Drink Me

33. SNAP

WARNING: one of the scenes from this chapter could be triggering or disturbing for some peole.

SNAP

Alice's and Riley's eyes met briefly before the woman's returned on Cormak.

"How do you know this?" She let go of the man's hand and retured the pliers in her pocket as she sat on the coffee table.

Cormak swallowed hard again, grasping for more air. "I read it in a classified file before I destroyed it."

Alice nodded and calmly asked. "Does your mandator know about this?"

Cormak's head tilted in confusion. "My mandator?"

"Yes, the person who put you in contact with the Irish guy."

To Alice's surprise, the man scoffed.

"I don't even know who that person is, I received an anonymous letter with a hefty payment three months ago. They only contact me with instructions on the information they want." He shook his head. "I made contact with Cooper," he said proudly, but confirming Aidan's implication. "I looked him up, sought him down. I figured I'd get more money if I could cut the middleman..." The man's courage impressed Riley.

"So no one else knows about this Absolem?" Alice pressed.

"No, no one," the man confirmed. He sounded almost proud.

But Riley knew what was coming.

"Thank you, Mr Cormack," Alice said as she stood up. "Ubey yego," she ordered as she walked past the two men and into the small service bathroom.

Riley didn't speak Russian, but he knew exactly what Alice meant. The Queen of Hearts had declared her sentence. He closed his eyes briefly before his hands grabbed either side of Cormak's head and twisted it in a sharp snap.

It wasn't the first time Riley had taken a life. He was a silent killer, used to pulling the trigger hundreds of meters away. Fast and sterile.

This was physical.

Alice emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later. She scanned the room to find Riley standing behind Cormak's slumped body. She walked to him and placed a gentle hand on Riley's forearm, suddenly getting all his attention; meeting his eyes, Alice nodded in approval.

"Come, help me," she ordered, heading for the kitchen. "Grab the body."

Riley silently obeyed, holding the dead man from under his armpits and dragging him across the living room and to the kitchen floor.

"What's the plan?" he asked Alice, who was moving a chair around the table.

"Domestic accidents are one of the highest causes of death in the UK," the woman said, as if she was the host in a morning news show.

She then placed the chair against the countertop and stepped on it to reach on the highest shelf of the open cupboard. Stretching out her fingers she moved a box of salt closer to the edge of the shelf. Once back on the ground, she kicked the chair so that it fell on its side. "Ooops," she said, putting her index next to her mouth.

"Do you think it'll work?" Riley asked, already positioning the body so that it looked like it had fallen from the chair.

But Alice shrugged and looking around she took a pan from the drying rack next to the sink and without saying a word, she slammed it on the body's skull where the impact would have hit him.

"For good measure," she said to an astounded Riley. "I'll have a team of cleaners come and fix it properly later, but this will do for now." She looked around with a pensive glare. "They should look for bugs too..." she added to herself.