Page 20 of Bloody Quarter

“Yes, we can do that, but one last question. Did you take anything from your mother’s house? Go back later for anything?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“No old memorabilia?”

“My mother told me she burned all my things and wanted me to burn in hell, so no, I didn’t go back, and I certainly didn’t know she still had anything. Looks like she is the liar. Maybe you’re looking at the wrong woman. She was the one sleeping with him, after all. Isn’t the spouse the number one suspect? Or is that only when they don’t have a child who was in prison?”

“I assure you, we are looking into all angles of this investigation. Are you saying your mother is capable of murder?”

I smiled and then laughed. “Who knows anymore? At one point, I would’ve said no. But I haven’t seen her in eight years, other than that night. People change, so maybe. What I do know is that I didn’t know this boyfriend of hers and didn’t even know she had one. It wasn’t me.” I stood from the chair. “Oh, can I file a sexual assault charge or at least have an occurrence on file?”

“Is this like the stalking,” he asked, and even though he didn’t smile, I could feel the sarcasm in the question.

“You know what? Forget it. I just want to go home.”

Dominic stood and walked over to the door. Opening it, he looked down at me as I walked past him. “I’ll escort you to the front, and you can wait there for an officer to take you home, but Miss Dubois, I wouldn’t leave the state until this matter is closed.”

“Like I have anywhere else to go.”

Every fiber in my being wanted to storm over to my mother’s house and tell her what I thought of her lack of mothering. Pointing the finger at me for something so horrendous was over the line.

This day was one of those days that I should’ve just rolled over and not gotten up. I looked down at my shaking hand as we stepped into the waiting area at the front of the police station. I needed a meeting. If God wanted to test me, he was doing a damn fine job of it.

Greyson

It had taken every ounce of my willpower not to rip Thomas’s head from his body. I’d seen the way he looked at my doll the moment she walked into the diner. Fuck, I loved how she spotted me right away. Her eyes had widened, and she’d frozen like a deer in the headlights. I’d seen her calculating the distance in her mind and wondering how I’d gotten there before her. She’d been even more unsure about why I was all up in her space, and she did not like it one bit.

The next thing I’d noticed was how Thomas tracked her every movement. The way he’d stared at her ass and tits. The fact that he was openly jealous of Alora coming to serve me without speaking to him. Thomas wanted her, and for that, he would die. For touching what was mine, he would die painfully, and for threatening her…well, for that, he would beg for his death.

I’d watched her ride away in the back of the police cruiser with a sickening feeling in my stomach. Hopefully, she was set free soon. Could I get her released? Probably. But to do that, I’d need to explain how I knew she didn’t kill anyone, and that would get sticky. I’d play it out and see what happened before I went all white knight. The whole shining armor thing didn’t really suit me anyway.

Now this…this was me. I looked down at Thomas, who was just starting to come around. I hadn’t used this spot in a few years. It was safest to stay away from the areas that tempted me to slip off the wagon, but Thomas deserved this, so here I was at my family’s boat shed. My parents never used this property, not since the body of my first kill was found here. I was too young for anyone to consider me a suspect. They wanted to sell it, but I insisted I’d buy it from them. Instead, they gave it to me as a gift for my twenty-fifth birthday.

I’d already shackled Thomas, but I was letting him fully recover before doing anything else. Leaning against the wooden wall of the boat shed, I used the honing steel to sharpen my blade. Once satisfied, I laid it down on my workbench and picked up the bone I was carving. This piece looked like Alora. Well, half of the face did. The other half was a decorative skull. It might be my best work yet.

“What’s happening,” Thomas slurred. “Why…why the fuck am I naked?”

I never bothered to answer stupid questions. Walking over so he could see me in the flickering light, I sat down and leaned up against the wooden boards. They had a damp coolness to them, but I would be hot and sweaty soon enough. The carving knife scrapped against the bone, shaving off tiny pieces and slowly creating the work of art.

“You….” Thomas looked around, blinking, and I knew things would be fuzzy as his mind pulled itself out of the fog of the drug cocktail I’d given him. “Why am I here? What did you do to me?”

“The better question to ask yourself is, what did you do? What did you do to incur my wrath,” I asked, blowing on my carving, sending little shavings scattering and falling to the floor.

He licked his lips. Because I was going to have Thomas hanging by his wrists, the cuffs and chains were in front of him, giving him enough slack to push himself up into a sitting position. Thomas wavered like a candle in the wind, but I doubted that was what Elton John was thinking about when he wrote the song.

“I don’t understand,” he said and shivered as the evening breeze whistled into the large shed.

“It’s quite simple, Thomas. What did you do to anger me?”

“How the fuck am I supposed to know that? I only saw you at the diner.”

I shook my head slowly as I finished carving the line of Alora’s upper lip. She had beautiful lips, and I couldn’t wait to taste them.

“Well, then it should be extra easy for you to figure it out,” I said, not bothering to look at him as he struggled to stand.

“Let me go, you whack job.”

I paused and then tapped my chin with the knife. “That is almost word for word what Alora said to you. Although she left off the whack job, I’m pretty sure she was thinking it.”