Page 54 of Grave Love
His lip curls, and he tightens his arms against his body, locking himself in, guarding that name. I clench my jaw, a bitter taste rushing over my tongue, and for a split second, I imagine cracking my brother’s skull on a headstone. Kicking him into a hole on top of a casket. Buryinghimalive this time, with enough earth to render him powerless.
I don’t like hearingmy corpse’sname on his tongue.
“Don’t you have a patient to protect?” I ask. He scoffs, then looks at the beach longingly, like all of the lonely tourists do.
Ren walks back inside the mortuary. The door clicks into place.
Brody sighs.
“It’s her, isn’t it?” he asks.
I lean forward sharply, getting in his personal space, then I bare my teeth like a fucking animal.
“You think I’d kill someone I work with?” I snarl. “You think I’m that stupid?” The bastard slants away from me, tension creasing his forehead. Scared like a child. I outgrew him in size once I hit my twenties, and I use that advantage over him now. He takes another step back. “I’ll callyouwhen my next victim is dead. You can be sure of that.”
“Good,” he says.
I wrench myself away from him. His attention lingers on my back. Hunting. Searching for what I want.
Iwantto kill him—to teach him a lesson for digging where he doesn’t belong—but if I do anything now, he’llknowit’s her.
And I can’t have that. I can’t have him on my back any more than I can have Ren still floating around, living her life, knowing who I truly am.
Moments later, I find myself inside of the building. Following her. She steps toward the exit, and I forget what I’m supposed to be doing.
Dead or alive, I need to touch her. To own her. Tofeelher.
Right fucking now.
Chapter20
Blaze
I grabthe back of Ren’s arm before she reaches the door. Her plain brown eyes take me in, disarming me.
We stare at each other, neither of us saying a word. Thoughts float through my mind, screaming at me to get this over with. To stop wasting my time. To kill her like webothwant.
But those thoughts evaporate, too weak to grip me now.
Ren and I stand in the hallway of the empty mortuary. Our only company is the dead. The familiar and the neglected. The corpses like us.
“I didn’t know you were still here,” she says.
I raise a brow, slightly amused. We both know that’s a lie. She’s been waiting for me, lingering in the building, so that we would leave at the same time. It’s our pattern now.
I tilt my head toward the back door leading to the gardens and the cemetery.
“Sit with me,” I say.
We walk to the edge of the graves and sit in the grass. Most of the plots have been reserved already. Many of the Floridian retirees like these plots on the beach, backed by swampland: you get the best of both worlds—the paradise and the home, escape and comfort. Even in death.
For a long time, neither of us says a word. The waves skim across the sand, and the stars peek out of the darkness. I keep my eyes ahead of me on that bleak, ominous ocean.
Brody is gone now. That shouldn’t give me relief, but it does. If he’s gone, I can let go. I can focus on her.
“I broke my leg once. Masturbating in the shower, actually,” Ren says. She laughs awkwardly, even though it’s obvious that it’s not a nostalgic memory. “I slipped, and it’s not like I could tell Mrs. Richmond exactly what happened. She didn’t believe I was really hurt, because I was walking—or limping, I guess. ‘You would know if your leg was broken,’ she had said. And when the school sent me to the hospital, she got mad. Said I was embarrassing her.”
My lungs deflate, the tension ceasing. Ren isn’t the type of person to volunteer information, especially about herself, and I don’t know how to take it.
