Chapter Text
It wasn’t the first time I’d fucked Lova Sahlberg; yet I feared it would be the last.
***
It was a strange sensation, this lucid dreaming. I’d done it frequently, prone upon my bed, living in my brain, living in a dream -- yet able to control everything that happened. That night, I’d been dreaming of Linda Wallander. Dreaming of, no… remembering… remembering as I held my gun, aimed at her would-be killer, taking the shot.
Yet, instead of the shot hitting the mark, it went wild, twisting and turning in the air, flying at speed yet in slow motion in curlicues and wobbles and strange waves. I’d lost my tenuous control of the nightmare, lost all control of the bullet, and it hit.
It hit straight between Linda Wallander’s blue, blue eyes.
Eyes which rolled back, the blue disappearing into white as the bullet passed through her head, moving slowly, slowly, slowly. The bullet, my bullet, gored through flesh, muscle and bone. I could see inside of her then, watching the bullet rape her brain tissue this way and that, and sever her corpus callosum; only to come through brain again, and then again bone, muscle, then flesh and finally, blonde hair.
I screamed; but my throat produced no sound.
I fired another shot, the sound echoing strangely double around me; in stereo, as if in my mind and in my room at the same time. A light, a single strobe, pulsed, and I woke; yanked from sleep and quick out of bed -- panting and sweating, affected by both the nightmare and the lightning that had flashed through my window.
“Fuck.” I slapped a hand to my forehead, producing a slight pain as the heel of it hit brow bone. Good. I let that hand melt down my face, pulling my flesh taut with it, rousing me into wakefulness.
The good news was it was a dream.
The bad news is it had really happened, but not quite that way. In reality, I’d missed Linda Wallander. She was never my target. Rather, I’d killed the man who held her, the man who, in his turn, pointed a gun at the back of her head.
I’d killed a man; essentially committed murder, and yet, Linda’s father, my colleague, Detective Kurt Wallander, had never thanked me for saving his daughter’s life.
The arsehole.
Maybe that’s why I’d dreamed of it as often as I did, even that night, after all that had happened that day. Maybe, secretly, part of me had really, really wanted to kill Linda Wallander.
Or Kurt.
I didn’t know.
***
Fully awake, I checked my bedside clock. 1:29 A.M. One thirty in the fucking morning. I didn’t expect Lova to be beside me. I’d hoped she would be, but I knew she’d leave me sometime in the night. Which she had. She always did, and it had nothing to do with me or her feelings for me, whatever they may have been. We simply didn’t talk of those things. Well, she didn’t. I’d wanted to, frequently.
Damn me for a fool.
I could say with certainty the exact time she’d left. 23:15. It took fifteen minutes to get from my flat to our station in Central Ystad, by car; and she’d brought her car that morning. She’d parked it a block away from my flat. Heaven forbid if anyone had seen her car outside my flat.
Lova was on duty for the midnight shift. I’d taken that shift the week before, and it was murder. Literally. Many times over, unfortunately.
“Lova, you shouldn’t go in tonight,” I’d said earlier, tracing my hand along the fleshy curve of her bare side, gripping her gently where torso met bottom, “you’re not in any condition to….,”
“Fuck that,” she’d retorted, twisting away from my touch, pulling the sheet up over her waist. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine, and I’ll do my job just fine so stop…,” I’d reached for her shoulder, and she again shrugged away from me. Her body tensed, her bare flesh becoming stiff, taut, unmovable, seeming to turn to stone before my eyes. “Stop babying me!” She hissed. “Jesus, just leave me the fuck alone.”
“Okay! Fine, Lova!” I sat up in the bed, my hands held up defensively. I let her have a minute, and she took it, her harsh breathing slowly settling, the rise and fall of her shoulder and her back slowing. “Listen,” I said, leaning over and brushing my lips against the small, short hairs at the back of her neck, “You’ve been through shit today, let me take your shift, or let me call Anne-Brit, she’ll cover for you. You shouldn’t go on tonight.”
“Why?”
I planted a small kiss behind her ear. “Well, like I said, you’ve been through the shit. I know how much it meant to you, the trial.”
“Yeah,” she shifted, moving further away, out of the reach of my caresses, “it’s over now, isn’t it?” Her voice quavered, just at the edge of tears, and it cut me to the core to hear it.
I grasped her shoulder and turned her to me, gently, yet forcefully, so she lay upon her back. “Lova…please, for fuck’s sake….”
