13. Micah
THIRTEEN
MICAH
“What about Thai food? Do you think Sage likes Thai food?”
I frown as I look down at Milo. He’s waist-deep in the hole we’ve been digging for hours, dirt smeared across his forehead, grinning up at me like we’re discussing weekend plans instead of in the middle of corpse disposal on a Sunday night. I’ve barely slept since Friday.
“What?”
“Sage.” He says her name like he’s tasting it. “Do you think she likes Thai food? Because there’s this place near her apartment that does these amazing drunken noodles, and I feel like she’d appreciate them. She seems like a spicy food person. You can tell by the way she stabs.”
“You can tell someone’s spice tolerance by their knife skills?” I ask. “What are you, the Rain Man of red flags?”
“Don’t knock it.” Milo jams his shovel into the dirt. He braces a palm against the dirt wall, ankles sunk into the soft loam. “That’s how my mom picked my first stepdad. The way he cut a mango. Said he had a surgeon’s touch and, I quote, ‘would make a thoughtful lover.’”
“They still together?”
“Nah. He cheated with a nurse. My mom made his life hell for a solid three years.” Milo smiles as he hoists himself out of the hole and sits across from me.
“What’d she do?”
“Stalked him. Cut the phone lines to his house. Put shrimp shells in the wall of his office. Like, full psycho ex energy.” He wipes his brow with the back of his arm, leaving a mud streak. “He had to quit his job and move to some trailer park in the middle of nowhere to escape her.”
“Jesus,” I say. “Did he go to the cops? Get a restraining order?”
He scoffs, like the question is an insult.
“He tried. But no one ever catches my mom. Dude lost his mind trying to prove she was behind it—his friends, his boss, all thought he was nuts. Last I heard, he’s in a psych facility somewhere in Nevada.
Claims he’s being haunted by the ghost of his own libido. ”
I snort.
Milo takes a long drink of water then jumps back into the hole. Ever since he and Holden collected me from Unholy Desires at the end of my shift, somewhere past two in the morning—Brock riding in back in a way that’s going to haunt me forever—we haven’t stopped.
First job was to switch him into the SUV, pack him in ice, and split up so we could dump his car and phone at the airport.
Holden helped with the print wipe down then took his own car home from there.
Milo drove us out to the desert. Three hours of empty highway while I slept and he didn’t, because the man runs on spite and caffeine instead of rest. We’ve been digging since midmorning, and he hasn’t stopped once.
I’m dead on my feet.
Graves take a hell of a lot longer to dig than TV shows and movies lead you to believe.
“How deep you think we need this?”
“Deeper.”
“Okay.” He grabs his shovel and starts digging again. “I’m going to ask her.”
I search my exhausted brain for clues as to what we’re talking about. “Oh. Your mom?”
“What? No. The murder kitten. Or kitten. I’m workshopping.” He starts digging again. “I want to get her take on noodles. She could be a rice girl, which is fine. I respect rice. I just want to wine and dine her, you know?”
“Murder kitten?” I stare at him. The desert stretches out in every direction—empty, silent, indifferent. And behind us, the SUV sits with its engine off, Brock’s body in the back wrapped in a tarp, water dripping slowly from the trunk onto the dusty sand. I bet there isn’t any ice left now.
“It’s a term of endearment.” Milo shrugs, like that’s a normal way to refer to a woman and not evidence of a head injury. “She’s fierce and cute like a kitten, but bloodthirsty.”
“I’m pretty sure what she experienced from Brock, and what she did after, comes under the banner of being fucking traumatized. I’m not sure you should be pushing your attentions on her.”
“Nah, shared trauma is a great relationship builder. All the best couples have it.”
“That’s . . . not even remotely true.”
“Name one happy couple that doesn’t have shared trauma.”
I open my mouth. Close it.
Milo grins triumphantly. “See? Shared trauma. It’s basically Cupid’s arrow, except instead of a little winged baby, it’s the screaming void of human existence. Very romantic.”
I slide back into the hole and get back to digging.
There’s no point in arguing with Milo when he gets like this.
He’ll just keep talking until you either agree with him or walk away, and walking away isn’t an option when we’re three feet into a six-foot deep hole and there’s a body that needs burying.
“She’s pretty, though, right?” he continues, because of course he does. “Like, objectively. I’m not being weird. I’m making an observation. Like, I know the blood and screaming kind of threw off the aesthetic, but if you squint—”
“She’s gorgeous,” I agree, and that stops him for half a second. He blinks, shovel stilled halfway up.
