Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Jigsaw
The stillness wakes me the next morning. I’m not used to waking up in a place this quiet. No rumble of bikes. No background noise of brothers shouting or girls moaning. No strumming of Shelby’s guitar somewhere in the background.
Just silence, broken by the occasional creak of the old house, the soft hum of the refrigerator, or birds chirping outside the window.
It’s…peaceful.
How can I feel peace after everything she confessed last night?
Margot sleeps curled up on her side, her face turned toward me, her breathing soft and even. She looks so small, so damn fragile, it’s hard to reconcile this woman with the one who calmly admitted to planning and executing four murders.
Not that I have room to judge.
If anything, I’m impressed.
I’ve seen darkness before. Hell, I’ve lived it. But Margot’s is different. Her darkness isn’t a choice. It’s a calling. A fight against the horrors in her small corner of the world.
I watch her for a long moment, trying to untangle what I’m feeling. Protective, sure. Drawn to her more than ever, yup. But there’s something else. Something I can’t quite name.
Awe. Knocked-on-my-ass kind of awe.
My brothers have sent plenty of fuckers to the demon’s dinner table. Hell, we eliminated half of the South of Satan MC a few months ago. Before that, we offed a few of their associates and a college kid who went after Murphy’s ol’ lady. With the help of our Virginia brothers, Rooster and I rescued Shelby when she’d been kidnapped by one of her crazy stalkers. Rooster let me go at the guy’s fingers with the garden shears, but we had to turn him over to the cops, so I couldn’t kill him like I wanted. None of that violence was done on a whim. We were reacting to the situations we found ourselves in.
Margot, though. She chooses her “projects” carefully. Her targets don’t even know they’re on her radar. They never see it coming. My own tiny, curvy blonde angel of vengeance.
She stirs, her fingers curling into the pillowcase.
I should stop staring at her like a goofy fanboy and let her rest.
The door creaks and cool air drifts over my shoulder. I turn my head toward the widening bedroom door. Gretel pokes her nose inside, then pushes it open wider and stalks across the room. Ah, here comes the black, fuzzy alarm clock.
This morning, she’s quiet, though. No warble to announce her arrival. She gracefully leaps onto the bed, landing light as a feather.
“Oh, so you can jump lightly,” I whisper, extending my arm and rubbing my fingers together to entice her closer.
She purrs and bops her forehead against me, her silky fur sliding over my skin. Then, like the disrespectful little beast she is, Gretel climbs onto my hip and walks her pokey paws over my ribs. I scoop her up before her sharp claws have a chance to pierce my bare skin not covered by the blanket and settle her on the bed in the space between Margot and me. She flops on her side, facing me and purrs louder, kneading her paws against my chest.
Margot’s nose twitches. She reaches for Gretel without opening her eyes. “Furball,” she murmurs, rubbing behind Gretel’s ears. The cat’s purring revs up another few decibels.
“You’re still here.” Margot brushes her knuckles against my chest, then opens her eyes.
“Told you I wasn’t going anywhere.” I wrap my fingers around her wrist, tugging her closer. “You sleep okay?”
“I really did. I had the softest, fuzziest, most pleasant dreams.”
Maybe unburdening herself was a good thing. “You’ve really never told anyone…what you told me last night? Your dad doesn’t know?”
She closes her eyes as if she hadn’t planned on waking up to this conversation. “God, no. I don’t ever want him to know that about me. I think it would break him. He’s very ‘normal moral.’”
“Normal moral? What’s that mean?”
“I mean, I don’t consider what I’ve done immoral.”
“Agree. But my morality lives in the gray area anyway.”
She chuckles lightly. “They were a clear and imminent threat to innocent lives.” The smile slips off her face. “I have access to so many creepy, sad, and uncomfortable secrets no one thinks about. And when we take someone into our care who’s been violated or abused…I don’t know. I can’t help myself. I want to know everything and then that knowledge makes me feel like I have a duty to protect others.” She winces and shifts her gaze to the cat. “Wow, that sounds like I have some crazy God complex, doesn’t it?”
“No,” I whisper, completely caught up in every word.
“I don’t like killing people,” she continues in a harsher tone. “It’s not a crazy itch I need to scratch. My targets come to me. In a manner of speaking.”
“I understand what you’re saying.” If anything, I want to be the Joker to her Harley—without the crazy, just the devotion.
Her phone buzzes.
“Ugh.” She rolls over and grabs her phone, swiping her thumb over the screen and quickly scanning the text. “Yes, Dad, I know,” she mutters, quickly typing out a reply. “Rose-colored light bulbs. I know. He acts like I didn’t spend a semester studying color theory and stage lighting or something.” She sighs and returns the phone to the nightstand.
“What?” I ask, curious. “Color theory?”
Pink spreads over her cheeks. “Well, yeah. Sometimes, it’s grisly business creating that peaceful facial expression families see at the end.” She bites her lip as if she’s afraid to gross me out with her mortician secrets. “But in some circumstances, even after embalming, the skin remains a bit grayish. So, we’ll set them under rose-colored light bulbs during the visitation. He’s just reminding me to add them to an order I need to place today.”
Now I can’t stop thinking about gray skin and pink light bulbs. I don’t want to hurt Margot’s feelings, so I force a tight smile. “Learn something new every day.”
She winces. “You kinda wish you didn’t know that now, don’t you?”
She reads me too easily. “It’s my fault for asking.”
Gretel’s clearly had enough of our lazy morning conversation. She flips and twists her body until she’s on her feet, then uses my legs as a launching pad.
“So violent,” I laugh, turning to watch her streak through the open door.
“Sorry,” Margot says.
“It’s fine. She jumped onto the bed so daintily earlier, I got worried.” Uncomfortable sensations prickle against my neck. I hate letting Margot think I don’t want to learn about her job. “Hey, I like all your little mortuary secrets. I think it’s…nice that you do so much to make sure the last moments people get with their loved ones are as pleasant as they can be.”
Relief or gratitude spreads over her expression. “Thanks.”
“What does today’s schedule look like?”
“A service for a nice man from the neighborhood. His kids have been sweet. They’re just…heartbroken.”
“No one fighting over his stuff yet?”
“No, thankfully. He was a friend of my dad’s, sort of—like grab morning coffee at Stewart’s and have a chat kind of friends…”
Somehow, I don’t picture Mr. Cedarwood running down to Stewart’s in his suit and tie to have coffee with the locals, but maybe I’ve been judging him too harshly.
“…So, he did the restorative work.”
“Wait, what? You…he…you work on people you know?”
“Well, yeah ,” she says with a large dose of duh in her voice. “I don’t think Mr. Lewis would’ve been comfortable having a woman he’s known since she was a toddler working on him.”
“Huh.” I frown, giving it some thought. “It’s nice someone still cares about what they think after they’re…gone.”
“It’s important.”
“Still thinking I really want to be tossed in a bonfire, though.” I grin at her, but she doesn’t laugh.
Her face scrunches as if she’s in pain. “Don’t joke about that. The world would be so much…duller without you in it.”
“Trust me. I’m not going anywhere.”
I lean in and kiss her cheek. She’s got a long day ahead, and so do I if I plan on sticking close. But my gut’s telling me to stick around.
To keep her safe.
From the world. And from herself.
Maybe it’s paranoia. Or maybe it’s knowing how the world works. Maybe I’ve seen people I care about get burned by their pasts too many times. Secrets have a way of crawling into the light. But if someone starts sniffing around Margot’s?
They’ll have to get through me first.