“What the fuck?” I blurt, rising to my feet as I take a single step toward it, my stomach pitching and rolling. It’s a man. A large, broad man with his blood spilled on the concrete beneath him. I force myself to tear my eyes away before I throw up all over the place, turning to Shiloh. “Who is that? What the hell is going on here?”
“I killed him,” Shiloh whispers, quiet enough that I can hardly make out the words.
“You killed him?”
He nods, still cradling his head. “He threw me against the wall and tried to choke me, but I killed him. I don’t know why they always try to choke me.”
“Are you okay?”
“I will be.”
I look back to the man, my guts again threatening to upend onto the concrete floor. Taking a deep breath, I step closer to find that his entire face has been turned to raw meat and Shiloh’s knife lays in the pool of blood that seeps from beneath him somewhere. I can’t get a good read on who he once was, and I don’t dare look at the mangled face any longer. The only dead body I’ve ever seen in my life was my mom, and she was pretty in her coffin. I made sure of it, sending her into her grave in her favorite dress with her makeup done just right.
This?
This is right out of a horror movie.
“Who was he?” I ask, still trying to put the pieces together as I turn away from the mangled corpse on the floor.
Shiloh hesitates, refusing to meet my eyes, but he does deliver an answer I probably should have expected. “Harold Bronwell.”
Iggy’s dad.
Shiloh bolting from my apartment flits through my memory from earlier and I frown. “You knew where he’d go.”
“Iggy told me.”
“Jesus, Shiloh. Why didn’t you call the police from my place? Let them know you knew he’d be here so they could handle it?”
Shiloh shrugs and I take a step toward him as he gets up off the floor, wincing and wobbling a little bit on his feet. He breathes heavily, touching his ribcage, his head, his shoulders.
“Why did you come here alone?” I ask, questions tumbling through my mind and falling from my lips like a waterfall.
“I needed to come alone,” he says, still not meeting my eyes. Something about this scene and that statement feels off, like everything has shifted left of center and I’m in the middle trying to make it all align. My stomach churns as Shiloh finally raises his eyes to mine so I can see the desperation and pain inside them.
“Why alone?”
His eyes cast down slightly, then meet mine again filled with a silent plea to stop talking. To stop asking questions he doesn’t want to answer, but I can’t.
I can’t.
“Why didn’t you call the police, Loh?” I ask.
He’s silent for a moment that stretches too long before he finally answers. “He needed to die, Donovan.”
Alarm runs through me as I take a small step away from him, from the body, from the blood and everything else soaking into the floor of this dusty, abandoned place. “Did you… mean to do this?”
Silence meets me again, and as Shiloh looks away from me, I have my answer.
“I can’t move him on my own,” Shiloh whispers, his voice smaller than he is in this moment. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Move him where, Shiloh? We need to call the police. You… you need to… oh my God, Shiloh, you could go to jail for this.”
“No police,” he whispers. “Please, Donovan. People like him deserve to die. Iggy?—”
“Will be fine,” I blurt out, cutting him off. “Iggy will be fine, Shiloh. He’ll wake up and they’ll find him a place to live that isn’t with his father, because even if you hadn’t done… all of this, he’d be heading to jail.”
“You don’t know that. You don’tunderstandwhat it’s like. He needed to be dead, Donovan. Dead where he can’t hurt anyone else… and I need you to help me move his body now that he is.” He hesitates a moment, then finally looks up to meet my eyes with his own beautifully sad gray ones. “Or at least give me a head start before you call the cops on me.”