“Screw him, Magnus!” She’d shouted, pounding her fists into the mattress. She bolted upright, not even bothering to cover her bare chest. She turned to me, finally, and what I saw broke my heart. Her eyes had hardened, the tissue seeming to transform into stone, like onyx embedded in peridot; the tears like crystals dangling from the corners. Her mouth was set firm in a thin line.
“He killed my sister. He fucking killed Lia and… burned… burned her body, I know he did. Kurt knows he did!” She threw her hands up, flapping them in my direction. “Well, shit, even you know he did, yet the bastard walked. He fucking walked today. Walked his arse right out of that courtroom with those goddamn judges smiling all pervy-like and telling him he’s not guilty and that there’s not enough fucking evidence! Bullshit!”
She sobbed, once, and a drop trailed from her left eye, painting a line transparent down her reddened, fevered cheek. I reached out to her, to wipe the tear away, but she balked, swiping at it with the heel of her own hand – silently telling me in no uncertain terms that she could handle the inconvenient drop of saline on her own.
“Why the fuck did Kurt even bother turning the case over to the prosecutors? Why’d they even bother with a preliminary?” Another tear fell. I let it alone. “Why? Is it because he… because he… because Kurt hates me? Because he wanted to put me through hell? Why?”
“Kurt hates everyone, Lova. But, I don’t know. I can’t say.”
“That’s right, you can’t say. You can’t ever fucking say, can you, Magnus?”
I blinked. “Why the hell is this suddenly about me?”
“It’s not,” she inhaled deeply, “It’s not. It’s just….”
I moved tentatively, wrapping an arm around her shoulder, pulling her to me. Thank God, that time, she let me. She didn’t always let me. Her weight, all of it, fell against my skin, her head upon my shoulder, her short, spiky dark hair tickling my neck and jawline. Her arms drooped helplessly, one against the other between my crossed legs. I stroked her arm, my fingers ghosting over the scar on her shoulder, over her Army tattoo, my hand shaking, unsure -- unsure just how exactly to comfort her. “I know, I know. You miss her.”
“Yes, I do,” Lova sobbed once, and wiped her nose on the corner of my bed sheet. “I miss her a fucking lot."
***
“This tribunal finds the defendant, Johann Mikkelson, not guilty. He is hereby acquitted of all charges relating to the death of Lia Sahlberg. This trial is concluded, the defendant is free to go.”
I’d watched Lova through the end of that trial, earlier that day. She sat there, in the courtroom, beside me and beside Kurt, solid, stoic, in her Ystad Police dress uniform. Her eyes stayed focused upon one person and one person alone, and nothing could have swayed her. Her uncle, Johann Mikkelson, sat in the defendants’ box, his advokat beside him, smarmy and smiling as the verdict was read.
Not guilty.
Not. Fucking. Guilty.
I knew what I had to do.
I stood swiftly from my chair and grasped Lova around her shoulder. For once, she didn’t fight me. She didn’t pull away. She merely stood, under the protection of my arm and that of Kurt on the other side, and she let us lead her, nearly at a jog, quick as could be, out of the courtroom, out of the general courts building, down the steps, into the car park.
She’d said nothing. She’d made no sound, no movement, nothing.
Even her face didn’t change. It was as if she was still staring at her uncle, daring him to say he didn’t kill Lia, daring him to look her in the face and tell her that he was innocent when she was so convinced of his guilt.
When we were all so convinced of his guilt.
She’d remained in that state until we got into my car, Lova and I. Until after Kurt helped her into the passenger seat, and had tried telling her it would be okay, that he would bring closure to Lia’s disappearance and death, that he would do something to make it right.
I don’t think Lova heard him, or even cared to.
She’d shut down; gone on auto-pilot.
She needed to be left alone, to be quiet with her thoughts, and then she’d explode. I’d seen it before; too many times to even list. It was how she’d coped; ever since Afghanistan – she’d changed so much – since she came home, it was just how she coped.
I’d learned to cope with it, myself.
I got in the car and cranked the ignition. The Volvo’s engine roared to life, cutting the cacophonous silence. Silence in spite of the city bustling around us, silence in spite of the wind whipping through the streets and the rain… the rain as it began to pummel the roof of my car, the windscreen, and the street below.
I turned to look at Lova and saw Kurt, through the window, his jacket hunched round his neck. He placed a hand upon the glass, willing Lova to turn her gaze to him. Willing her to… what? Forgive him? I nodded, shifting the Volvo into gear. Kurt backed away, and I pulled the car into the road.
I’d expected Lova to scream. I’d expected her to rant, to yell, to get angry, to pound her fists against the dashboard, to show some emotion, some sign of her despair at the tribunal’s impotence; at her own utter inability to get any sort of revenge, to see to any sort of punishment for the man who had killed her sister.
