Growing restless, Dom didn’t return to her chair. Instead, she circled the car like a hungry lion. It was hard not to feel like she might snap at any second and turn me into her prey.
Perhaps it was the adrenaline of our fight, or perhaps it was the desire to prove my competence to the beast circling around me, but the work moved faster as she drew closer to the car.
Once the dry vac was done, she had me spray cleaning solution over the carpets, drill at the mud with the electric scrub brush, and use the wet vacuum to suck up the rehydrated mud. The cleaning solution had a fairly strong scent, but it washardly a match for the rancid, earthy smell that came from water mixing with whatever the fuck was splattered around the car. I repeated the cycle over and over and over again until well after the reddish-brown water had turned clear.
My neck and shoulders were aching straight through the bone by the time Dom relented. “Good enough for now. We can worry about detailing later.”
I balked. “Two hours of scrubbing isn’t detailed enough for you?”
“We don’t do things halfway.” Those glacial blue eyes sent a chill straight through my core as they locked onto me. “Finish the trunk, and I’ll let you take a break.”
I wanted to mouth off, but the promise of a break — some relief for my aching body — was too tempting to turn down. So I stood from the backseat, trying to ignore the way her body filled the doorway and made it impossible to stand without touching.
Squeezing past her, I circled to the back of the car, pressed in the handle, and tried not to gag as an oppressive wave of rotten, earthy smell slammed into me. “What the fuck?”
The rest of the car had been lightwork. The trunk was where the real mess — and the source of that toe-curling smell — was hidden.
In addition to the mud and debris that had littered the cabin, there were crumpled tarps, lengths of nylon rope, and an armory’s worth of knives chucked into the back of the car. The trunk’s carpet was splattered with dark stains and smelled as if it had been soaking in blood for days now.
And as that smell stung at my nose, I realizedexactlywhat this had to do with Violence. This was a murder vehicle. And my prints were all over the clean-up.
68
KIERA
The sightof the bloody trunk was almost as bad as the smell, though either on their own would have been enough to turn my stomach. I swallowed hard as bile burned at the back of my throat, determined not to add any more of my DNA to this fuckfest of a crime scene I’d gotten duped into cleaning.
But Dom strolled behind me, taking in the Pollock in the back of the car like it was any other detail job. “What’s wrong? Didn’t seem to mind the blood when you were taking a chunk out of my hand.”
“Fuck you,” I wheeled to face her, rage pulsing through my veins. “You’re gonna lose a lot more than some blood once I’m done with you.”
Dom smirked. “Bold words from someone who’s gotten pinned by me twice now.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I waved my hand back toward the car. “This isn’t a fucking joke! What is wrong with you?”
“Would you quit acting so surprised?” Dom laughed clear and deep, clearly getting a kick out of my terror. “What did you think initiation would be? Picking daisies and gossiping about boys? You saw The Gauntlet.”
Stepping closer to me, her gaze leveled me. The overhead lights cast most of her face in shadows. But through the darkness, those piercing blue eyes said everything. “You know what we are. And you know you’re no better, Viper.”
I wanted to argue, but a part of me knew it was true. Once Spencer and Leo had explained what that man did, any outrage I felt over the matter melted away. Only the resentment of being left out of their dark secret had remained.
It hadn’t stopped me from staying in the house, from trusting them with my safety, from fucking one of my captors and flirting with another.
As much as I recoiled from the violence at The Hollow, I couldn’t deny that it pulled at something deep in my brain. There was a part of me, revolting as it was, that lit up at his suffering. I wanted to watch him get battered over and over and over again until the image was burned into my brain.
Because deep down, I thought they were justified. I’d known plenty of men who did the awful things he was guilty of, but I knew far too few people who were willing to take justice, no matter the cost.
And any anger or fear I’d felt in the aftermath was turning out to be a projection of my desire for more violence.
When I stirred from my thoughts, it was because Dom was shoving a big black garbage bag and a pair of nitrile gloves against my chest. My eyes flicked down to her hands, confused when she’d had time to put on her own gloves.
“I’d suggest you work fast and thorough,” she growled. “Sunlight’s fading fast, and your DNA is all over that thing.”
My skin crawled at the idea of what exactly she wanted me to clean. My eyes flicked back to the trunk, certain that there must be a body under all those tarps, something that I missed. There wasn’t, thankfully, though its absence made the entire thing eerier.
“Gloves first.” Dom raised her brow, a hint of irritation already creeping into her voice. “Then go grab the bleach.”
I tried to hide the trembling in my hands as I pulled on the black gloves and crossed over to the storage cabinet. Up at the top shelf was an industrial size bottle of bleach sat beside a big plastic bin.
