Yet she wound up dead.
I’d walked the perimeter of the house she shared with Grey.
And Grey… He was the corpse last night.
Someone killed him, and it wasn’t me.
Did Fox end them both?
Eve shifts on her seat across the room.
Berlin watches me, waiting for me to reach a conclusion.
The truth is lead in my stomach.
“Lynx is fucking with Storm.” And it can’t be on behalf of my brother, or he wouldn’t be avoiding me like the plague. “And Fox is…helping him.”Betraying me.
Berlin nods once, but still, he doesn’t speak.
“That means Storm isn’t the enemy. Not right now.” I lift my eyes and find Eve’s.“Lynxis. But where Storm goes…my uncle seems to follow.” For reasons unknown to me, but the people around Storm are ending up dead like flies, and yet Lynx can only drive past my home while avoiding my calls?
It seems I know where to find him. It’s just never where I expected.
“You still flinchat the sight of blood.”
I stare down at my makeshift altar; crow feathers and red string along the cement of the lower deck, a fire contained in the pit, the woods spread before me, a chill in the air, and Fox and Eve both seated around the fire.
They came back with me from the hospital an hour ago.
Eve is sworn to silence. It’s my job to ensure Fox doesn’t feel anything amiss.
I am the only one on the ground. My legs are crisscrossed and I clack my sharpened matte black nails along the bone in my hand. The pelvis of a rabbit, humanely collected, as all of my curio is.
“Unless it’s your own.” Fox’s words lodge somewhere inside of my chest but I refuse to show him he has affected me in any way. “Do you remember when Lele crashed his dirt bike, walked up the hill to your uncle’s, and blood was pouring down both knees, soaking his white socks red?”
I clench the bone tight in my fist and lift my eyes to Eve.
She is in an Adirondack chair, like Fox, and her blue eyes hold mine. There is something she feels with his words, the way her tongue is pressed to the roof of her mouth. I can see it in her throat. She’s offered to sleep over. To help protect me, where Fox clearly can’t, or won’t, not without stabbing me in the back. Berlin has men around the house, too.
And people keeping an eye on Storm Leary.
Fox knows nothing of it.
And between all of us, we have spoken no more of my uncle.
Too many wolves circling. Too few answers. But now I know how to get them.
Fox’s eyes are already on mine when I cut my gaze to his. He is sitting with perfect posture, his blond hair pulled back in a short ponytail, chin lifted, a small smile playing along his lips. Dressed in all black, with a gun in his holster. He should be patrolling my estate, but I feel safer with him closer.
Not because he won’t kill me. But because I’ll see it coming when and if he tries.
In my head, the man on the stairs is blue.
Storm Leary kills another. Red spray.
Darkness, crawling around my mother. I was old enough to get up. To scream. To run.
I didn’t do any of that.
