Close to Death, Far from Love

Close to Death, Far from Love.

NOVEL STATUS: COMPLETED

PUBLISHED CHAPTERS: 72 CHAPTERS

Close to Death, Far from Love – Sneak Peek

POV BRYN

The skull on Bryn’s worktable had been a woman once — Eastern European, probably Slavic, somewhere between thirty and forty-five, with cheekbones that would have turned heads in life and now, stripped to bone, turned only the slow, methodical attention of a forensic sculptor working alone at half past eleven on a Tuesday night.

Bryn dipped her fingers into the clay. It was warm from her palms, yielding in a way that always surprised her — you’d think, after seven years of this, the softness wouldn’t register anymore. But it did. Every time. She pressed the clay against the zygomatic arch and smoothed it with her thumb.

“You had good cheekbones,” she said aloud. “Lucky you.”

She talked to them. She’d always talked to them, since her first week as an intern at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner, when she’d been too nervous to sculpt and too stubborn to admit it, and the talking had started as a way to keep her hands from shaking. Dr. Lucienne Duval, her mentor, had noticed and said nothing — which, for Lucienne, constituted enthusiastic approval. Later, over rum in Lucienne’s kitchen, the older woman had leaned back in her chair and said, “The dead are easier than the living, chérie. They don’t argue about their cheekbones.” And then, more gently: “Talk to them all you want. Just make sure they don’t start talking back.”

They never did. But Bryn gave them names anyway.

This one she called Darya. No reason. The name had surfaced while she was measuring the orbital depth — floated up from wherever such things came from — and it stuck. Bryn had learned not to question the names. They arrived like weather.

“Darya,” she murmured, building out the tissue-depth markers on the forehead. “Where did you come from?”

The lab was quiet at this hour. Fluorescents humming overhead, their light flat and slightly greenish, the kind of light that made everyone look like they’d been dead for a week. Down the hall, a refrigeration unit kicked on with its usual arthritic rattle. The building smelled of formaldehyde and the ghost of cheap coffee from the pot someone had burned at five and left on the burner. Bryn had long stopped noticing the smell. It lived in her hair, her clothes, the creases of her knuckles. Once, on the subway, a man had moved to a different seat after sitting next to her for two stops, and she’d wondered if it was the formaldehyde or the clay under her nails or the general aura of a woman who spent her days with the dead. She hadn’t taken it personally. The dead didn’t take things personally. It was one of their better qualities.

𝖱еа𝘥 𝗐𝘪𝘵𝘩𝗼𝘂t in𝗍𝗲𝗋𝗿𝗎𝘱t𝗂𝘰𝘯s 𝗼𝘯 𝗴а𝗅ոo𝗏e𝗹𝗌.𝖼𝘰𝗺

She was working on the nasal spine when the door clicked open.

Bryn didn’t look up. She’d learned to identify colleagues by footstep the way birdwatchers identified species by call: Dr. Khalil shuffled, the rubber soles of his orthopedics whispering apologies to the linoleum. Espinoza stomped — everything Espinoza did was percussive, including his laugh. Lucienne glided, the residual muscle memory of a woman who’d danced ballet until forty and never quite forgave her knees for quitting.

These footsteps were wrong. Heavy, deliberate, with a measured cadence that didn’t belong to anyone who’d ever dropped a coffee mug in this kitchen or argued about whose turn it was to restock the latex gloves.

“Miss Harrow?”

She looked up. A man stood in the doorway — late thirties, broad through the shoulders, with a face that had been broken at least once and reset slightly crooked. Not badly crooked. Interestingly crooked, the way certain old buildings settle and become more compelling for the asymmetry. He wore a dark suit that fit too well for a cop and too precisely for anyone who’d wandered in off the street by accident. His eyes moved around the lab the way a room gets cleared — systematically, corner to corner, threat assessment dressed up as casual glancing.

“It’s after hours,” Bryn said. “If you need to file an inquiry—”

“I’m not here about a new case.” He stayed in the doorway, hands at his sides, weight evenly distributed. A man who understood thresholds — who knew that entering a room uninvited changed the terms of every conversation that followed. “My name is Cade Rourke. I’m looking into an old one.”

-Continue in Close to Death, Far from Love chapter 1 –