That entire conversation with Hadeom had been weird.
And if Hadeom had wanted weekly reports on the weirdness of Tenebrae Cove, then that phone call was making the list.
Sawyer knew he had a job to do. It was why he was in Tenebrae Cove, after all. But he couldn’t help but feel the need to.... He wasn’t sure what. Defend these guys?
Not rat them out?
To what end, he wasn’t certain.
He could almost dismiss his first suspicion that they might be a drug syndicate. He didn’t think that was true.
Were they unusual?
Sure.
But that was part of the problem. They were each so different. Each member of the consortium was individual, with their own personality traits, whereas every organised gang Sawyer had ever had the displeasure of knowing were basically all cut from the same cloth. They dressed the same, spoke the same, behaved the same, thought the same.
These guys weren’t like that.
Fraser was funny and outgoing. Kellan was quiet and studious. Otis was kind and always smiling. Aurin was a sultry little twink if Sawyer had ever met one. Hendrix seemed like a wildcard, while Tobin was quiet and hardworking, and Ciaran....
Well, Ciaran was.... He was hard to explain.
Complicated, layered, and it was as if he bore a weight of responsibility. Something had scarred him. Sawyer was sure of that.
Like he was sure he knew what Ciaran’s body felt like, even though they’d never touched.
Sawyer was certain he knew what it was like to be pinned by Ciaran while his hands raked over his body, holding him down, caressing him with far too many hands while he fucked him?—
Sawyer shot up out of his chair. “Christ,” he mumbled. He grabbed his empty coffee cup and went into his flat to wash it, needing to get those images out of his head.
How it felt...
He could still feel all those hands, Ciaran’s giant cock....
“Fuck.”
Sawyer held onto the sink, dropping his head, and closed his eyes. He had to wonder if Hadeom would like him to add these sexual ideations to his report. Just how weird did he want to get?
Then he wondered if Carpenter had experienced intense erotic imaginings.
Had that been what had sent him around the twist?
Before he could get too caught up in that idea, his computer beeped, so he went back to his desk. It was an email from Hadeom with no text, just an attachment.
A map of Tenebrae Cove.
It was a satellite image, a few years old, by the looks of it. A Google Maps image that Sawyer could have screenshot himself.
It depicted the road in through the national park as still open, so it wasn’t recent at all, but it did show Sawyer that there were some houses out that way. So, after pulling his gloves back on, he grabbed the keys, told Salem to hold the fort, and got back in his police cruiser.
The clouds seemed to close in around him as he drove along Bay Road, drizzling rain, mist, and freezing wind. Sawyer drove slowly, barely over ten kilometres an hour. Not for safety reasons, as there were no other vehicles on the road—or any other people for that matter—for a hundred miles. No, he drove super slow for no other reason than it felt right.
Nothing in Tenebrae was rushed or forced. And he liked this pace. He liked the unhurried nature of the place.
He remembered how Mr Brown had said time was strange in Tenebrae. He wondered how it was possible to lose track of how many days he’d been here.
And a nagging part of Sawyer’s brain told him that was something he should probably be concerned about, but he just wasn’t.
