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Franziska von Karma is not an easily flustered woman.
She has always – always – valued her focus. (Calm, perhaps not so much, but there is strategic value in a well-timed burst of anger.) A von Karma does not (should not) allow herself to be distracted from her goals.
Even if that distraction comes in the form of a beautiful woman with a tongue far too sharp for her own good, and the vivid mental images produced by the sentence Save the whip for after you buy me a drink, okay?
“I beg your pardon?”
Ema Skye gives Franziska a sharp-edged smile over the case file lying open on the table between them. “It’s called a joke, Prosecutor von Karma. Do they not do those at Interpol?”
“I know what a joke is, you fool,” Franziska snaps. She regrets it when Ema laughs; it’s as sharp as her smile, with almost none of the bitterness that tinges it at times. If Ema has ever found Franziska intimidating, she hasn’t let it show, and at times, it is...distracting.
Or it would be, if she was not a von Karma. But she is, and so she will not allow herself to be distracted by Ema Skye.
“Do you have anything useful for me?” she demands, as icily as she knows how. “We are on a strict time limit. If the smugglers are given time to leave the country –”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ema flips to the next page of the case file. It’s a photocopy of some fingerprints, and a picture of the cellphone that, so far, has been their only lead. “Would I call you in if I didn’t have anything?”
Franziska looks from the photocopy to Ema’s face, and back again. “You are not a member of the forensics team, Ema Skye.”
“Yeah, don’t remind me.” Ema makes a face and sips her coffee – one of those ridiculously over-flavored drinks she favors, the kind Franziska has never understood. “The prints belong to our victim.”
Franziska eyes her suspiciously. “We have already established that the phone did not belong to him.”
“Yeah, I know, but those are his prints on it. And yes, I’m sure.” Ema sits back and folds her arms. “So it was in his possession at some point. That changes everything, right? If the victim had the phone...”
“He was more closely involved with the smugglers than it seemed,” Franziska finishes. Ema is right; if that is the case, it changes their entire line of investigation and gives them a lead to follow. “Perhaps you are not as much of a fool as you seem, Ema Skye.”
Ema gives Franziska the deeply unimpressed look of a woman who’s worked with one prosecutor too many and developed an immunity to both threats and praise. It’s too old for her years. “You don’t say.”
“It was a compliment, Detective. Do they not have those, at your precinct?” Ema stares at her for a moment, then bursts out laughing, head thrown back and throat bared. The fluorescent lights don’t highlight it the way a softer light might, but Franziska finds herself thinking, again, of Save the whip for after you buy me a drink. It is distracting.
Franziska von Karma does not have time to be distracted. She has a case – one the woman in front of her may have just cracked, if Ema’s identification of those fingerprints is correct (and, though she is not a member of the forensics team, Franziska has no reason to doubt her). She does not have the time to think about Ema Skye’s bared throat, or about what she would look like in the low light of the expensive, quiet bars Franziska favors, or how very long it’s been since she took someone else there with her.
But if Ema’s evidence is enough to break the case, perhaps Franziska will be in court sooner rather than later. Perhaps there will be a night, or two nights, before she returns to Europe, that she can spend focused on something other than her case.
“Ema Skye,” she says. Ema raises an eyebrow at her. “When this case is over, I will buy you that drink.”
Ema’s gaze darts down to the whip coiled at Franziska’s side. When she meets Franziska’s eyes again, there’s a challenge in her smile, and like everything else about her, it will be difficult not to think about when Franziska is going over her case files alone tonight. “You think I’m going to make this that easy for you, huh?”
“I think it was your idea,” Franziska snaps back. It doesn’t have the bite she wants, because something in Ema’s tone gives her the mental image of Ema Skye holding a whip, perhaps learning how to use it, and that is somehow even more distracting.
Ema grins at her, unfazed. “It was, wasn’t it?”
Somehow, Franziska suspects that that smile is going to be the most distracting thing of all.
