Baby Widow (Prim & Poison #1)

Chloe

Inever really gave much thought to how I’d die. Not beyond the fleeting thoughts that I’m sure everybody has.

Best case scenario? Old age. Worst case? Car accident.

I’m sure the men my mother married never thought they’d die under her roof.

Well, technically, the first two died in the yard.

Husband Number One fell off a ladder and split his head open. Bled out with an audience and everything. The colorful glow of the Christmas lights he’d been hanging twinkled in the reflection of the puddle of blood that formed around his skull.

A horrible accident, she called it. Nineteen-year-old me wasn’t terribly sad about him. May his soul never know peace, the perv.

We were all surprised when Husband Number Two drowned in the saltwater pool my mom had installed the summer before his death.

He was a strong swimmer, and the pool wasn’t even that deep—six feet at its deepest. He had a good six inches on the water that took his life, not to mention a few pool noodles he could have grabbed on to for support.

I was twenty-three then, and they’d been married for three years.

I wondered how my mother even managed to find a guy so quickly after the death of her first husband, let alone marry one. And another bastard? Jeez. What luck.

When Husband Number Three died of an accidental overdose of his heart meds six years later, our little town started getting a lot more suspicious. As did the police department. Or rather, one detective in particular who wouldn’t stop connecting the coincidences dotting my mother’s history.

Fucker.

My father is the luckiest of them all. He never married her, and he split before I was even born. At least that’s what my mother tells me.

Maybe that’s where it all started for her. The desire to chase love, even in its filthiest forms.

All three husbands had wandering eyes. Fast and heavy hands. Crude words, and even cruder fantasies they inflicted on both of us.

Still, having witnessed all these very creative ways for people to die, I never pictured what my own end would look like.

Certainly didn’t picture it looking like this—face down in a mud pit with poison oak tickling my neck and a colony of ants making a nest in my pants.

God, I fucking hate ants.

I’ve been on the ground for barely a second, and I can already feel them crawling inside my coveralls, all the way up to my knees.

I shove my palms into the sludge, lifting myself off the ground and wiping my hands on the butt of my pants before trying to clear my eyes.

Beads of mud flick to the ground as I shake my hands out, and I spit a brown pool of saliva onto the forest floor before turning to face the man tied to the tree whose legs I clearly failed to secure.

His legs are longer than I accounted for, and he didn’t hesitate to kick one straight into my back the moment I turned away from him, launching me face first into the heaping pile of muck.

I swear I thought I was going to drown for a second. How embarrassing would that have been?

“Now that you’ve got that out of your system,” I drone, continuing to haphazardly wipe my eyes and mouth with equally filthy hands.

“You fucking bitch!” he shouts. “I’ll fucking kill you!”

I don’t blame him for the threat, or the foot to my spine. I’d do the same if I was in his position: roped to a tree God knows where, under the shade of a dark forest ceiling. Not to mention the puncture in his gut that’s slowly oozing the life from him.

I pull the switchblade from my pocket, flipping it open. I really want to wipe each side of the blade across my thigh, because it freaks them the fuck out, but the entire front of me is now caked in mud. Asshole.

His pupils dilate when the moonlight peeking through the leaves of the overhanging trees glints off the blade, and all color drains from his face. That’ll have to do.

“That would be a really good plan, but it won’t be necessary.” I walk behind the tree he’s secured to, careful to keep a wide berth so he can’t swing another leg at me. Lesson learned.

“What…what are you talking about?” He’s nervous now that he can’t see what I’m doing, trying unbelievably hard to hold on to his rage and temper his fear at the same time.

He’s straining against the ropes, but I can barely tell on the other side of this giant redwood.

It’s remarkably sturdy. Very dependable for situations like this.

“I’m going to cut this rope, and you’re going to want to run. Okay, Gary?” I wait for a response from him before I begin slicing my blade across the fraying rope.

“What the fuck? Why? And who the hell is Gary?” Oh shit. Forgot his name already. Whatever.

I continue sawing my switchblade against the rope. Usually I’d just untie the knot, but Stone tried to teach us all a new fishing knot over the weekend, and I was an idiot to try it on Not Gary. Now I can’t get the damn thing loose.

“Wait!” Not Gary shouts when he feels the binds rip against his body as I pull them taut. “I’m not Gary, you have the wrong guy!”

