back, and I did, down the hallway where people turned to look at me. I kept my face turned straight ahead. I didn't know if they recognized me as the girl from the tabloids, or if they had been talking about me behind my back.

Mrs. Deveny led the way back to the end of the hall and down the stairs. The stairway was green with fluorescent light, and we came down into a room lit only by emergency lights. Mrs. Deveny flipped the switch and the lamps flickered on overhead, their cold light alien and sterile as a hospital's. The room was larger than I had expected - the shelves were taller than my head, and stretched back far enough that I thought the room might take up the entire space below the police station. All of the shelves were packed full with cardboard boxes behind a metal grating.

"We run the filing offices for everyone in Budapest," she said, seeing my surprise. "There's a backlog of information from solved and unsolved cases."

"You don't put anything online?"

"We try," she said. "Nowadays. When was your mother killed?"

"Thirteen years ago," I said. My voice sounded shaky. I coughed into my hand and pretended that the burning in my eyes was from the dust that hung in the cold air.

"We didn't start digitizing records until just a few years ago," she said. She ignored the tremble in my voice, for which I was thankful. "The government offices are, as always, behind the times."

She brought me back through the shelves, winding her way along the corridors. My eyes wandered over the names which labeled the boxes, all in Hungarian. Again and again I saw the Hungarian word I'd learned from searching for my mother online: gyilkosság. Murder.

It was as though I'd stumbled upon a gruesome treasure trove, one filled with horrors rather than coins. Mrs. Deveny strode quickly to the center of one aisle and shook her keys from her pocket. Unlocking the fastener on the shelf, she pulled the metal grate open and pushed the front box aside. A cloud of dust rose from the top of the cardboard boxes and hovered in the thin light.

"Two boxes," she said, pulling out the first crate. I swallowed as I read the name on the side of the box. Katalin Tomlin. It made me shudder. Even seeing her name on the gravestone had not affected me so much. I hoped that Mrs. Deveny would leave me alone. I couldn't imagine digging through the boxes of evidence for my mother's murder with her standing over me.

"You take one, I'll take the other," she said. "There's a table in the back. You can look at the evidence there."

I walked, carrying the box in front of me. It carried all my mother's secrets—the secret to how she was killed.

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