Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
KIT
PRESENT DAY
R afe and Grant are whispering in the other room. Well, not whispering but they’re definitely talking in hushed voices so that I don’t know what they’re saying. I chew on my fingernails and lay on my side, watching the door to the bedroom. It’s ajar, just an inch or so. The light from the kitchen spills into the bedroom and the golden glow cuts into the pale morning light that’s slowly filtering into the room.
It’s been maybe twenty minutes since I got out of the bath clean. Grant dressed me and carried me into the bedroom. My hair is wet and sticks to my neck and the pillow I’m laying on. I should have gotten a towel to dry my hair but I wasn’t thinking about it. I’m wearing Grant’s shirt and a pair of his boxers. I reach down and pull up the waistband of his boxers from where they’ve slipped down my thighs. The second Grant put me in bed, he turned out the light and told me to get some rest. He’s been in the other room with Rafe ever since. I watch the kitchen light and strain my ears to listen to what my men are saying.
I’ve only been able to pick out a word here and there.
“Murder” and “Who?” Have definitely been words that I’ve picked out, along with my name and the police. Overall, not a great sampling of words to hear but what can you do about it? My mind has been running rampant, the dark in front of me and the slowly vanishing shadows have swirled and moved until I think my eyes are playing tricks on me and I’m not sure what’s a shadow and what’s memory.
I roll onto my side and look at the window that I thought I climbed out of. It doesn’t open, not the way it did in my dream. It’s a floor to ceiling window, more wall than anything else, it doesn’t open at all. I tug the blankets around myself and bury my face in my damp pillow. When I close my eyes I see the woman with a shadow for a face and my body goes cold. I used to sleepwalk when I was a child but it stopped when my mother sent me to therapy. The only real memories I have from sleepwalking are waking up with dirt on my feet or the couple of times I woke up in the backyard.
Nothing ever came of those times. Not like tonight when the world seemed to shift on its side and I woke up falling on my face on the bloody ground and screaming. I take in a steadying breath and let it out before I do it again and I listen.
The gentle murmur of Rafe and Grant talking dies down and I hear a knock at the door. My eyes snap open and I sit up in bed. Who is here?
I hear someone enter the cabin but then it goes quiet for a beat before the deep sound of an unfamiliar voice starts talking. I can’t read the tone but it’s loud, someone speaking matter-of-factly and not accustomed to keeping their voices down. They stop and I hear Rafe, his voice is sharp and hard. Silence comes and then Grant speaks quietly before the door opens and closes again. The person is gone from the sound of their feet on the porch.
I’m still sitting in bed when Rafe comes to the door and opens it. “Who was that?” I whisper.
“The police.”
“Oh my god.”
“Fuck the police.”
“Rafe!”
He grins and his eyes are playful. It’s enough to break me out of my spiral and I smile back at him because smiles from Rafe are like gold. Rare and beautiful, a sight to be treasured when the man gives them out.
“What did they want?”
“Same old shit, just some questioning, that’s it. Told them to come back later.”
Grant joins Rafe in the doorway and there’s a cup of coffee in his hands. “Did you sleep at all?” he asks with a frown and I shake my head.
“I couldn’t. I-I everytime I closed my eyes I kept seeing her.”
“Who?” Grant asks. He blows on the coffee and brings it to me, carefully turning the mug so that I can take the handle from him.
“The woman from my dream.” I take a sip of my coffee and it’s perfect. Two sugars and a splash of cream with cinnamon powder. Exactly how I love my coffee. “She didn’t have a face.”
Rafe and Grant share a look that makes me scowl at them. “I mean it. She had a shadow where her face was supposed to be,” I go on because I don’t like the look they just shared— the look that said their girlfriend is definitely going off the deep end. “It’s a dream, okay? It’s not like they make any sense.”
“Dreams are dreams but yours took you into the woods.” Rafe’s voice is gentle and I shrink into myself, my fingers tightening on the coffee mug. He’s right.
“How did you get out there, sweetheart?”
I look at Grant and see the worry in his eyes. “I don’t know. I used to sleepwalk when I was kid. I think…I think that’s what happened. I don’t remember going out there, just that when I grabbed her and I saw her face it was awful. There was nothing there, it was just empty.”
The darkness that was there seemed alive, like it was reaching for me, spreading out and over her body but I don’t say that. I keep it simple.
