The raven croaks again.

“Shush, Morpheus,” she says. She doesn’t look toward the source of the sound, but I do. My heart thunders beneath my sternum. “I’ll feed you in a minute.”

Harper raises the cup to her lips, her eyes still pressed closed. The raven caws more loudly than before.

Everything seems to happen in slow motion. A crease appears between her brows. She takes a sip of coffee as though steeling herself for a fight with the insistent bird. Her head turns toward the feeder.

Coffee sprays from Harper’s lips as she opens her eyes and finally sees.

The raven is standing on the roof of the bird feeder, leaning over the edge to peck Jake Hornell’s eyeball, the other one already gone. The bird pulls a string of ruined flesh from the cavity and gulps it down. With a flutter of his wings, he croaks at Harper, clearly pleased with himself.

“Jake …?” she whispers.

Glee races through my veins. I back out of sight behind the corner of the cottage just as Harper’s eyes dart across the grounds. Maybe she’ll let out a terrified shriek. A dramatic fall to her knees with her head in her hands. Maybe she’ll shake her guilty fists at the sky. Surely there will be tears, at the very least. Any second now …

I peer around the corner. Harper is standing motionless, her head tilted to one side. Though her back is to me and I can’t see her expression, everything else about her seems to have stalled.

The meltdown is coming. I’m sure of it.

Harper takes a step closer to the bird feeder. Another. A fly passes her in a slow, curling arc to land on Jake’s cheek before crawling into the empty eye socket. As accustomed as I am to the grotesque indignity of death, it’s still fucking disgusting. Surely she thinks so too. She’s going to puke. I know it. Coffee and croissant will be everywhere.

Harper looks down at the phone in her hand and presses a contact before placing the call on speaker. Two rings later, I hear the quiet but gruff “hello” of an elderly man’s voice.

“Did you find your shoes?” Harper asks.

There’s a pause. “What?”

“Your shoes. The Christina Riccis or whatever.”

“Stefano,” the man barks. “Stefano Riccis, you heathen.”

Though I can’t see her face, she raises a hand to suppress a laugh, as though this is both an expected and amusing reply. “Stefano Riccis, of course. Did you find them? Did you happen to take them for a … wander …?”

“Why would I wander in Stefano Riccis?”

“I dunno, maybe you wanted to take them on a little test drive …? Last night …?”

“Be specific, Harper. I’m nearly at the part where Alicia steals the wine cellar key in Notorious.”

Harper turns just enough that I catch her eye roll before her gaze skates across the garden. I barely manage to keep my “What the fuck?” whisper to inaudible levels as confusion and disappointment swirl in my blood. “Fine. Did you take those Stefano Riccis over to a certain Jake Hornell’s place and chop off his head to bring back as a souvenir? Is that specific enough for you?”

There’s a pause. The raven caws from the roof of the bird feeder before he leans over the edge to poke at the eye socket. The buzz of the disturbed fly is muffled in the cavernous dark.

“No,” the man finally says.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“You know your memory sucks, right?”

“Harper, I did not kill Mr. Hornell. If this is some horrible practical joke like the time you convinced me you were finally going to let me kill that pretentious old windbag Simon McCarthy but took me to Irene Kennedy’s seventy-seventh birthday party instead, I will never forgive you.”

“You had a great night. You have the hots for Irene, admit it.” The man grumbles a string of arguments to the contrary that sounds entirely forced and untrue as Harper chews on one of her nails. She puts her weight on one foot to rub the back of her calf with the top of the other, as though the caress of the penguin slipper is soothing. She seems to stew on his answer, but after a deep sigh, she finally says, “Okay. I’d better run.”

“Wait … go back for a moment. Jake’s head?”

“Gotta go. I’ll see you at lunch.”

“Harper—”

She hangs up and stuffs the phone into the front of her shirt to perch between her breasts on the flimsy elastic of her top’s built-in shelf bra, then stares at the decapitated head, her hands on her hips as though this is merely an inconvenience. “Well,” she says. “This is … weird.”

Weird …?

I nearly ask it out loud, slipping into the shadow of the cottage as Harper pivots a slow turn as though hunting through the garden for clues. She walks back inside and I retreat to the kitchen window to watch as she trades her penguin slippers for a set of Dakota work boots. The contrast of the beat-up leather against her bare legs and those ridiculous shorts has me shifting as another erection starts. I try to think my way out of that fucking biological response. She killed your brother, I tell myself. She almost killed you. She is absolutely not sexy.

She turns her back to me as she heads out the door. I catch a glimpse of her round ass in those napkin-sized shorts and drag a hand down my face as though I can swipe the image clean from my brain. “Chrissakes,” I hiss, my cock not receiving the message as the door slams behind her in a stamp of sound.

I press my back to the cold stone as Harper marches past me toward a garden shed that sits adjacent to the low garden wall. It’s not far from where I killed Jake last night. If she were to lean over the wall, she might see the blood that stains the grass just past the hydrangeas. But she doesn’t. Instead, she disappears into the shed and, a moment later, she strides with purpose from the building with a pair of gardening gloves in one hand and a spray bottle in the other. She returns to the bird feeder and sets the orange bottle at her feet before she pulls the gloves on, and then she’s reaching into the bird feeder to yank the head free from between the roof and the platform.

What.

The.

Fuck …?

When I lean farther around the corner, she’s gripping his ears, trying to tug the head free. I wedged it between the roof and the platform pretty good last night, to be fair. I was a little worried about a raccoon climbing up there to run off with all my hard work while I jogged back to the inn for more supplies. It took me several hours and multiple trips to chop up the rest of Jake Hornell and run his body to the shallow burial site next to the Ballantyne River that I picked out months ago from topographic maps, the place I intended to use to dispose of Harper’s body. I don’t think packing dismembered limbs and a collapsible shovel into a backpack to run them for two miles was really what my firefighter and SAR training was meant for, but at least I got a good workout in last night.

And I’m not the only one getting a workout.

“Fucking … just … comply … with … instruction … Jake …,” Harper hisses between gritted teeth as she pushes and pulls until she finally yanks the head hard enough to dislodge it. She shrieks as it faceplants into her chest, but it’s really more a sound of irritation than the abject terror I was hoping for. “Even in the afterlife, Jake? Seriously? That is fucked up, dude.”

I just … do not understand. And frankly, I’m a little pissed off. I spent all night chopping this asshole up and hauling him around, and I didn’t even finish, for fucksakes. There’s still a bag of body parts strapped to my back. It takes a long-ass time to saw a person into pieces in the pitch dark and not wake up your sleeping enemy. And I was aiming for a big reaction. Screaming. Tears. Horror. Panic. But what I’m getting just seems more like mild confusion sprinkled with a hint of annoyance, like this is nothing more than an unwelcome inconvenience to her morning routine. She’s just standing there, seemingly unfazed, with the head clutched between her hands, staring down into the bloodied, vacant holes where the eyes once were.