Chapter 37 Abi
ABI
Two days later, I’m on a rented catamaran at sunrise. It jostles over the waves as we ride out on the Gulf, toward the horizon where the sun is just starting to come up. The sky is pink and grey and gauzy, like an old silk dress.
I sit at the bow, the wind blowing my hair back from my face, and think I should be traumatized by everything that’s happened.
But I’m on a boat in the soft light of dawn, and all I feel is calm and happy.
When Rowan led me out of that half-built beach house, his shirt draped over my shoulders to hide my nudity, I wasn’t sobbing the way I was when I left Blake Fletcher’s house that night ten years ago.
I was content. And I was safe.
Just like I’m content now.
“Charlotte says we’re almost to the spot.”
I twist around to find Rowan standing on the deck behind me, looking shy and handsome with his floppy dark curls and pretty dark eyes.
I don’t know how I managed to look into those eyes so many times in the funeral parlor and not connect them to the Rowan Hanover—the man I thought was too good for me. The man I thought didn’t deserve me.
All that time, he was watching me behind the mask of a monster.
“Do you need my help?” I ask.
“If you want.” Rowan slides into the plastic bench beside me and winds his hands through mine. “But me and Charlotte can take care of it.”
Charlotte. She had been waiting beside a rental car when Rowan led me out of the beach house. She smiled and held out her hand and said, “I’m Rowan’s half-sister. Let’s get you home.”
It’s been two days since then, and they’ve passed by in a blur.
They didn’t actually take me home, but to Rowan’s house, a tidy little bungalow set into the dunes.
There, he washed me off in his bathtub, his touch shocking gently compared to his earlier brutality.
Afterward, he pressed butterfly stitches from a First Aid kit into the knife wound and washed the other cuts with stinging witch hazel. Then he tucked me into his bed.
I slept.
When I woke up, he was still there, and he brushed my hair out of my eyes and said I didn’t need to worry about Kaplan, that Charlotte knew what she was doing, and it was all going to be taken care of.
And that’s what we’re doing now. Taking care of it.
Rowan squeezes my hand a little tighter and smiles at me, that shy, nervous smile I first saw when I went to the Palm Breeze Hotel. When I was investigating him, following the breadcrumbs he left to draw us together.
I’m still not sure what it says about me. But I’m not so confused that I didn’t get on this boat, or that I’m not going to sit beside him as the sea wind blows across my face, our hands intertwined.
“What are you thinking?” he asks suddenly.
I look over at him, the waves spraying us with a fine mist of seawater. “I was thinking about my investigation,” I say. “The letters.”
“Your dark whisperer,” he says.
“What?” I laugh a little, shifting toward him as the boat careens over the wave.
Rowan’s cheeks turn a soft red. “That’s what I was spelling out,” he says. “I was introducing myself.”
I stare at him, the dawn light softening his features. I like it, being able to look at him. To see his big, expressive eyes more clearly. The dimple in his left cheek. The crook in his smile.
“I thought it was about me,” I finally say. “Your darkness, maybe.” I fold my hand on top of his. “I thought you’d seen it. My darkness.”
He studies me. “You only have a little,” he finally says.
“Just enough.” I smile.
He looks like he’s about to say something else when Charlotte steps onto the deck, her red hair in a big knot on the top of her head.“Sorry to interrupt,” she says. “But we’re at the spot. I’m about to kill the engine.”
Rowan nods. “Be there in a sec.”
She flashes a grin at us and ducks into the pilothouse. Rowan sighs.
“You looked like you were going to say something,” I say softly, my heart fluttering.
“Let me take care of this first,” he says. “You don’t have to help.”
He means it. I can see it in his eyes. But the truth is, I want to. Kaplan never made my life easy, and then he tried to end it. He ended the lives of two women who helped me when I was a scared, terrified teenager.
He deserves it, to be chopped up and thrown overboard into a Gulf stream that will take him out into the Atlantic Ocean, hundreds of miles from here.
“I’ll help,” I say.
We stand up just as the boat’s engine cuts out, stilling us in the soft, rolling waves. The light is still gauzy from the sunrise, and it casts everything in a sort of pinkish wash that makes this much more beautiful, much more idyllic, than I suppose it technically is.
But then, I’ve never been one for the idyllic, have I?
Rowan and I walk around to the stern of the boat, where two big coolers sit waiting. I know what’s in them.
Charlotte’s already there, her hands in black gloves. She tosses a pair to Rowan, then raises her eyebrows at me.
I nod, and she tosses me my own pair.
When Rowan opens the first ice chest, it’s a tangle of limbs. I stare at it, trying to comprehend that this flesh was the source of all my terror for the last month. This meat destroyed Olivia Pearce and Heather Staunton. Others, too.
He’s nothing, now. Fish food.
Charlotte grabs an arm and tosses it overboard, and then Rowan does the same with a foot. I step forward, memories running jagged through my thoughts. The blood-stained mattress. The photographs on the wall. Kaplan’s hot, sour breath on my skin.
Rowan, stepping into the hallway, just as I knew I was about to die.
I pick up a chunk of Kaplan’s torso. Charlotte and Rowan cut him up while I was recovering, and the work is choppy and amateurish. My coroner’s brain is already filling out the report, even though I don’t need to. As far as Rosado is concerned, Kaplan disappeared.
