I turn my head, looking down at the top of hers, covered by a hood that matches mine, her eyes on the uneven path ahead. I want to understand, desperate to claw my way inside her head and dig through the piles of rot and ash, just to find the reason why.
Is it me, is it here, is it The Obsidian, is it her?
So many thoughts race around inside my skull, I’m barely paying attention to where we’re heading, where she’s leading me. All I know is, this is the last fucking thing I wanted to be doing tonight.
“It’s here,” Nellie says finally, the curve of her spade slicing through the air before thudding down into the oversoaked earth.
“You’re sure?” I ask incredulously, because right now, in the pitch fucking dark, nothing but a singular lantern between us, the orange glow only just enough to see a foot ahead, it’s impossible for even the best killers to find a grave.
But she looks over at me, one eyebrow curving higher on her forehead, holding my gaze for just a few seconds, both of us silent, and then without answering, she hefts up the spade and starts to dig.
I’m the first to find it.
Him.
Thomas Avery.
My shovel hits bone, sending a vibration up the length of my radius, stumbling up my humerus, my entire arm jolting with the impact. The more mud we remove, the clearer it becomes that the freezing temperatures we’ve been having have kept his body pretty intact. He looks more or less just the way he did when the girls brought him out here, the hammering rain washing away the dirt on his skin as we fully uncover him.
“He’s still like that ’cause of the cold temperature, huh?” Nellie sighs, knowing this’ll make the job longer, knowing that’s why we brought the axe out here with us, just in case of this.
It almost makes me smile. How we’re both endlessly on the same page, same thoughts, same time, even when neither one of us says it. But then I remember how I’ve spent the last two months trying to knock her arse up and she’s got a fucking implant stopping me from doing just that.
Nellie crouches over the grave I’m standing in, a good four feet deep, lifting her eyes unto mine from staring down at the body, but I don’t look up. I don’t look at her, because between me and her, the axe at my back, and this already dug grave, there’s too much of a possibility I’ll kill us both and toss our pathetic bodies into the second-hand pit.
“Yeah,” I reply, sighing too, wishing tonight had never happened at all.
That I’d handled things better with Imogen.
That my father wasn’t secretly back, hiding in the manor somewhere just waiting to spring out on us when he’s got something to punish us for, to torture us about.
That’s how I know he’s in that house.
Imogen being in my suite in the middle of the night.
That wasn’t a coincidence.
Not dressed the way she was, in her uniform, butruffled…
It means he sent her for a reason.
To look for something.
And I’m sure it’ll have had something to do with my little lamb.
Penelope jumps down beside me, her feet squelching as her welly boots sink into the sodden ground, the puddle of water quickly deepening.
“Head or feet?” she asks me, and I just want to scream at her, but I don’t.
“Well, why don’t we let you choose, Little Lamb, since it was you he hurt, you can decide which part of him you’d like to hack up first.”
She smiles at me then, this shy curl of her lips, something real, something dark. Her big ash-brown eyes drop to her feet, lashes fluttering, she looks up at me, her chin still dipped, and it looks like love, the way she holds my gaze. It’s as though she’sreached inside my skeleton and dug out the marrow, replaced it all with pieces of her.
Devotion.
It almost tricks me, almost makes me forget, but then I get angry all over again, remembering what she’s done to me.
How that can’t be, how that isn’t, love.