Instead, she was silent the entire ride back to my flat.
With the exception of this: When I pulled into my spot in the car park, when I put the Volvo out of gear and pulled the brake, when I turned off the ignition and sat there, hands in my lap, looking to her, gauging her readiness, she had said merely,
“I swear, Magnus. I'm going to kill him.”
***
And so I’d taken her, guiding her with an arm around her shoulder, my body close beside her, upstairs to my flat. My little flat on the third floor of the small building on Torngatan, and for a long time she’d said no more.
She’d changed her clothes, out of her dress uniform, taking a pair of jeans and a t-shirt from a drawer I’d cleaned out for her months ago. She'd rarely used it, but there it was, and I was glad it was there for her. I’d purchased her a toothbrush, too, and she used that. For the first time in the three months it was there, she’d used it.
Her brother, Noel, had phoned her, but she said very little to him. I overheard a few “yes” and “uh-huh” and “no” responses but little else. Noel hadn’t been at the trial that day, he was in Stockholm, on business, but he’d heard the news.
She’d rang off from Noel’s call and joined me where I’d been sitting on the sofa, nursing a cup of tea. I took her cup from the table and offered it to her. She shook her head, no. I set it back down, and set mine down beside it.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked. I placed a finger on her chin, turning her face to mine. I smiled, sympathetically. “We can talk about it if you like.”
She remained silent for a beat, then another, and another, the sheer intensity of her stare raising gooseflesh on my arms. She licked her lips and moved in, toward me, her eyes finally releasing mine, falling ever so slightly down, roving over my face, to my lax, open mouth. She moved in further, her hand squeezing the top of my thigh, her breasts brushing against my arm, her lips feathering lightly, oh so very lightly over mine. She whispered against me, her breath tasting of hazelnut coffee, the sound of her voice echoing within the cavern of my mouth.
“Take me to bed, Magnus.”
***
I stood and held a hand out to her. She grasped me by the wrist, quickly, her hand darting out like a snake striking, holding me firm, tight, so tight that it hurt. So tight that I turned my arm within the circle of her grip and took her wrist just as hard, pressing my pointer finger against her pulse point. I swept her to me, hauling her in like a salmon to a bear, throwing my arms around her and pressing her, firm, to my own body. Her head collided with my collarbone and I cried out with the pain, as did she, but it didn’t matter.
I knew that night, we wouldn’t be gentle. She didn't want me gentle. I knew we wouldn’t be making love. I knew what I was there for. I wasn’t her lover that night, I wasn't her boyfriend (never really was, I supposed), and for all she cared, I wasn’t even human. I was there for her to forget. I was there for her to lose herself in, to fuck her cares and anxieties and heartbreak away.
And I was more than happy to oblige.
I pushed a hand over the bristle-brush of her spiky hair, making the individual strands perk up under my touch, forcing the flap of longer hair out of her eyes. I let my gaze fall to her lips, and she sought out mine: predatory, hungry. She took the sides of my head in her two hands, fingernails raking against my scalp, one catching against the curve of my ear, likely drawing blood.
She pulled me to her, her mouth colliding into mine. There was and would be no play that night, no teasing – I opened to her immediately and she plundered me, her licks skittering across my teeth. I bit her bottom lip and she growled, curling her mouth into a feral grimace. I gave her my tongue and she sank her teeth into it. The pain drove me on.
I took a handful of her hair and pulled, drawing her head back, and I ravaged her throat, applying as much pressure as I dared with my mouth and my other hand against her windpipe. I drew an amount of skin into my mouth and sucked, hard. She coughed, and moaned, wailing, and pushed me off of her. I fell backwards, taking one, two, three clumsy steps back until I caught myself straight again.
She launched herself at me and shoved, hard against my chest, pushing me in the direction of my bedroom. I tore my shirt off, and kicked the door open, the doorknob chipping out bits of gypsum as it made contact with the bare, white wall. I whirled back to find her in the doorway, herself naked from the waist up, breathing heavily through her nose. Her chest heaved, her mouth was set in a scowl and her eyes burned right through me. I took the two steps to her and took her, one handed, around the back of her neck, my thumb pressed into her jugular vein, the little hairs in the back catching between my fingers. I pulled her around by the throat and threw her bodily upon the bed.
“Fuck!” She bounced on the mattress, and I pounced upon her, hitting her full on with my entire body weight. “Magnus, aaaah!” she screamed. “Fuck you.”
