Somewhere behind him, the bedsprings groaned. Tanja stretched beneath tangled sheets, her tattooed thigh flashing pale where the blanket slipped. “You’re thinking about her,” she said, not a question. The cigarette between her lips trembled when she inhaled. Not fear—anger. Always anger with her. Elias didn’t turn around. Outside, the neon sign of the blues bar across the street flickered pink through the sleet, painting watery stripes across Tanja’s naked shoulders.
The radiator hissed like a displeased cat, its lukewarm breath doing fuck-all against the January chill. Elias Korhonen pressed his forehead to the fogged windowpane, watching his own reflection blur into the Helsinki gloom outside. The glass tasted of old cigarettes and failure. Finnish Detective Elias Korhonen, a brilliant but haunted man, a recovering alcoholic, is called to investigate the discovery of a frozen corpse in Helsinki. The corpse is an unidentified woman, her fingers clutching a single tarot card—The Hung Man.
Tanja’s fingers traced the scar on his flank—a souvenir from a meth head’s box cutter two winters back. “You should’ve let me stitch this,” she murmured against his spine, the words vibrating through muscle. Her breath smelled of burnt coffee and Pall Malls. He remembered her leaning over him in that shitty walk-up clinic, hands steady as a sniper’s while she sewed him up with fishing line and spite. The memory tightened his throat more than the nicotine ever could.
“We won’t know anything, until the doc cuts her, it’s a damn sure thing that the card didn’t kill her” Her fingers dipped lower, nails scraping the trail of dark hair leading beneath the waistband of his shorts. A sharp inhale—half surprise, half defiance—as she found him already half-hard. “Thinking about dead women gets you going?” Tanja’s whisper as she slid his boxer shorts, slowly down and licked his sphincter while he groaned.
Elias grabbed her wrist, not hard enough to hurt, just hard enough to feel the pulse jumping under her skin. “Thinking about you does.” Lie. Truth. Both tasted the same on his tongue these days. She made a sound low in her throat—something between a laugh and a snarl—and twisted free, rolling him onto his back with a knee between his thighs. The radiator clanked disapproval as her teeth found the shoulders of her step-brother. She used to be a whore to her stepmom’s caress, now, she’s freelancing.
Her mouth was savage, her tongue tracing the ridges of his ribs like she was memorizing a map to ruin. When she bit his nipple, he arched up with a curse, but her palm flattened against his stomach, pinning him to the damp sheets. The neon glow turned her skin the color of a fresh bruise. “You smell like that fucking morgue,” she hissed. Elias knew she didn’t mean the chemicals—she meant the ghosts clinging to his pores.
Tanja’s fingers twisted in his hair, yanking his head back to expose his throat. Her teeth grazed his Adam’s apple, and for a wild second, he imagined her biting down until cartilage crunched. Instead, she licked the sweat. Her hips grinding against his thigh with deliberate, punishing friction, has her cunt erupted. The tarot card flickered in his mind—the Hung Man dangling by his testicles—before Tanja’s knee shoved his legs wider, her nails digging crescents into his hips.
She rode him like she was trying to exorcize something, her breath coming in ragged bursts against his collarbone. Every thrust was an accusation, every roll of her hips a challenge. Elias gripped the headboard to keep from bucking her off, the wood creaking like an old gallows rope. When she came, it was with a soundless scream, her body locking around him so tight he saw static behind his eyelids.
Afterward, she collapsed onto his chest, her sweat-slick back rising and falling against his palms. The silence between them was brittle as thin ice over black water. Tanja’s cigarette had burned down to the filter in the ashtray, its spiral of smoke the only movement in the room. Elias traced the blurry edges of her wolf tattoo with his thumb, remembering how she’d gotten it the night after her first kill in Afghanistan—blood and ink as memorial—fucking his stepsister.
“Hi-Ho, the Derry-O!”— Stepmom was climbing the stairs, on her way up…
