Page 60 of Clubs

Entirely involuntarily, he gagged.

I loved that about him. My cruelty disgusted him. It was better than the reverse. Someone completely unbothered by these things wouldn’t be my type. And no, the irony of that wasn’t lost on me.

“I’m giving you the easy job,” I said. “But if you know another Werewolf who could help us faster—”

“I’m fine.” The bile I felt burning his esophagus said otherwise. “We don’t want to get anybody else involved with this. Let’s just clean it up and call it a day. Then we can figure out how to keep me out of jail.”

“Maybe we can hold on to the hand,” I murmured. “If I cauterize it, I could, in theory, take it with me into the police department and put it on pieces of evidence from the murder scene. Or, the dump scene, I guess. Then, in theory, it would tie everything to him, and there would be nothing leading back to you. And that’s what we need, right? Hard evidence.”

Nose wrinkled, lips curled, Declan shook his head. “I love you, sweetheart, and I love that you know how to handle this shit, because I sure as hell don’t. But you can leave me out of the details.”

I almost smiled at that, but Ria and Emory landed at my side before I had any time to respond.

Gradually, as Ria looked at the ground, her jaw fell open. Not with disgust, but shock. After a long, quiet moment, she looked up at Emory. “You did this?”

“I’m sorry.” His voice was so much softer when he talked to her. “I don’t know what I came here for. I just saw you coming into the house, looking like this”—he gestured over her—“and I lost it. I just… I lost it.”

As if he was her high school date who had just arrived at the door with a bouquet of roses and a limo, she smiled up at him. “Don’t apologize.”

“We have to get this done. ASAP. It won’t be long, and people are gonna be coming here to get their drugs,” I said.

“Right,” Ria said. “What you need from me?”

“Well, I need his hands. Left and right.” I gestured to them. “You brought a knife, right?”

She reached into her hoodie pocket, and pulled out a six-inch blade. One of my athames, which I used for ceremonies, and felt very dirty about using for a purpose like this. But time was of the essence. “Think this’ll work?”

“With the arm he’s got on him?” I hooked a thumb toward Emory. “Yeah, shouldn’t be a problem.”

He rolled his eyes at me, then reached for the blade.

But Ria pulled it back. “You killed him. I get this.”

I imagined that would be the last I ever heard of what Davey did to her. Ria was as emotionally walled up as I was. Sure, she was sweet, but we buried shit. Aside from when we were under the influence, we didn’t acknowledge what our trauma had done to us. If we swept it under the rug, even we couldn’t see it.

It was how we coped. And if that’s how she got through this? Along with chopping off his hands? The hands that had violated her in more ways than I could ever know? Well, so be it. Who was I to judge?

Emory gave a curt nod.

I turned to Declan. “Ready to go clean up?”

Struggling up onto his knees, then taking my hand for support as he stood the rest of the way up, he said, “If it means I don’t have to watch this man’s hands get hacked off, yes. Yes, please.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

DECLAN

The smell of human flesh burning.

It was something I could’ve gone my whole life without knowing. Of course, that was only the smell of Ria cauterizing the wounds from where she sawed off Davey’s hands. I didn’t even want to know how bad it would be when she burned the whole body.

But I had a job to do. While Ria and Emory tended to Davey, Brooke and I got to work inside the old house. We used one another’s memories to remember exactly what we had touched, then wiped every surface. If we were smart, we would’ve worn gloves yesterday. But we had figured that we were dealing with drug dealers. We hadn’t thought that we would be committing, or covering up, a murder here.

“Why do you think Emory did this?” Brooke asked, wiping a large shard of one of the bongs she had shattered yesterday afternoon. I didn’t know how she expected to get her fingerprints off of all the pieces, but she was attempting. At least she was wearing gloves this time.

“Because he lost his shit?” Leaning toward the sofa, I sniffed. Sure enough, one of Brooke’s long, curly red hairs laid against the back of the cushion. “I mean, when I saw Ria like that, I was ready to come in here and kill him too. Don’t know if I would’ve done it the way he did, but, yeah. I get it.”

“Why didn’t you?” she asked. “You could have. You didn’t. He did. Why?”

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