“If that’s what you want.” I said, calmly. Not standing on pleasantries, I captured her mouth in the snare of mine and held her there, moving with her measure for measure, foiling any attempts at escape. I fumbled beneath me and undid both her jeans and mine. I worked my hand down and found she was not wearing anything between denim and skin, and I groaned with the sensation of it. Her body was clean and hairless, youthfully groomed. My groin twitched painfully as I moved lower, playing over her soft, soft skin, and shoved two fingers up into her body.
She bucked against me, wedging my hand between her hips and mine, against my hardened cock. I cried out with the pain, and she laughed. She laughed and I repositioned my hand and pinched her in the clitoris. “Jesus fucking Christ Magnus, you bastard!” She bellowed.
I pinched her again below, my mouth at her ear above. “This is what you want, isn’t it?” She shook her head, not to say no, but because her body wouldn’t let her do anything else. “Isn’t it?” I dipped my fingers into her again, pulled them out, and worked the tip of my middle finger over the current centre of her nervous system, pushing hard, causing pain along with the pleasure.
“Not what I want,” she panted. She wriggled a hand in between us, cupped my balls and squeezed, tight.
“Jesus Christ! Aah!” I screamed, arching my back, my arms stiff at the elbow, bending my body off of her. She pushed at me, and I flipped over, landing on my back. Lova moved quickly, straddling my middle, tenting her arms over my head. She stayed still, very, very still for a long time. Too long a time. I moved my hips a bit, and she pulled away.
“Damn you, Lova.” I hissed, teeth gritted. She grinned down at me, the light from the streetlamp outside glistening off of her white teeth. “Come on. Lova. Come... come on!” I bucked my hips off the bed, desperate for contact, desperate to be inside of her, desperate for….
In a swift movement, she reached between us and grasped my cock, my jeans still tight around my hips, her own having been pushed down somehow, hanging off of one ankle. She kicked at the offending fabric, sending it flying through the air. It thumped against my wardrobe door behind. She grasped my cock again, and, wriggling her knees up beside me, set herself into position.
She sank down upon me in one swift move.
“Lova!” I cried, clutching her around the waist. I dug my fingers in, bending them at the first knuckle, latching and locking her in place upon me. I moved my hands up and down, ordering her to move, but she wouldn’t. She stayed still below, instead, raking her fingers down my chest, one fingernail scratching over my left nipple. “Oh, God!” I arched, my head stretched back. “Lova, fucking move!” I commanded. “Move, damn you!”
And move she did. She rose up on her haunches and slammed back down, her pelvis bruising, crushing mine. She did it again, and again, and again, and by the fourth time I was unable to take anymore. "Fuck! That fucking hurts!" Before the next impact came, I stopped her with a hand, a thumb pressed into her centre.
She moaned, threw her head back, and moved against me, her hips waving back and forth over the pad of my thumb, me making little circles there. “Magnusssss,” she whispered. She fell forward on to me, letting me continue to work her into a frenzy. She huffed breath onto my neck and in my ear, moving up and down on me below in short, quick strokes, making me pant and whimper in time with her movements.
I turned my head and took her earlobe into my mouth. As I bit down on her flesh there, I felt her body tense, her flesh below quivered and vibrated over me, and a sudden flood of heat and moisture enveloped me. I sobbed; she screamed in my ear, a loud, piercing noise -- a moan of pleasure mixed with a keening wail of grief. I let her ride it out, not even turning my ear away from the horrible, yet erotic noises she was making.
I pulled my hand out from between our bodies and she started moving again, this time going deeper. Enough of this shit. I needed to take control. I wound my arms round her middle and flipped the both of us. I pulled out, and she whimpered at the loss. I seized her by the legs and turned her over, on to her stomach.
I was not gentle, not in the least. My hands found her hips and heaved upwards, forcing her to her knees. Without a word or any signal to her, I stood behind her and pushed into her. She grunted, her hands scrabbling at the bedclothes, her head turned to the side. She looked behind herself, at me, and scowled.
I didn’t care. “No. Oh. God... Lo... Lova...this is…not... what… you wanted.” I told her, and thrust home. I thrust home over and over, once… twice… three times, more. She cried out, a loud, short bark of a noise, muffled in the fabric of my bed with each stroke. I hit her deep and hard each time, punishing her arse with my pelvic bones, knowing full well just how much it hurt and I did it again and again and again… and then I shook.
Every muscle in my body seized up, vibrating. My face and hands went numb, I lost all control, my face contorting in a silent scream. “Oh, fuck!” Released, I growled from deep within my chest and collapsed over her body as I spilled myself within it.
