Page 7 of Cursed by Death

My heart dropped down somewhere near my asshole as I struggled to breathe.

I had never seen them before in real life, but I’d read about eyes like that before when going through all of the many boxes of information my grandmother had gathered over the years.

Those boxes were actually down here in this very basement.

There was information in them that claimed there were things not quite human that ran the dirty, filthy, underbelly of this city.

An underbelly my father had lived in the higher ranks of for years.

Were the twins a part of that?

Did my father have Thomas killed?

A hundred different questions ran through my mind and I didn’t have answers to any of them.

The police arrived not long after, and I had no idea what to tell them about what had happened here.

Chapter 4

Ihad told the truth. Mostly. I mean, I didn’t know what had happened or who had murdered Thomas.

I left Bane and Roan out of it though. They could do their explaining to me when I found them.

Detective Johnny Rowans eyed me like he knew I had been lying to him about something but he didn’t have proof so he wasn’t going to come right out and accuse me or call me out on my lies.

He was an attractive man in what I’d guess to be his late thirties. His black hair was sprinkled with white at the temples. His eyes were a light blue. They were cold and certainly not kind.

Not only was he suspicious of me from word one but I was fairly certain the man just did not like me upon eyesight.

If I was a different kind of person it might hurt my feelings.

Alas, I was not.

“You’re telling me you just came home and found him like this? And you have no idea who could have done this to him or of anyone who wanted to hurt him?”

“No. Of course not,” I said as I frowned at the detective.

“And it’s just the two of you here?”

“Yes. I live in the big house by myself and Thomas lives out in the guest house. Lived. It’s only ever been just the two of us.”

“And, you said he’s not a relative, correct?”

I sighed heavily as I crossed my arms over my chest. “No. He was my grandmother’s attorney. When she died he sort of became mine and he was something of my… handler. He was the only family I had left.”

I didn’t care if that made sense to the detective or not. It was the absolute truth.

“You have no family, you say?” he murmured. “Your last name is Maredo. You wouldn’t happen to be related to Johnathan Maredo and lying to me about it now, would you?”

Son of a bitch.

Now I understood where his suspicion and disdain for me came from.

Johnathan Maredo was my father’s name. Of course, a police detective would know the name of the man who ran the dirty underbelly of this city.

I should have changed my last name the second I turned eighteen.

I figured there was no point in lying to this man because something told me he’d be able to see right through it. To see right through me.

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