“Where’s the car?” He looked down at the keys in Heloise’s hand.

“Right up here,” she replied, gesturing up ahead with a nod.

“Okay, we’re going for a ride.” He held out his hand.

“I’ll drive,” Heloise clarified, clutching the car keys.

CHAPTER

13

THE PAIN ZIGZAGGED up through Stefan’s arm as he lit the lighter. He swore under his breath and exhaled the smoke hard through his nose. The radiologist had called it a “fracture of the fourth metacarpal” and asked how it had happened. “A work injury,” he had replied, secretly amused.

Three weeks ago, a high school teacher from Risskov had become a problem, suddenly remorseful and falling apart. Stefan had been assigned to take care of it, and at first he had tried to talk some sense into the guy, appealing to his inner demons. When that didn’t work, he had threatened the man’s family.

Initially, it had seemed to have had an effect. It always did. But Stefan had sensed that the man was still having doubts, and they quite simply couldn’t afford to gamble with the business. There was too much money at stake, too many lives that would be ruined by a defector with moral scruples. If he wasn’t onboard, he’d be thrown overboard. Simple as that.

The man had fought for his life.

Who would have thought that an elf of a man with such long, flimsy fingers could put up so much resistance and fight back so well? He had flailed wildly in the air and hit Stefan with a couple of decent blows before Stefan had pacified him with a closed-fist punch right under the jaw.

The man had folded like a defective beach chair and hit the ground with a dull thump.

Stefan had observed him, unconscious, vulnerable. He’d looked so fragile, like a newly laid egg. A single blow in the right place would have cracked his skull open.

Stefan had felt a desire bubble up in his chest, the desire to place the man’s head at a particularly vulnerable angle, fetch the sledgehammer from the toolbox in his pickup, and swing it in a fireworks display of blood, brain matter, and shards of cranium, but no. That would’ve have made too much of a mess, and there hadn’t been time for that.

Instead he had tied the rope around the man’s neck, tightened it, and waited.

When he had sailed out of the Aarhus marina a half hour later, he’d pushed the lifeless body over the side of the boat and stared down into the water for a long time after the man with the iron chain wound around his torso had sunk so far down into the dark water that he couldn’t be seen anymore.