Saint and Kyan had exchanged a dark look when I showed them it which made me think I was in for a tongue lashing at some point, but the more urgent task of disposing of our problem had taken precedent for now.
Saint had returned to the catacombs to bleach everything again. He was such a clean freak that he even had a blacklight which he usually used to double check his cleaner had done a thorough job, but had come in really fucking handy for tracking down blood splatter.
The rest of us had doused the body in lighter fluid and Monroe was the one to strike the match. And then we spent the next few hours making sure we stayed upwind of the rancid smoke and kept feeding the fire until we were sure that as much of the evidence as possible had burned away.
So now, as the embers burned low and all that was left was the charred remains of bones which wouldn’t burn down, the four of us sat together and waited for the fire to go out.
“I never realised how easy it was to kill someone,” I muttered, breaking the silence we’d maintained for most of the night.
“I was well aware,” Saint deadpanned.
“Never thought I’d do it, though,” Monroe muttered.
“We did it for her,” Kyan growled. “There’s beauty in that.”
We all looked at each other for a long moment. Her. Tatum Rivers. The girl who’d changed everything. There were a lot of unspoken words hanging between the four of us about her. Because no matter what had passed between all of us and the girl we’d claimed for our own, it had led us all to a place where we were willing to kill for her. And there weren’t many people in this world who I could claim to care about like that.
None of us said anything else on the subject, leaving it there for later.
Aside from Saint barking orders and the odd question, the whole night had been a pretty quiet affair.
But as far as I could tell, we held our silence for different reasons. Saint was in OCD heaven. Never had control and compulsive cleaning been so important. I could practically see him creating an impossibly long list of things required to destroy all the evidence and the light in his dark eyes said he relished the challenge. I didn’t think he had particularly enjoyed killing the asshole, but I didn’t think he was affected much by it either. It wasn’t that he was a straight up psychopath – though I guessed a lot of people would beg to differ with me there – but with Saint it was more that he found it hard to care about people. He struggled with empathy to the point where I was fairly sure he didn’t have any. He struggled with sympathy because he tended to believe that the world dished things out to people who deserved them for not being strong enough to force another destiny. And he struggled with grief because he hadn’t had many people he cared about enough to grieve them. And he certainly didn’t think many people were worth grieving. Saint cared about himself first of all and then me and Kyan. That was it. Although I had to admit that Tatum seemed to be getting under his skin. And the way he’d instantly stepped in to stab this guy in solidarity with her made me wonder how much he was beginning to care for her.
Kyan was in his element here. He was violence embodied and was the most emotional about this whole thing out of us. Not emotional in the way you might expect someone to be – regret, panic, guilt – no, Kyan was amped up. He was a ball of energy. He’d spent most of the night pacing around the fire, collecting all the wood needed to stoke the flames almost single handedly with this crazy smile playing around his lips.
He was waiting for his next part in this with so much energy coiled in his muscles that I expected him to spring forward at any moment. Monroe had gotten a sledgehammer from the maintenance building to deal with the last of the bones and Kyan laid claim to it instantly. He’d wedged it against the dirt with the handle sticking up and was crouched with his chin resting on the top of it, looking to all intents and purposes like a mountain lion waiting to pounce.
I, on the other hand seemed to be the only one of us who was borderline freaking out about this whole thing. Was I wracked with guilt and regret over killing some deadbeat wannabe rapist when he’d been trying to hurt our girl? No. But was I envisioning some version of the future where police came, evidence was discovered and somehow we found ourselves locked up in a supermax for the rest of our miserable lives? Yeah. That thought had occurred. Repeatedly.
When I’d dragged Tatum up here with thoughts of killing her, I’d been out of my fucking mind with grief and heartache and so much fucking rage that it had consumed me. I’d cracked. I knew that now. It was the culmination of all the helpless, useless agony I’d been bottling up until it festered into something so much more potent. So much more dangerous.
I couldn’t even remember planning it. Something in me just broke and I lost it. But I knew exactly what had dragged me back, what had reached me through all the layers of pain and suffering and misery.
Tatum Rivers had called my name in the dark and I’d
