Page 12 of Price of Angels

Carly was dead.

But she was equipped to handle the most awful of things, wasn’t she? Yes.

“What happened?” she asked, sitting upright again, sniffling hard.

Michael watched her a long moment, eyes moving back and forth across her face, his expression blank, before he sucked at one corner of his mouth, that little thinking face he made. He was trying to decide how much to tell her, she realized. He didn’t know how much she could bear to hear.

“You can say it,” she said. “I won’t fall apart.”

He studied her another moment, then nodded. “From what the cops could tell, she was taking the trash out the side alley door, and got jumped from behind while she was facing the dumpster. Her face got slammed up against the side of the thing. She had bruises on her neck, blood in her eyes. The one cop wouldn’t talk to me, but the young one would. He recognized me from around town. He said it looked like she got strangled to death, the marks on her throat. The broken vessels in the eyes. They won’t know if she was sexually assaulted till the ME gets done with her.”

“And you’re sure it was Carly?”

“Brunette. Little like you are. Bartender ID’d her.”

Holly sighed. “Yeah, that’s Carly.”

“I thought it might be better hearing it from me, than seeing it on the news in the morning,” Michael said.

She nodded, managed to offer him a scrap of a smile. “It was. Thank you.”

He continued to watch her, gaze never wandering from her face, the occasional blink the only sign that he was a living man, and not a mannequin.

Holly slumped sideways against the back of the chair, exhausted by the news.

“You were friends?” Michael asked. It was the first time, in their almost four months of acquaintance, that he’d ever asked her anything. This simple question shouldn’t have mattered to her, but it did, a small spot of warmth in an otherwise cold night.

“Yeah.” She smiled, faintly. “I was supposed to close tonight and she was worried about me. She sent me home early, and covered the rest of my shift.”

“Why was she worried about you?”

Because I was crying, because you said no, she thought. But she said, “Because I was sad.”

He frowned, just a little, brows drawing together over his very straight nose. “Sad.”

“Even more now, because I might as well have killed Carly myself.”

“That’s stupid,” Michael said, evenly, without missing a beat.

Holly felt her brows go up. She stared at him, inviting him to explain, the guilt pounding inside her.

“She offered to take your place, didn’t she? You didn’t do anything wrong. You had no hand in killing her, and if you’d stayed, it would be you dead, instead of her.”

She shuddered. “Carly was a sweet person,” she said, though the idea ofit would be you deadwas making her lightheaded. “She didn’t deserve to die.”

“But you did?” he asked, his voice relentless, too direct for this conversation.

Holly shrugged and glanced away from his unforgiving stare. Yes, if it came down to her or Carly, then she was the one who’d deserved to die. She was the one with unspeakable sin attached to her name. She was the one who wouldn’t be missing out on much of anything, if she were killed. She was the one seeking out Michael. Didn’t that automatically make her the worthy candidate for death?

“That’s what you think,” he said, the force of his gaze drilling into the side of her face. Didn’t he know this was a sensitive topic? Didn’t he have a softer voice somewhere, buried inside him? “You think itshouldhave been you.”

Holly hated lying. She detested it; it left a dark, stale taste on her tongue every time. At moments, she was forced to do it – at least that’s what she told herself; lie, or face the wrath again. Lie, or risk the pain again, like that awful time both her blackened eyes had swelled shut, when she’d been blind. In that house with them, and totally blind.

But here, sitting with Michael, her natural aversion to falsehoods was stronger than any fear. He may have been blank-faced and insensitive, but Holly realized she wasn’t afraid of losing her eyesight as she sat with him. She wasn’t braced and ready for pain.

So she told the truth. “Yes, I think it should have been me.”

Michael watched her, blinking at least, hands curled over the arms of the chair, still as frozen water. Still as a wilderness predator. Waiting.

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