Lies in the Dark: A Heart of Inferno Novel by Nicole Fanning

Author:Nicole Fanning [Fanning, Nicole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

“Damn,” Rachel says, sighing deeply as we settle back into the study. “That was different. I can’t believe I let you talk to me like that.”

I smirk to myself, pouring us each a glass of wine.

“You didn’t seem to mind,” I look at her over the top of my glass.

“Oh, I didn’t,” she grins, biting her bottom lip. “I just don’t usually let most people talk to me like that.”

“Well, I hope I’m not like most people.”

I clear my throat, watching with satisfaction as the faintest of blushes settles across her cheeks as she smiles at me. Reaching forward she takes her glass from the coffee table and sits back on her couch.

“No,” she whispers. “You’re not.”

I can’t explain why, but something about the way she says this makes my heart beat faster.

Rachel flips her hair back, grabbing a pillow and settling in against the corner of the couch, stretching out her legs.

She’s so beautiful, even when she isn’t trying to be.

Especially when she isn’t trying.

“So,” she says. “We’ve concluded the dinner and dicking. Now I’m ready for serial killers.”

“Dinner and dicking,” I repeat, nearly snorting on my wine. “You sure as hell have a way with words, Miss Valentine.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she says waving me on. “Less compliments, more confessions, please and thank you.”

I laugh.

“Alright alright,” I say, crossing my legs. “Well, it took us nearly two months of investigating and tracking before we had our perpetrators. They were a couple, on the lower end of high-society, who looked eerily similar to the profile I crafted for Roger.” I say as Rachel kicks off her slippers.

“Martin Naveau, a forty-year-old architecture professor, and his art-gallery owning wife, Stella, had inserted themselves into one of the most prestigious and ultra private kink clubs in Manhattan.”

“Almost exactly what you described,” Rachel says.

“After our intelligence team hacked their way onto the Naveau’s internet history, they found Stella’s art for sale on the dark web. Art which consisted mostly of scarily accurate oil paint canvas recreations of the corpses we found in the woods in graphically lewd positions, selling a minimum of six figures a pop.”

“Holy shit.” Rachel gasps softly.

“And that was just a fraction of what her life-sized clay sculptures were going for,” I continue. “We concluded that Martin and Stella must’ve been taking directly from the old adage about “life imitating art,” but instead of paying a model to sit for long periods of posing time, decided to find models that didn’t need to take breaks…or oxygen.”

“Pesky inconvenience,” Rachel winks at me.

“We learned from their friends that Martin and Stella were up to their ears in debt, and were considered the poorest couple of their trust-fund social circles. We could only assume this led them to harbor a vicious disdain for the increasingly high table of Manhattan’s elite,”

“And come up with a way to strike back,” she nods.

“Exactly. And after a few conversations with the connected facilitators, and the reasonable assurance of my informant’s anonymity, I learned that the couple were referred

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