“The words came out of my mouth before my brain had finished processing what my eyes were seeing. Deven on the floor. The blood — dark, almost black in the flashlight beam, spreading across the stone floor in a slow expanding lake that crept toward the baseboards, toward the bed legs, toward the rug. The knife in his back — my knife, my Wüsthof, the handle I'd held ten thousand times, the blade I'd honed every morning on the ceramic rod until it could split a hair, now buried between his ribs to the bolster, the German steel disappearing into his body like it had been designed for this all along.”