“Did the woman in Odessa, Zasha, have a halo?”
Ava nodded. “Yes. Faintly, but it was there.”
“Is that why you chose her?”
“Why ask when you know the answer?” Ava snapped.
“Because I don’t know. I’m listening to you and trying to understand. Can you explain, help me understand?” Annalise reached out, put her hand on Ava’s forearm, squeezing gently.
“The halo is faint and will fade if I don’t help them.”
“What you’re doing is helping people to be like your mother. To have moral fortitude, like she did.”
“Yes. If I didn’t, their halo might vanish. They have the right to ascend with the grace of angels.”
“Everyone you helped…they all had halos?”
“Yes.”
“Even Josephine O’Connor?” Annalise reached into her pocket, pulled out a small photo of Josephine and held it up. “She lived in Dublin.”
Ava glanced at the photo, and then reached for it. Annalise put it back in her pocket.
“She did,” Ava assured her.
“But you didn’t pick her, did you?” Annalise asked. “Someone else gave you her name.”
Ava’s shoulders straightened and she raised a brow. “Oh?”
“There’s no need to protect him. He’s dead.”
“No,” Ava said slowly. But before Annalise could reply, she said, “I knew that. I knew he’d ascended.”
Annalise reached into her other pocket, taking out the picture of Petro. “Who was he to you? A friend?”
“Melech understood me.” She reached for the picture, and this time Annalise let her have it.
“Melech,” Annalise repeated.
Ava studied the picture of Petro. There was no longing in the way she looked at it. Whatever had been between them hadn’t been romantic.
“He could see the halos too.” Ava passed the picture back. “He saw it on Josephine. It took me time, but I also saw.”
“But he told you what to do with her body, didn’t he? So he did more than just see the halos. He told you how to…help them.”
“If he saw them first, then I had to listen.” Ava stared at the wall, seemingly lost in thought.
“Melech is a Hebrew name, but also translates to ‘king’,” Nikolett said in her ear. “Subtle.”
“You had to do what he said, because he identified Josephine first. But you would have done it differently, wouldn’t you? If you’d seen her first.”
Ava looked back to Annalise, frowning. “It wasn’t proper, what happened to her.” Ava touched her cheek.
“It wasn’t dignified,” Annalise agreed, noting that when it came to Josephine, Ava was speaking about it as if someone else had done the action.
“Dignity is not… A body isn’t important.” It sounded like Ava was trying to convince herself. “My mother’s body had to be left so it could return to the earth.” Ava swallowed. “Even so, I treat them with care.”
“Yes, I saw how you cared for Alicja. The box you used was lovely,” Annalise murmured. “But with Josephine, he didn’t think there should be anything, did he? You chose to do more than he’d told you to. To care for her.”
“Melech didn’t fully understand. He wasn’t there to see my mother.”
“Of course not. It makes sense he wouldn’t know as much as you. What did he suggest you do with the other pieces of Josephine?”
“I didn’t have time to do what I needed with her.” Ava shook her head. “So I gave her body to the fire, so it could baptize her.”
Annalise’s heart hurt for Eric, and Josephine’s brother, that there would never be any additional remains they could bury. None of what she was feeling showed on her face as she kept her expression calm and slightly sympathetic. “That must have been hard, to build a fire big enough to burn a body without anyone seeing.”
Ava’s attention snapped to Annalise. “Please don’t be obtuse. I didn’t build a…a pyre.” Another sneer. “Like a pagan. I put her pieces in the hospital’s incinerator.”
“Hospital?” Annalise’s heart was pounding, and through the earpiece she thought she heard muttering, quickly shushed.
“St. James’s Hospital. In Dublin. That’s where I was stationed.”
“Stationed?”
Ava looked down her nose at Annalise. “You’re pretending to know things, but really you don’t know anything important.”
“Then why don’t you tell me? Tell me what you were doing at St. James’s Hospital.”
“Locum work.” Ava smiled. “I’m an orthopedic surgeon.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was late when Walt returned to the hotel suite in Budapest with Jakob and Annalise. They’d cut the interrogation of Ava short after she’d dropped the bomb about being an orthopedic surgeon. They needed time to gather more intel from Leonid and Zasha before they continued with the questioning.
It had been a hell of a week. He, Jakob, and Annalise had spent the previous night in Odessa together, but they’d done nothing more than climb into bed, sleeping restlessly. Jakob had been in a great deal of pain from the laceration to his arm—the subcutaneous cut had only required external stitches—and Annalise had never had time to properly heal—physically and mentally—from her time with Axel.
Walt was beginning to think it was a good thing he was around. The two of them seemed to need a full-time physician on hand.
He’d spent more than a few anxious moments in the car on the way to the house outside Odessa after learning Jakob had been wounded. While the knife had been lodged deeply in Jakob’s upper arm, after careful bandaging, Walt had been able to remove it safely.
When he’d seen the knife wound through the grainy feed of Vadisk’s body cam, he’d been concerned about vascular damage, so he had been relieved to discover the knife hadn’t struck an artery. An injury like that could have effectively ended Jakob’s career as a Ritter of the territory.
Leonid’s bodyguard had been frighteningly prepared when they arrived at the house where Zasha had been held. He’d helped Walt set up a makeshift field hospital in one of the upstairs bedrooms, supplying everything he needed from a first-aid perspective—gauze, nylon sutures, needle, antibiotics.
They’d been awakened this morning in Odessa an hour or so before dawn by Vadisk, banging on their hotel room door, telling them they were