“It's what...what you… uhnnnnn….needed.”
***
Not even a minute after I’d been roused from sleep by the thunderclap, did my iPhone ring. It was a familiar and quite unwelcome sound – the chiming bell ringtone I’d assigned to Kurt Wallander.
“Fuck,” I groaned, again, patting the side table, groping for the phone. I turned the device right side up and saw, yes, “Kurt” writ upon the screen. I slid the slider at the bottom to answer. “I’m not on tonight, Kurt.” I growled. “Phone up Lova. She’s decided to go in….,”
Kurt cut me off. “She’s not… Lova’s not…” he said, his tone… strange. Wavering, almost fearful.
I swung my legs out of bed, kicking frantically at the bed clothes. “Jesus, Kurt. What’s wrong? What the hell happened? She’s not dead, is she?”
“She’s not dead, Lova’s not dead,” Kurt said, his voice near a whisper, “I… I just need you down here.”
“Where is she… I mean, where are you?” I stood, pacing my room, shoving my fingers through my mess of tangled curls, grasping and pulling at the back of my head, willing the pain. “Tell me, Kurt, and I’ll be there.”
“Lova’s place,” he said. I tasted bile. My chest burned and my stomach muscles clenched, painfully. “Her place. It’s… it’s on Matrosgatan,” Kurt threw in, almost as an afterthought. “Get here soon as you can.”
“Where’s Lova now?” I grabbed my shirt and started shrugging into it, cradling the phone between my shoulder and neck as I, fingers fumbling, tried desperately to work the buttons.
“She’s getting loaded on the ambulance right now.”
“Ambulance?” I had one leg of my jeans on, and stopped mid-pull of the other. “Jesus! Is she….”
“She’s fine. She’ll be fine. Anne-Brit is going with her.”
“Good, good.” I said, trying not to sound as concerned and upset as I was. Kurt didn't know, in fact -- no one had known about my…relationship…whatever it was, with Lova; and we’d taken great pains to keep it that way.
“I’m on my way.” I rang off, pulled my trousers the rest of the way on, grabbed my keys, slid into my shoes, holstered my gun, and dashed out of my flat, into the after-rain humidity of the Ystad night.
***
In the six years I’d been on the Ystad force, I’d seen some pretty gruesome murder scenes. This one was up there. Not quite as horrible as the jogger tied up to the tree, or the man who was drowned alive, or even the old man who’d been impaled upon a makeshift spike-trap, but horrible nonetheless.
In spite of the facial distortion death had always left, I’d recognized the victim immediately. I’d seen him only a few hours before, very much alive.
The body lay on its side, one arm thrown in front, the other trapped beneath, pulled back at an angle nearly matching the first. The portly man’s shirt front was blackened-red, no white to be seen anywhere on the fabric, and the man’s jacket was coated in gore, a sheen reflecting; shining in the bright, artificial lights the forensic team had set up. The sheen continued along the concrete walkway, congealing, coating the covered pathway like a bucket of spilt black paint – or two buckets, perhaps three or four.
It never ceased to amaze me just how much blood the human body could hold.
What was gruesome about this scene to me was not the body itself, but the method of death. Even that, to anyone else around me would not have been that bothersome.
The forensic team, having finished taking their photographs, and otherwise processing what they needed to process, turned the body onto its back, revealing the cause of death.
An immense knife, stuck hilt-deep into the chest, at an upward angle right beneath the bottom edge of the sternum, right where the sternum would meet the xiphoid process. Right in that place where a knife shoved upwards just at the correct angle would cause instantaneous death. Right into the heart.
What was frightening to me about this was that not everyone knew how to make that killing stroke. It was, from what I’d learned, a distinct methodology of killing taught to those in the military, by those who’d learned to use and handle a bayonet.
A bayonet just like the one sticking out of Johann Mikkelson’s chest.
Yes, the body that lay sprawled and blood-covered before me was that of Lova’s uncle, the man who had just been acquitted of the murder of Lova’s sister, Lia. The man who, we were all certain, had kidnapped, possibly tortured, and killed the most important person in Lova’s life – had burned her body and disposed of the bones such that all that remained was some blood, hair, a chip from a tooth, and part of a finger.
And yet, there he lay before me. In front of Lova’s home. With Lova’s hand bayonet – brought home from her days in the Army, from her nightmare days in Afghanistan -- an Excalibur protruding from the rock of the man's chest with her gold-etched initials, “LS” shining upon it like beacons in the dark.
“Fuck me,” I breathed, whispering to myself. “Jesus, Lova, what the hell did you do?”
***