Killing Time: The Bonus Collection by Elle Chardou Read Free Book Online Page B

password back in before the page I was looking at stared back at me.
    It was the webpage for Club X-Tasy, the famous BDSM club supposedly owned by Rory Krieger though on closer inspection, his twin brother, Severin, owned it under the Business License Records I’d managed to procure. According to all the legal paperwork filed with New York County that was considered public record and completely accessible to anyone willing to search the Assessor Records for property and the Court Records, Rory had been added as a co-owner later through additional legal documents filed with the County.
    As I was a journalist, it would have been completely negligible on my part if I didn’t have access to government records’ and Court websites which were considered public. I often needed the information for investigations but unfortunately, this club hadn’t done anything to me though someone who frequented it might have had a hand in my sister’s death.
    These thoughts fueled my anger and had a direct impact on how I conducted research about the Krieger family in general and the brothers’ specifically. It took all afternoon but the internet was awash with information and determination to read as much as possible kept me going.
    It turned out my parents’ and the little information Grayson gave me about the family were grossly understated at best and downright misleading at worst.
    Was it no wonder both brothers were sadists and Severin was one to the most severe magnitude he would have made Joseph Mengele proud. There were several questionable deaths in Germany during the early part of the twenty-first century and in every one of them, Severin Krieger was a person of interest.
    However, the police could never prove anything. I looked at countless articles about the Krieger family on Der Spiegel’s English language website and other sources, I had to rely on Google’s shitty translations because I couldn’t read or speak German, at least not the proper kind. My father was Alsatian but Alsatian German was like Swiss German and bore very little resemblance to “real” German dialects used in the country as it existed in the modern world.
    By seven that evening, my eyes hurt and I was tired of the depravity and the sickness of what I had to endure reading about. The Krieger family was far from normal but I didn’t understand whether I was thinking that about them because they were Germans or because I was just pissed off about my sister’s murder. Then again, what family was exactly normal? Grayson’s sure as fuck wasn’t and he was mostly Scottish with Welsh, French and a bit of German in his family so this wasn’t an ethnicity issue.
    I knew it wasn’t fair or politically correct but I didn’t like or trust German people. That might have come from spending my childhood in France and most of my adulthood in the States. The French had no love loss for the Germans after what they had put them through during World War II under the Vichy Government. As a matter of fact, I would wager they only thought the English were worse than the Germans and that, in itself, was pretty bad.
    Although to be fair, most French people I knew disliked the English because they believed them to be uncouth and without manners while most French disliked the Germans because they were too orderly and everything had to be just right. We French liked perfection and orderliness too but we also believed in a certain joie de vivre and preferred not to take all of life so seriously, we forgot to have fun.
    At the end of the day, perhaps distaste and hate were too strong of words. Maybe it was more of simple cultural differences than anything else.
    If I remembered correctly, the love of my life, Renaud, had a German grandfather and hid the fact with swift resignation. The only reason why it didn’t bring him more embarrassment was because the gentleman was his maternal grandfather therefore he never had to grow up in France with a German last name. Though,