“There was no face,” I say quietly and look down into my coffee. “I don’t know why I dreamed it or why I sleepwalked out there.”
“Stress,” Rafe answers and we all look at him. “Stress can be a trigger for people that have bouts of sleepwalking. It’s been a lot with the move out here and the why. I think that’s all it is and you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, shy girl.”
Shy girl.
He still calls me that and it still makes me melt.
“What happened to Jane?”
“No one knows,” he says. “That makeup artist you're friendly with shares a room with her, they’ve got them bunked up two to a room. She said she went back there after having a drink at the bar and Jane was gone but the place was painted in blood.”
“Oh god. Poor Jane. They have to find her.”
“She’s dead, baby.”
“How can-I just saw her. That doesn’t make any sense. Who would want to hurt Jane?”
I look from man to man and in that moment I’m once again struck with how different yet alike they are. Dark to light, brooding to amiable, but that’s only on the surface. My men are both predators, killers that move the same way and think the same way. Even if I scared Jasmine and lost control for a moment, I don’t see the world like they do.
They’re killers.
The thought that maybe they had something to do with this flits across my mind and I try to bat it away. It couldn’t have been them. They were with me the entire night. Even if they hadn’t been, Jane isn’t their usual target, right? I see the cold look on Grant’s face that had me confessing to what I had done to Jasmine and there had been a moment tonight when Rafe’s eyes had been different. Hungry in a way that wasn’t all desire.
I knew falling in love with monsters was going to be ugly, hadn’t I? It was easy to ignore when the monsters loved me so well. I clear my throat and meet their eyes. Both Grant and Rafe are watching me closely so it isn’t hard to do.
“ You didn’t , I mean, neither of you did it, right? Not to Jane.”
Grant’s face is made of stone. No reaction. He looks like he hasn’t heard my question, but I know better. The room is too small, too quiet, and they are watching me like they always do.
He heard me.
“Grant?” I whisper.
The sound of my voice forces a reaction and he shakes his head. “No, sweetheart. Women aren’t my thing. Not if I can help it.”
I look to Rafe next and he is looking at me carefully. He raises an eyebrow at me. “You going to ask me next?”
“I just did,” I point out and cross my arms.
“So you did.”
I have to bite my bottom lip. I know what Rafe is doing. He doesn’t like being questioned, doesn’t like it if I even so much as doubt him and that’s what he is taking this as. “Rafe, please, just tell me you didn’t.”
For a moment he doesn’t say anything. Grant moves in the silence to look at Rafe and come to stand beside me. It’s unnerving looking into Rafe’s eyes right now. He’s like a snake, lethal, silent and detached, waiting for his moment to strike.
“Answer her,” Grant orders.
Rafe sneers at him. “I didn’t fucking do it.” His dark eyes move to me and they soften. “You know I didn’t. Why are you asking me if I did?”
“Because if you didn’t do it then there’s…there’s only one real answer to it.”
“Yeah, we know,” Grant sighs and my heart squeezes in my chest.
“You do?” I ask and look up at him. How can he know what I don’t want to face? What I’m not ready to face on my own?
“Of course we do,” Grant replies and nods at Rafe. “We already discussed it. We’ll figure it out.”
“But how do you know already? How do you know what I did?”
If they know about this then there’s no hope of the past staying in the past. Even if it did, Grant and Rafe would drag it out eventually.
“What you did?” Rafe holds out a hand and raises a finger. “What do you mean what you did?”
“Well, I mean…I-I was the one that did it.”
Grant rounds on me and crowds into my space. “Yeah, kinda having a hard time keeping up with that one, sweetheart.”
“I was out there. I was covered in blood. Who else did it?”
“You didn’t do it, Kit,” Rafe snaps and Grant nods along in agreement.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense!” And it is. If I really looked at it, Holly’s accusation makes sense. There was so much blood, too much for it to be a coincidence. “Are you telling me that you believe that I just so happened to sleepwalk on the night a woman goes missing and you find me in a pool of her blood in the forest and you don’t think it’s me?”
“If you did it then how did you do it?” Grant asks and I deflate.
“You’re not a killer,” Rafe adds.
Those four words sink to the bottom of my stomach like stones. He’s wrong. They both are.
I am a killer.