Read Downfall for Free Online Page A

worried about Glenn. You are really the better person, after all he’s done to you. It’s not like he’s shown you loyalty and consideration. You need not lie for him.” Belias took her hand in his. His skin was always so dry, so cold. His fingers so pale. Once she had dreamed of those pale hands with strings attached to his fingers, strings that led back to her shoulders, her wrists, her brain, her heart.
    “Lie?” She hated how he always knew.
    “I listen to the police dispatch. There’s a dead man on that bar’s floor. Who is he?”
    She listened to five loud ticks from the red clock on the wall. “Some bystander.”
    “Glenn killed a bystander. That is unusually…reckless.”
    “Yes. The bystander interfered.”
    “The police dispatch report is saying that there were two men attacking a woman in The Select. Two men.” He raised a pale finger on each hand and pushed them together. “Who was the other man, Holly?”
    You’re a great liar , she told herself. Lie like you never have before. For Glenn. For your kids. “The news reports are wrong. It was chaos. So Glenn said.” Holly pulled her hand from his cool grip.
    He let her; he folded his hands before him in the gentle pose you might see with a saint’s statue. The silver ring he wore was a match for the symbol on her husband’s necklace, and she stared at it like it was a mark of the devil. She was suddenly very frightened, a terror that touched her bones. She stared at those folded hands. Your life has been in this man’s hands for how long? And now it’s come to this. Your ability to sell one little lie. “How are the kids, Holly?”
    She looked up at his face. “What? They’re fine.”
    “Isn’t that why you do what I ask you to do? So your children have a ‘better life’?” He smiled the smile a knife might give if it suddenly came to life. “Who was the other man, Holly?”
    “A bystander, maybe he intervened in the fight.”
    “And Diana?”
    “Ran out into the night. The cops were coming, we had to go.” She kept her gaze steady. “We…we had to protect your investment in us.”
    Belias smiled and she knew her lies hadn’t worked. He touched the tip of her jaw with his finger. “You make me sound mercenary when all I care about is your well-being.” He got up, poured her a glass of ice water. She drank it silently while he watched. “Let’s see how Glenn is doing.”
    Roger, with his typical efficiency, had cleaned Glenn’s wound, shaved the hair away, and butterfly bandaged the wound. “How is he?” Holly asked. He looked bad. So pale. But his breathing was steadier.
    “Blood loss, concussion. He could have a hairline skull fracture,” Roger said. His accent was rural, English, thick. “When did he last have a tetanus booster?”
    Holly wanted to say, It’s not my business anymore to keep up with his medical records , but she found herself trying to recall what Glenn’s file at home said…Did she still have one for him? Wouldn’t he have taken it when he moved out?
    But Glenn answered for her, as though cogency were returning to him. Roger went to a fridge and checked supplies and gave Glenn an injection. Lord only knows what’s in that fridge , Holly thought. Truth serum?
    “We have to find Diana,” Belias said.
    “She’ll go to the police now,” Holly said.
    “No, she won’t. She won’t send her own mother to prison. I’ve profiled this young woman. Her mom is everything to her.” Belias glanced at Glenn. “You’re off the job, Glenn. She knows your face. And this dead bystander’s face.”
    She wanted to say, Be smart, Glenn . But he was hurt, disoriented, and in pain.
    Roger said, “The police dispatch say another man at this bar was stabbed. I thought you were strictly a gun man. You never did that well when I trained you with the knife, Glenn.”
    “I thought the knife would be better,” Glenn said. “I needed a way to scare her, to get her into the car. But she had a gun. She fired it