Without thinking too deeply about it, Zelda knew that in that way could never work for her with anyone else but Raymond. Not after all she had been through. It might have worked with Emile, but he was dead. She knew she was damaged, that a part of what she was—her womanhood—had been taken from her. And two of the men who had taken it were now dead at her hand. But she could live with that. She knew that other women’s lives were different, but she could live with what she was, and what she had done. And living had to be enough. People sometimes asked if she felt she could ever be the same after her experiences, but she always replied that there was nothing for her to be the same as; they had taken everything from her before she even got it herself.

But had her life come to be dominated by revenge, by the need to kill? Where would it end? Any real list would be very long indeed, and she had to ask herself if that was the existence she wanted. Or jail, where she would inevitably end up. She was lucky not to have been caught so far. Alan was no fool. The cops were no fools. They had their methods, and they would uncover her, not cover up, the way they had done with Darius. In killing Darius, she had done the authorities a favor, had done to him exactly what they wanted done. Darius had a lot of dirt on a lot of famous and powerful people. Household names. Government ministers. With Emile’s help, Zelda had done their dirty work for them, had even uncovered his store of blackmail material for them, and they had rewarded her with a passport and her freedom. They couldn’t state that publicly, though, so she had had to leave France. She lost Emile forever, too.

There had been no mention of a body found in a London hotel in the morning paper she had scanned at Banks’s cottage, as there surely would have been if Goran Tadić had been left there after her visit. Back at home, she scoured the Internet news sites and still found nothing. By mid-afternoon, she became certain that what she had thought would happen had happened. They had got there first, before any hotel employees, and they had removed his body, destroyed all traces of his murder. If there was to be any investigation, any retribution, it would belong to them, not to the police.

Now it made sense for her to stop. Let Petar Tadić live to suffer the loss of his brother.

But there was one more, if only she could find him.