By the time I make it back to shore, she’s already made good progress in the soft soil. I watch her fluid, metronomic movement as I get dressed, still soaking wet. She stabs her shovel into the earth and shifts it next to the pit she’s creating. She’s strong. Graceful. She doesn’t break her cadence, not even when I pick up a shovel and join her. We don’t talk. I don’t think she really looks at me, at least not the way I do, sneaking the occasional glance like a thief. It’s not until she strikes a foreign texture with the point of her shovel that her eyes meet mine.
“Guess your plan worked,” she whispers.
I nod. “One down.”
“Fifteen to go.”
With a single, grim look shared between us, we dig up the body, nothing left of it but bones in a decaying polypropylene sack with a faded black stamp that says RYE in large black letters. When the hole is filled back in and our tools are packed up, we stand for a moment and survey the floodplain and all the work we still have left to do. And she’s probably thinking the same thing as I am when we turn and start heading back toward the road. I know I should not be looking forward to it, but some traitorous little voice in my brain claims otherwise. It’s the anticipation of the hunt—that’s all it is. I’m gathering evidence and learning the habits of my prey. Tonight was just setting the stage for what I can learn about Harper that will take her down. It was nothing more than an indulgence in my curiosity.
“Thanks,” Harper says, breaking the silence that I didn’t even notice in the riot of my own thoughts.
“Sure.”
“What’s wrong?”
I blink at her. “What do you mean, ‘What’s wrong?’”
Though she lifts a shoulder, I don’t miss the way her brow furrows as she assesses my face, as though she’s hunting for clues. “You’ve looked miserable all evening, but now you’re … extra miserable. I didn’t think that would be possible, and yet, here we are.”
“Maybe I’m just thinking about how fucked up this situation is.”
“Didn’t really take you as the type to be put off by a little body relocation, given your scrapbooking hobby. But yeah,” she says, pausing to run her fingers along her jaw as she surveys the road ahead. I want to remind her that she’s been handling a body sack and that human decay juices have definitely passed through those fibers. But I don’t. “I guess it’s a little messed up.”
“A bit. And now I’m helping a woman I want to kill to cover up murders committed by another serial killer. This is the most incestuous murder party I’ve ever heard of.”
“You have no idea,” Harper mutters as she tosses the sack of bones over her shoulder and walks away.
“Wait … what? What do you mean by that?” I jog a couple of steps after her before she tosses me a quizzical look in return. Inexplicably, my blood feels a hundred degrees too hot in my veins. “Do you and Arthur have some kind of … situationship … thing?”
“The fuck? No. Oh my God. Do you get anything right ever? Arthur has the hots for Irene.” She scoffs, and though she turns away before I can see it, I swear I hear her eyes roll. “Forget about it, Ballmeat guy.”
Harper walks out onto the shallow gravel pull-off where I’m parked. I follow her, but when she reaches my rental vehicle, she just keeps going, heading for a path that slices into the woods on the other side of the road.
“Where are you going? I’m your ride,” I say, walking to the middle of the unlit road.
“I’m good. See you tomorrow.”
Without another word, she disappears. And just like the first time we met, she leaves me alone.
In the dark.
AVASTHarper
THERE IS NOT ENOUGH COFFEE in the world for me to survive today, let alone another seventeen days of this shit. I can barely even think straight long enough to make coffee, for godsakes. Yesterday, I even forgot to turn the fucking stove on. For a full ten minutes.
It’s day four. But I swear it feels like day four hundred and eighty-five. These late nights are killing me. It’s not just staying up until two or three in the morning, or the additional physical work of digging up bodies after an already demanding day of preparing Arthur’s extensive gardens for another season of decimating Sarah Winkle’s hopes and dreams. It’s not just trying to fix the rusted old Pocket Rocket or worrying about Sam Porter suddenly showing up at my doorstep with triumphant jazz hands.
No. It’s the stress of being in a secluded place with a man who wants to kill me, and the only thing stopping him is a bit of evidence currently in the possession of the endearingly naive and perpetually distracted Lukas Lancaster.
And the other part that makes this whole corpse relocation program so completely unbearable?
Nolan Rhodes is hot as fuck.
Those dimples. They’d be my undoing if he smiled at me with anything more than contempt. His skin. A man’s skin has never rendered me close to speechless until Nolan. The moonlight settles on him every night as though it’s determined to illuminate the planes of muscle in his ridiculous body as he undresses to swim across the river. Sometimes, the shimmer slithers across the scars that cross his elbow. His shoulder. His back. His lower abdomen. Christ, that one is the worst. It follows the diagonal ridge of muscle that leads to the waistband of his briefs. They always hang low on his hips, like a purposeful taunt, daring me to look down when he strips his clothes off so he can walk to that dark water and slip beneath its treacherous embrace. I’ve never been jealous of fucking water before. But here we are.
But it’s not just the way he looks. It’s his presence. Even though I know he’d probably rather clock me in the face with his shovel, there’s something oddly comforting about his menacing silence at my side every night. The most dangerous monster is the one right next to me. When he’s there, I’m not afraid of the dark.
This is like some super-fucked-up Stockholm-syndrome-adjacent thing I’ve got going on. Rationally, I know that in his mind, I belong to him. Nothing and no one will stand between Nolan Rhodes and the life he’s come to claim. But to my not-so-rational mind, that is so fucking hot. It’s wildly intoxicating to be such an object of someone’s obsession that they would decimate anyone who threatens you. I realize that sounds pretty messed up. And I know with every fiber of my being that I need to kill this man before I wind up as a souvenir in his skinbook. Though I should be running in the other direction and testing out his theory that he’d find me no matter the distance, the idea of him traveling to the ends of the earth to chase me down somehow makes him even hotter.
My self-imposed, years-long dry spell isn’t doing me any favors right now. It’s tempting to picture an alternative ending to our acrimonious story, maybe even a happy one, but the reality is he would kill me, that’s what he would do. One hundred percent chance of death.
I sigh and roll my eyes, my hands braced on either side of the stove. “Get your shit together,” I whisper as I finally realize I haven’t turned the burner on to boil the water in my stovetop coffee maker. Again. “He’s just a guy. A completely psycho serial killer guy with a decent skin suit and muscles for days and some cute dimples.” I squeeze my eyes shut and turn to lean against the counter. “You should just feed him to Cookie Monster and be done with it.”
Even though I say those words out loud, I know it won’t transform the way I really feel into an opposite reality.
My enemy is right where I can see him. I don’t just need his help. I want it. Maybe part of me even wants him.
“No, you absolutely do not want him,” I say to myself as the water starts to boil in my coffee maker. “You just need caffeine.”