I don’t bother telling him that while I may have the wrong name, I most definitely do not have the wrong guy.

I take verification of these types of crimes very seriously, and I would never accidentally kill someone who didn’t truly deserve it.

Just didn’t find it prudent to remember his name, is all.

“Okay, Gar—I mean…Not Gary.” I stop sawing at the rope right before it fractures completely and drop my hands to my sides.

“So, about running. Right before you woke up, I was playing the sound of a dying rabbit.” In hindsight, it’s probably what woke him.

I shouldn’t have played it as loud as I did, but I’ve only done this setup one other time, and I’m kind of on a tight timeline tonight because I’m supposed to meet the girls for drinks in—I pause to wipe the mud off the face of my watch—one hour.

“You are out of your mind, you know that?”

I ignore him because we’re running out of time, and he turns his head to the side to try and get a glimpse of me as I continue talking.

“The sound of that dying rabbit drew in a predator looking for dinner.” I lift my knife up the side of the tree, pointing it in the direction of the cougar prowling slowly in our direction, her golden eyes glowing in the dark, nose twitching to pick up the scent of his blood.

“Oh, fuck,” he rasps quietly at the same time I slash the final fraying branch of rope.

“Run,” I whisper around the tree. And like the dumbass he is, he does, shaking free of the rope and stumbling off in the other direction.

I stay hidden behind the tree and watch the cougar, who I’ve named Venus, take off in chase immediately.

I hustle off in the opposite direction toward my car.

She’ll be too focused on him to worry about me, and I sense this unspoken agreement between us, between me and the universe, actually: I take the bad out of the world, doing my good deed by giving back to the earth, and they accept me as their own.

I pull out my phone and dial Maeve as I emerge from the tree cover and make it back to my car tucked off the dirt road.

I reach up to pick a bundle of pine needles off the windshield, flicking it to the ground as the phone rings.

Not Gary’s wails and screams sound in the distance as I circle the front of the car.

“I’m done,” I tell her when she picks up. “And I’m going to be late.” I lean against the hood, wincing when the tender spot at the base of my spine touches the vehicle. “Fuck, and my back hurts.”

I can practically hear Maeve rolling her eyes through the phone.

“I’ll send Stone out. And of course you’re going to be la—holy shit, is that Garrett screaming in the background?

” Garrett. Was that it? I roll the name around in my brain.

Nah, I don’t think so. I glance back toward the woods I just emerged from as Gary-Garrett’s screams taper off into silence.

I hum an affirmation. “There’s rope, and tire tracks, and…oh my God—” My gaze catches on a mat of grey fur settled in a pile of pine needles off the path of my car.

“What is it? And why does your back hurt?”

I bring a hand to my back subconsciously as I walk toward the little, motionless body. “He kicked me in the back. And it’s a possum.”

“A possum,” Maeve parrots.

“A gift from the universe,” I muse, crouching to inspect the little—dead—fur ball.

“You are so goddamn woo-woo. Would you hurry up? I need a fucking drink.” She pauses before adding, “And turn your location back on.”

I tell Maeve I’ll meet them at Mickey’s before slipping my phone into the back pocket of my coveralls, making a mental note to turn my location back on when I’m far enough away from what is now a crime scene.

I lift the possum out of the pile of needles that likely would have been her final resting place.

I guess it’s not such a bad place to die.

I personally wouldn’t want to die in a pile of pokey ass pine needles—or a mud pit, as I’ve also learned.

I tap the pads of my fingers to the drying mud painted across my cheeks that’s clumping the loose hairs together around my face. Maeve is going to kill me, because it’s going to take a lot more than a quick rinse to get this shit off.

Carrying the possum to the back of my car, I pop the truck bed down and lay her inside gently, promising that she will not be forgotten in this dark forest. She will live on forever.

In my lair.

I don’t actually call it that—but Maeve and Stella do, and I’ll admit sometimes it has a nice ring to it.

On the drive back to town, I pull my mother’s Suburban into the dirt lot of the abandoned warehouse off the highway, leaving the keys inside for Stone to pick up and scrub to ensure no evidence is left behind.

After retrieving the possum from the back, I get behind the wheel of my Bug, pulling back onto the highway.