“Yeah?”
“Hard not to notice.”
Milo grins wider. “See, this is what I’m talking about.
We could double-date. Triple, because Holden is definitely interested—and I don’t mind sharing.
Oh! Eli called her ‘our girl,’ remember?
And Knox was extra broody while Eli was cleaning her up.
Maybe the six of us could do a murder mystery weekend. Add some spice.”
I laugh—can’t help it. It feels good to laugh. The sound echoes sharp in the desert air, then dies and leaves the world unchanged. “Let’s get through this first, Casanova.”
“Copy that.”
We get back to digging, letting the rhythm of it settle—lift, throw, lift, throw.
I work the shovel with the same mindless efficiency I use on a treadmill at the gym, my body on autopilot, until the blade hits sandstone and we’re chipping and hauling rock.
Sweat drips down my nose, and every muscle sings with the simple, honest ache of work.
I like it. I like the way sweat drowns out the rest, the way the horizon out here is clean and silent and you can forget how bad everything is.
I wonder what she’s doing.
I can’t stop thinking about Sage either.
Her body clamped in my arms, ribs shuddering as she tried to puke up everything anyone had ever done to her.
The knife in her hand, the scream that cut the air, the way she fought me like a cornered animal until she realized she didn’t have to fight me at all.
For a moment, I’d felt her heart against my chest, wild and frantic, then slowing as I whispered to her that it was over, she was safe, she didn’t have to fight anymore.
How long had it been since anyone told her that? That she could stop? A long fucking while, I bet.
I know what it’s like—when adrenaline is still eating you alive, when every memory is a blade at your throat and the only thing that keeps you alive is action.
That’s a look I’ve seen before, that moment when trauma and rage blend into something that tastes almost like freedom. She’d owned her violence in a way that made my skin crawl and my heart race.
There are people who want to die, and people who want to kill, and sometimes you can’t tell the difference till it’s too late.
The world’s full of men like Brock. It’s also full of women who have run out of options.
I get why she stabbed him.
I get why she didn’t stop.
I get it because I’ve been there.
I know what it’s like to be small, to be prey. To disappear inside myself so nothing could get me. To want to hurt something—someone—so bad that all the regular rules of physics and morality just slide off your skin, and you become the weapon.
It happened when I was nineteen. Skinny as a reed and still holding the belief that I could be openly into both guys and girls without it being used against me.
My mistake. He was an older guy—friend of a friend of a friend, college dropout, quarterback shoulders and a handsome face.
I suspect he’d never had to apologize for anything in his entire life.
He called me pretty, which I was, in a way I’d learned to despise.
Too pretty, he’d said, and then fucked the word into my mouth so hard I couldn’t breathe for a week after without tasting blood.
That was along with all the other things he did to me that I begged him not to.
He told me it was a favor. A lesson. He said I’d thank him someday.
And I did. After I slit his throat and watched him die.
He was my first kill.
“Do you think she’d let me braid her hair?” Milo says.
I don’t hear the question at first, or maybe I do but my brain misfiles it under “non sequitur.” I blink at Milo, sweat in my eyes.
“Huh?”
“Braiding,” he repeats. “Do you think murder kitten would let me play with her hair? She has the right type for it. Long. Soft. Slight curl at the ends.”
I stop digging. “What the fuck, Milo?”
Only Milo could turn grave-digging into a brainstorming session for his fantasy romance.
“I’m good at braids—I used to do my sister’s all the time. It’s soothing, meditative, even. I feel like Sage could use some meditation.”
“Milo.”
“What?”
“We’re burying a body.”
“I’m aware. I’m multitasking.” He gestures at the hole around him. “Digging and planning. Two birds, one shovel. Sometimes a pickaxe.”
I don’t blame him for fixating on her. She’s all I think about too—dark brown hair, wild in the moonlight, sticking to her cheeks with blood and tears. I remember holding a fistful of it to keep her head upright, to keep her from choking.
I wonder what it would feel like against my chest?
I shake off my illicit thoughts and climb out of the hole to get some water.
My shoulders are screaming, my hands are blistered, and the bandage on my forearm has gone gray with dirt and sweat, the cut underneath throbbing every time I close my fist around the shovel.
She got me good—the blade and then her teeth, like she couldn’t decide which would do more damage.
I haven’t changed the dressing since I patched it at the beach, but I can feel where her teeth went through my skin, and a part of me hopes it scars.
“Hey, Micah? What do you think of this?”