The Nails by Yana Bazylevych

Her scarlet nails were
digging into his skin, her long white fingers slowly choking the life out of him. There were no sounds in the dark cellar except for the soft rasping of the man currently dying on the floor. Her eyes were fixed mercilessly on her victim, not a hint of emotion on her face. She was quite happy with the way things were turning out so far.
***
“Well, Detective, what do you think?” They both leaned over the body of the dead man, holding napkins over their noses to avoid inhaling the smell of death in the cellar. The detective leaned closer towards the corpse, examining his neck closely.
“It was the woman again, I’m sure of it – look at the marks over there on the neck. Same as the others”.
“I don’t know, Detective, still doesn’t seem to make much sense. A prostitute killing a bunch of rich guys – come on, there’s no way”.
“Maybe she wasn’t alone”.
“Yeah, right, a gang of hookers. Sounds extremely likely”.
The Detective was used to her partner’s sarcasm by now, so she paid it no attention. She had been on this case for months, and still no breakthrough. All they knew was that there was some sort of female escort murdering some of richest and powerful men in the city, causing earthshaking scandals in the tabloids.
“Revenge, it must have been revenge” she kept thinking to herself over and over again. She knew
first-hand that it was not so easy to strangle a man to death, especially for a woman.
She stepped closer to the corpse and looked at the man’s face, disfigured by the way he had died.
A strange feeling came over the Detective, one she couldn’t quite place.
There was a sudden bang of metal on metal, and she jumped, looking around wildly to see what had caused it. She couldn’t get up, something was holding her in place, digging into the skin of her wrists.
“Hold her down” came a cold voice from somewhere behind her. “There we go, just swallow the pills, why do you have to make this so hard every time? You’re only making things worse for yourself”.
She felt the huge dry pills being forced into her mouth, a glass of ice-cold water splashing all over her as a rough hand held her face still, poring the liquid down her throat. The door closed behind the men in white, and she lay there, gasping for air, until she felt a dense fog creep into her mind, numbing everything. The fists relaxed, the fingers with long chipped red nails hanging loosely from the soft handcuffs.
“Well, Detective, what do you think?”