Like today.

It’s been almost six months since Gabe passed away. And this afternoon was the memorial service for Samuel Brooks.

Bria has been preparing for this day from before I even knew her. On the surface, she’s handled it with strength and poise. To anyone else, she would be the reserved, efficient, resilient niece who planned out a beautiful event to celebrate the life and contributions of her beloved uncle. But there’s so much more than that beneath her shimmering surface. She doesn’t say it, but I know she feels adrift without her greatest ally. The more I’ve gotten to know Bria, and the more she’s come to terms with herself in ways she never expected, the more she’s struggled to understand her relationship with Samuel through different lenses. Now that he’s gone, she’s not just mourning the man who saved her from the desert. She’s grieving for a history she might never understand.

I’m watching Bria as she takes a stack of records from Samuel’s belongings we gathered from Cedar Ridge, examining the handwritten titles on their dust jackets. There are still boxes from my house in the corner of the room next to Samuel’s piano. Kane sits on the highest one, glaring down Duke. They’ve established a truce over the last week since I moved in, but the suspicions still run deep for both parties. In a tactic oddly reminiscent of Bria, the cat likes to use his murder mittens on Duke’s nose when no one is looking.

“Any old-school gems in there?” I ask, patting the top of Duke’s cat-scratched head as I bring over two glasses of wine, stopping at Bria’s side.

“Not really. These are all Samuel’s,” she says, setting the records down on the coffee table to pick up a sealed document envelope we retrieved from Samuel’s safety deposit box on the way home from the service. She peels the flap open, glancing up at me with a look that says “this is serial killer stuff you might not enjoy.” “His pieces were his…trophies…”

“Ahh. I might not listen to them the same way again,” I say, but with a smile and a kiss to Bria’s temple as she withdraws a thick leatherbound notebook from the envelope. In the life we’re building together, revelations like Samuel’s musical trophies have come to make sense. Part of the reason Bria and Samuel have been so successful in staying hidden is their ability to avoid patterns of behavior the rest of us believe are typical for their kind.

“Me neither…” Bria whispers, her voice trailing off. She flips a page in the notebook, reading the careful, scrolling penmanship on the yellowed pages. “He wrote lyrics for his pieces… I never knew…”

“A different kind of trophy?”

“Yeah…seems like it.”

I pick up the stack of records, ready to flip through them. “Which piece was his favorite?”

“Opus #139,” Bria says.

I shift to the middle of the sequentially-ordered stack and pull out Opus #139, placing it onto the vintage Thorens turntable on the sideboard. I turn up the volume and set the needle. A warm crackle precedes an evocative piano melody, filling the room with a haunting atmosphere.

“It’s not here,” Bria says, her voice full of disappointment as she flips back and forth between pages at the center of the book. I stop in front of her as she gives me a melancholy smile. She passes me the book and picks up her glass of wine. “It’s a shame. I would have liked to have known.”

Bria moves away to the hearth as the music swirls around us. I watch as she picks up the photo of her younger self and Kane. But I think it’s Samuel she’s looking at, trying to divine his thoughts from a moment caught in time.

I open the book, reading snippets of lyrics as I turn the pages. They’re poetic, atmospheric. Nothing is shocking or gruesome. Without knowing the man or the truth of his dark double life, the words would never cause suspicion. Understanding him now from what Bria has shared, I can see the trophies for what they are in the descriptions on the page. The color of a woman’s hair, a man’s eyes. The reflection on a blade or the glint of a metal wire in dim light. These lyrics are a history of small details that stood out in his mind for each life he claimed.

I flip to the end of the lengthy book, past the empty pages that will never be filled, to the very last one.

Opus #139.

I read through the first stanza, my breath catching in my lungs. When I glance at Bria, her back is still turned toward me as she stares at the photo in her hands.

“Daughter of the Devil. God grants no mercy in the desert sun.”

Bria’s back stiffens. She goes impossibly still. I can’t even see her breathe.

“Flower in the dust. In the darkest night you bloom.”

There’s a tremor in Bria’s fingers as she sets the photo on the mantle.

“I thought that I would teach you. It was me who learned from you. Things I’d never known. Things I thought untrue.” I pause as she turns so slowly, tears gathering in her eyes. It’s the hope in them that breaks my heart. “Yet I find that when I watch you, swimming for the shore, these things I thought untrue, I can deny no more. Flower in the dust. In my darkest night you bloom.”

I lay the book on the coffee table and stride toward Bria, gathering her into my embrace. A sound of the deepest loss passes from her lips. And I think right now, as she lets the last of her armor down, she’s the strongest she’s ever been. The most whole.

“It was real,” she says into my chest as we sway together in the current of the music.

“Yeah, sweetheart,” I say, laying a kiss on the crown of her head. “It was real. And this is real too.”

We stay like that for a long time after the music has stopped. But then we play other songs. And we dance. We make the steps up as we go. I dip her and even earn a laugh. To some it might sound macabre, dancing to the trophies of a killer. But Bria and I, we make our own rules.

And now, as I lie in bed with Bria’s head on my chest, her breathing deep and even, I cherish the quiet moment for my nightly ritual. Careful not to wake her, I reach toward the nightstand and pull open the drawer on my side, retrieving a black box from its depths. I tighten my arm across Bria’s back and open it.

Diamonds glitter in the dim light, and I imagine every moment of how I’ll ask her to marry me. I’ll get down on one knee and promise to love her until my last breath. I’ll promise to show her so she never doubts the truth, even though not so long ago she would have thought it was impossible.

This is real.

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EPILOGUE

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BRIA

My hands are tied together behind my back. A dildo hums a gentle vibration in my pussy. I’m blindfolded, positioned on my knees, my face pressed by Eli’s hand into the mattress. I shudder as an ice cube trails a lazy path down the sweat misting my spine.

“I don’t hear you begging,” he says as the ice cube trails over my ass cheek and down the back of my thigh. It comes up again, passing through the arousal gathered on my folds, then down the other side. “Don’t you want to come, Mrs. Brooks-Kaplan?”

My heart grows so big with those words that it might burst through my bones. “Yes,” I whisper as the ice cube carves its tingling burn up my inner thigh, back to my pussy. “Please, Eli. I need you to fuck me.”

The ice cube circles my clit and I gasp. Eli leans over my back, his breath caressing my neck as he presses the cold block to my sensitive flesh. “Then you’d better start using the right word,” he says, his voice teasing in my ear.

I smile as he leans back, his free hand still pressing my face to the mattress. “I need you to make me come…husband.”

The hand leaves my face to trace a line down my body as the chip of ice swirls across my clit. “That’s a good girl, sweetheart,” Eli says as the intensity of the vibration in my pussy increases before he turns on the second dildo in my ass. The ice cube leaves my flesh and then its cool caress is back as he glides it over my clit with his tongue.