Page 25 of Scythe & Sparrow
“I know, right? What a waste of good beer on this asshole.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant.”
Though I toss him a grin as I dab Eric’s eyeballs and face dry, Fionn only frowns, a deep sigh lifting his chest and his muscled shoulders. “Okay,” I say, then prod one side of Eric’s lips to make a lopsided smile that falls as soon as I let go. I hold the device up to his face and this time, it finally unlocks the home screen. “Success.”
I slide off the rail and open his text messages. Half the snippets displayed only confirm what I already know, that he was cheating on Naomi with multiple women.Hey baby! What are you doing tonight? Want to come over? I miss you …
And then I open his text exchange with Naomi.
The rage I feel as I skim the conversation has me wishing I could do it all over again. Make him suffer. Bleed longer. Staple his eyes open and let him fall over that cliff while he was still alive, so he could feel concentrated fear, distilled to its purest form. Naomi must have lived in fear every day. Fear of being with him. Of being without him. Fear of leaving only to face his retribution. Any doubts I might have had about what I’ve done are erased when I read his threats and insults, his backhanded, controlling compliments and his unhinged, narcissistic outbursts.
My nose stings when I think of the suffering Naomi must have endured every day when she woke to this reality, her chest tightening as consciousness took hold, her stomach hollow. I remember that feeling. How worry and hopelessness can carve out your center, leaving you scraped clean. How every waking moment becomes corrupted by the kind of dread that pulses just beneath your skin, a second heartbeat humming in the dark.
I clear my throat, but it does nothing to dislodge the knot that pulls tighter around my every breath. “He’s been abusing Naomi Whittaker, the nurse at the hospital,” I whisper, offering the phone to Fionn. “Threats. Intimidation. He struck her recently. She told me while I was there.”
The shock in Fionn’s face is replaced with the slow dawn of epiphany. “You mean, just like Matthew Cranwell has been abusing Lucy,” he says, and it’s not a question but a carefully delivered statement of fact.
“Something like that.”
“Did you start that fight too?”
I shrug. “I guess it depends on how you look at it, Doc.”
He watches me for a moment, a crease between his brows. With a tentative hand, he takes the mobile, but he seems reluctant to remove his gaze from mine. Maybe it’s the glassy sheen he sees in my eyes. The way tears gather on my lash line. I nod to the phone and force a smile. “Go ahead, before it locks and I have to rinse his eyeballs with beer again.”
Fionn’s brows pull tighter. And then he looks down at the phone.
I see every minute change. The flush of crimson that dusts his cheeks. The way his pulse quickens on the side of his neck. The parting of his lips, the subtle shake of his head. He scrolls through the messages, once. Twice. Three times, and he’s probably read more now than I have. He sees something that makes his fingers tense around the phone before he locks it and slides it into his pocket as though he can’t stand to look at it another moment longer.
He unbuttons the cuff of one of his sleeves, rolling the pressed gray fabric up his forearm, his muscles tense. “Keep watch on the road,” he says as he repeats the motion with his other sleeve, his voice gruff, his eyes never straying from mine. “If you see a cloud of dust in either direction, tell me.”
I nod once and he takes a step closer, our connection unbroken as he reaches for the half-full can of beer to take a long sip. And then he turns and stalks away. He pulls a small knife from his pocket, unfolding it as he bends to unscrew the cap on the tire valve. He presses the tip of the blade to the core and air hisses from the tire. When Fionn has finished airing down each one, he returns to my side, repocketing the blade. “Start it up, wheels to the left, put it in four-wheel drive. When I tell you, give it just a little gas.”
“Okay.”
He heads to the back of the truck and prepares to push as I press the brake with my crutch. I start the engine, shifting it into drive. When he’s ready, he gives me the signal, and with the slow, steady crawl of the deflated tires and his rhythmic pushing, the truck finally glides free of the sand. I stay on the rail until we near the edge, and then I take my crutch off the accelerator and let it crawl forward.
“Eyes on the prize, dickhead,” I say, and with a final salute to Eric’s dead body, I hop down from the vehicle, taking Fionn’s waiting hand as he slams the door shut with the other. The truck rolls to the cliff edge and we follow to watch it tumble down the steep embankment, gathering momentum. It hits a boulder and flips, then cartwheels end over end until it smacks the surface of the slow gray current to sink into the silty gloom.
“Investigators are really going to have questions if the body turns up with his eyes stapled open,” Fionn says as the last tire disappears from view. Bubbles pop in the swirling eddies and we watch in silence until the last one dies, and the water resumes its slow procession. He turns to face me then, and I’m not sure how to read the mask that watches me back. There are hardly any clues to what he must be thinking, just a feathering of the muscle along his jaw. A haunted spark in his eyes, like a candle nearly burned to the end of its wick, fighting to hold off the dark. He must realize I’m trying to read him because he breaks our connection and bends to retrieve the crutch I dropped when I took his offered hand. “Let’s hope he never turns up,” he finally says.
We don’t talk. Not as he helps me into his car, even though he doesn’t need to. Not when he turns the truck around to head back to the main road. Neither one of us remarks on the thunderstorm that looms in the distance, or how its black heart bursts with bright streaks of light in the palest shade of pink. It’s beautiful, and I want to say it out loud. But I don’t.
It isn’t until we’re on the other side of Weyburn and well past the town limits that Fionn pulls Eric’s phone from his pocket. He wipes it clean. And then he veers to the center of the empty highway and tosses it out the window into the ditch on the opposite side of the road.
And he doesn’t look back.
SUTURES
Fionn
I never thought I’d find crocheting meditative and soothing. But here we are.
I’m sure my brothers would have a field day if they knew that I was holed up in my room like a hermit, spending my Saturday night crocheting a fucking blanket. But I guess they equally take the piss out of me for my “gym obsession,” or as Lachlan likes to call it, my “Dr. Bellend gym-bro phase.” And Rowan would be chiming in with some unhelpful suggestions, or even worse, he’d take up crocheting just long enough to make me a mankini for my birthday. While Lachlan is a broody asshat, Rowan is fucking nuts, and will go to literally any lengths to make a point or get what he wants, no matter how reckless or ridiculous or absurd. The two of them together are the worst, and the torment would be never-ending if they found out all the details of my life at present.
Especially seeing as how the most beautiful but admittedly also terrifying woman I’ve ever met is sleeping in the room across frommine, and I’ve done nothing but try to force myself to avoid her as much as possible.
I haven’t been doing a great job of it either.