I throw the meat overboard and listen to the satisfying thunk as it hits the water.
We work in silence, the three of us. It’s not hard. I’m used to dead bodies and blood. So are they.
When we finish, when the last of him is on his way south, Charlotte announces, “I’ll finish the rest of the cleanup. I know—” She looks at Rowan. “I know you need to, uh, talk.”
My anxiety flares suddenly, and I look between them. I’m still not sure what I think of Charlotte. She’s been kind to me, but there’s something dangerous about her, something that goes beyond the fact that she’s a killer, too.
“Talk about what?” I say, trying to break the silence.
“It’s nothing bad,” Rowan says. “Not as bad as that, anyway.” He tilts his head toward the ice chests. “I mean, you already know the worst thing about me.”
I look at him, vaguely aware that Charlotte has turned away, like she’s giving us privacy.
“Let’s go back to the viewing bench,” he says sheepishly. Then he peels off his gloves and drops them next to the ice chests. A beat later, I do the same, still quaking with uncertainty. Not fear, though. It’s crazy, but I’m not scared of him.
How could I be, after Rowan saved my life?
The wind blows across the deck, washing away any lingering scent of death. All I smell is the salt of the sea. Rowan guides me over to the bench and sits me down, and I can sense how nervous he is—shaking his leg, twisting his hands up together, letting his hair flop into his eyes.
“You’re kinda freaking me out.”
I mean it as a joke, but Rowan jerks his gaze up to me with something like alarm. “You don’t seem scared,” he says.
I blink in surprise. “I’m not scared. As confusing as all this is—” I gesture out at the boat, at the water, at Kaplan floating away. “I’m not scared. Not of you.”
Rowan studies me with those dark, serious eyes.
“I like this,” I say softly. “Seeing you. Without the mask.”
A startled smile flickers across his lips. “I—I like it, too. It’s—different. But I’m getting used to it. I’m getting used to a lot of things.”
I frown. Sea spray blows up between us, bright and sparkling, and for a second, I think I see a rainbow shimmering in the air.
“That’s what I wanted to—” Rowan moves closer to me and takes my hand and then looks down at it. So do I, our fingers braided together. Coroner and killer. And yet I don’t want to let him go.
“Charlotte told me some things about myself,” he says, and I look up at his face again. He tilts his head away from me, toward the ocean. The wind blusters, bringing more sea spray. “This is going to sound crazy.”
“Crazier than everything else about you?”
“Yes.” He’s serious, and his hand tightens around mine. “She says I’m something—not quite human.”
The confession hangs on the air between us. I feel a flash of panic that I’m out on this boat with him and Charlotte, miles from the shore. It flares and fades, like a guttering candle, but Rowan still jerks his gaze up to meet mine and says, “Don’t be afraid of me.”
“I’m no—” I cut myself off under the intensity of his eyes. There he is, my Nameless. “I’m not,” I finish weakly.
“You are a little.” Rowan’s gaze never leaves mine. “This is what I mean. I can sense things, Abi. I can tell when you’re afraid or when you’re happy. I can track scents, like a dog. That’s how I was able to find you.”
I stare at him, a kind of hollowness in my chest. Of course I had wondered about that when I was tucked away in Rowan’s bed, still trying to process what exactly had happened. But then, he was Nameless. And Nameless always knew how to appear when I needed him most.
But now, out here on the ocean, the waves lapping against the side of the catamaran with a soft, rhythmic slapping, I feel it—that sense that I’m looking at a predator. I felt it before, and I assumed it was because he’s a killer. Now, though…
Now, I’m not so sure.
“I know it sounds insane.” He moves closer so that our knees bump.
“And I honestly don’t know what it means, really.
Just that—I’ve always known, my whole life, there’s something different about me.
I thought it was because I—you know.” He gives me a sheepish grin, and I ought to feel that panic again, but I don’t.
Because I know, more than anything, that he’ll never you know me.
“And Charlotte’s gonna help me figure things out. There are others, like me.”
Rowan’s grip tightens. His eyes gleam.
“I just hope,” he says softly. “That you’ll be with me as I figure things out. I really like—” He hesitates, shakes his head. “No, I love you, Abi. I’ve loved you from the moment you first came to Rosado, and I haven’t stopped.”
My breath catches in my throat. I stare at him as the sea wind blows his hair across his eyes, as he watches me. A killer. And maybe something else—some inhuman monster that can move out of the shadows and track me down when I’m in danger.
And he loves me.
The thing is, I can feel it, too, that love.
I feel it pumping like blood through my body.
It’s almost indistinguishable from madness—the madness that makes my body heat at death and darkness.
The madness I’ve always tucked away, and only let loose when Nameless came into my home and drew it out of me with his touch.
Not Nameless. Rowan.
I pull my hand away from his to cup his face. His actual face. I want to feel the skin and muscle and bone there, not rubber.
He’s showing himself to me. And I’ve shown myself to him.
I lean forward and kiss him, as gently as the first time he kissed me. My heart pounds. I suspect I’m condemning myself to some kind of hell, but I don’t care. Not with Rowan at my side.
“I think I love you, too,” I whisper against his mouth. “No matter what you are.”
He smiles. I feel it more than I see it.
And then he’s kissing me in earnest, drawing me into his chest, and I know I will happily fall into whatever darkness he lays out for me.