Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series Book Two) Read Free Page A

would have expected. There was a cylinder attached to one end. A silencer.
    Something touched her bare calf. She gasped, imagining Saskia’s premature return, and her sudden anger, but it was only the cat.
    ‘Shit, Ego.’
    The honey-coloured animal corkscrewed into her ankle. His eyes gorged on the room and Jem realised that he had never been allowed in either.
    ‘You’re curious, too, aren’t you, sunshine?’
    Curiosity killed the cat.
    She looked again at the gun.
    Satisfaction brought him back, baby.
    Jem tried to smile at Ego as he strolled towards the weights bench and nosed the stack of discs over and over. Turning back to the desk, her eyes caught the doorway and a chill travelled her spine as she saw Saskia Brandt standing there, silhouetted against the brighter hall and black as the gun. She held bags of shopping in each hand. Her mouth was open.
    ‘What the fuck are you doing, Jem?’ Her voice was hard.
    ‘It’s OK, really,’ Jem replied with a confidence she didn’t feel. She walked over to Saskia, leaving a metre between them. ‘Just having a look around.’
    ‘How dare you? I locked the room.’
    ‘Listen, I’m just wandering about, no harm...’
    Jem talked. She had filibustered people before, and with this confidence she dealt word after word. Though Saskia’s expression did not change – only the direction of her gaze as she looked around the room, checking – Jem maintained her verbiage. Covering fire , she told herself, shooting from the hip , but that only returned her thoughts to the weapon. The idea that Saskia kept a firearm in her apartment could not be positively spun. For Jem, the most worrying element was the addition of the silencer. Was Saskia a policewoman? A contract killer? How did that fit with the extraordinary events of the previous evening?
    Jem’s spiel dried up.
    As though that were her cue, Saskia dropped her shopping and moved into the room, shouldering Jem aside. Her footsteps were silent. Jem remembered trying to walk silently across the floor minutes before. She had not been able to. Saskia could. She knew, Jem realised, which floorboards would creak.
    Saskia touched the glass top of the desk. Her eyes moved from the contents – passports, tickets, camera – to Jem, then back again. Jem tried to judge her mood. Saskia seemed to be as preoccupied as a person working through a crossword. Her skin was ghostly, like a figure in stained glass, yet she was beautiful in an undeniable, cold way. Beholder’s eye be damned.
    Saskia took the gun.
    Jem said, ‘Wait.’
    She did not know what to do. There was a chance that Saskia could rule against her in some way, and though the consequences of that were dim, shapeless in her mind - eviction? death? - Jem knew that she had to interrupt the process. She walked to her. In the glass of the desk, she saw an upside-down Jem meet an upside-down Saskia. Jem wondered, as she had many times, whether the reflected world could be the more real. The true world might play out in polished door handles, around bathroom taps, in the waltz of ice-cubes spun by a lazy hand.
    They stood hip to hip. Both were looking at the gun. Saskia held it backwards, like a club, puzzling over it.
    ‘Sweetheart,’ said Jem, pushing away a strand of Saskia’s fringe.
    ‘How did you get in?’ Saskia asked. Her voice was sad. ‘I locked the door.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter. I just saw you, that’s all. It was this morning. You were standing at the window of the bedroom. It was after we... it was afterwards. I was about to call your name when you turned away and left the room.’
    ‘You followed me?’
    ‘Only to the living room. I saw you pull out that book halfway. I knew it had to be a lock of some sort.’
    ‘Clever girl.’
    Jem smiled, eager to make a human connection between them. Something beyond this exchange of information. But nothing in Saskia’s countenance altered. She looked at Jem, who searched her eyes for meaning, as well as her