Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
DONOVAN
The musty scent of decaying wood hits my nose as I walk through the dusty doors of the abandoned building Shiloh directed me to.
Dust motes fly through the air as I step into the dim light, hoping that whatever black mold might be growing in this place doesn’t end up making me sick.
The floorboards creak as I step deeper into the room, but they don’t buckle beneath me, which is a good sign.
Crashing through a rotting wooden floor and landing in some spider-filled basement isn’t how I want to die, that’s for sure.
I stop moving and scan the space, looking for Shiloh.
“Donovan,” he calls out, his voice weak and distant.
I turn and find him on the floor to my right, holding his head in his hands, his eyes wide and teeth gritted against the pain of raising his voice to shout at me. I hurry over to where he sits on the concrete, worry churning my guts as I kneel beside him.
“What happened? Why are you here?” I ask, reaching out to run my fingers over his jawbone.
He doesn’t respond, but I can feel him shaking beneath my touch. I do another scan of my surroundings, trying to recall if Shiloh ever mentioned something about a place like this at any time before but coming up blank.
And that’s when I see it.
The dead body on the concrete.
“What the fuck?” I blurt, rising to my feet as I take a single step toward it, my stomach pitching and rolling.
It’s a man. A large, broad man with his blood spilled on the concrete beneath him.
I force myself to tear my eyes away before I throw up all over the place, turning to Shiloh.
“Who is that? What the hell is going on here?”
“I killed him,” Shiloh whispers, quiet enough that I can hardly make out the words.
“You killed him?”
He nods, still cradling his head. “He threw me against the wall and tried to choke me, but I killed him. I don’t know why they always try to choke me.”
“Are you okay?”
“I will be.”
I look back to the man, my guts again threatening to upend onto the concrete floor.
Taking a deep breath, I step closer to find that his entire face has been turned to raw meat and Shiloh’s knife lays in the pool of blood that seeps from beneath him somewhere.
I can’t get a good read on who he once was, and I don’t dare look at the mangled face any longer.
The only dead body I’ve ever seen in my life was my mom, and she was pretty in her coffin.
I made sure of it, sending her into her grave in her favorite dress with her makeup done just right.
This?
This is right out of a horror movie.
“Who was he?” I ask, still trying to put the pieces together as I turn away from the mangled corpse on the floor.
Shiloh hesitates, refusing to meet my eyes, but he does deliver an answer I probably should have expected. “Harold Bronwell.”
Iggy’s dad.
Shiloh bolting from my apartment flits through my memory from earlier and I frown. “You knew where he’d go.”
“Iggy told me.”
“Jesus, Shiloh. Why didn’t you call the police from my place? Let them know you knew he’d be here so they could handle it?”
Shiloh shrugs and I take a step toward him as he gets up off the floor, wincing and wobbling a little bit on his feet. He breathes heavily, touching his ribcage, his head, his shoulders.
“Why did you come here alone?” I ask, questions tumbling through my mind and falling from my lips like a waterfall.
“I needed to come alone,” he says, still not meeting my eyes.
Something about this scene and that statement feels off, like everything has shifted left of center and I’m in the middle trying to make it all align.
My stomach churns as Shiloh finally raises his eyes to mine so I can see the desperation and pain inside them.
“Why alone?”
His eyes cast down slightly, then meet mine again filled with a silent plea to stop talking. To stop asking questions he doesn’t want to answer, but I can’t.
I can’t.
“Why didn’t you call the police, Loh?” I ask.
He’s silent for a moment that stretches too long before he finally answers. “He needed to die, Donovan.”
Alarm runs through me as I take a small step away from him, from the body, from the blood and everything else soaking into the floor of this dusty, abandoned place. “Did you… mean to do this?”
Silence meets me again, and as Shiloh looks away from me, I have my answer.
“I can’t move him on my own,” Shiloh whispers, his voice smaller than he is in this moment. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Move him where, Shiloh? We need to call the police. You… you need to… oh my God, Shiloh, you could go to jail for this.”
“No police,” he whispers. “Please, Donovan. People like him deserve to die. Iggy—”
“Will be fine,” I blurt out, cutting him off. “Iggy will be fine, Shiloh. He’ll wake up and they’ll find him a place to live that isn’t with his father, because even if you hadn’t done… all of this, he’d be heading to jail.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t understand what it’s like.
He needed to be dead, Donovan. Dead where he can’t hurt anyone else…
and I need you to help me move his body now that he is.
” He hesitates a moment, then finally looks up to meet my eyes with his own beautifully sad gray ones.
“Or at least give me a head start before you call the cops on me.”
My head reels as I glance between him and the bloodied corpse on the ground, my stomach churning and too many thoughts flying through my head. I can’t help him hide a dead body, but the thought of turning him in makes my entire body clench.
I can’t do this.
I can’t do any of what he’s asked of me.
I have a career to think about, a promise made to my mother on her deathbed.
Even being here in this moment is too much.
If I’m caught or end up with any evidence on me, everything I’ve worked so hard for will be gone in an instant.
Oh, fuck, what if I leave something behind here that can be traced back to me?
I could already be fucked.
I can’t explain why I’m here aside from the fact that I came to help a friend, but if that so-called friend refuses to claim self-defense, I have nothing.
I can’t even come up with a good enough lie to make it make sense that Shiloh is here in this dark, hidden corner of the city.
The truth will come out eventually, I’m sure.
If I’ve left evidence behind, though, Shiloh definitely has as well.
He’s covered in blood, the red staining the green Snakes hoodie he wears.
I don’t know how much of it is his and how much belongs to Iggy’s dad.
Oh my God, Iggy’s dead dad could be soaked into the green hoodie I was so proud to have him wear, and that can be traced right back to me.
I’m well and truly fucked here, and I know it.
Reluctantly, I slowly nod at him, understanding what I have to do even though I want no part of this.
“Do you have a plan?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Shiloh says, exhaling the word like he’s relieved that I’m going to help him. “I do.”
“Fine. Let’s get this over with.”
Dead bodies are heavy.
Dead bodies are heavier when the clothing they wear is filled with rocks and stones.
I push Iggy’s dad into the water whole, not in pieces as Shiloh asked of me. There was no way I was about to start carving the man up like a Christmas turkey, but now that he’s sinking to the bottom of the ocean, I wonder if I should have.
We spent the last hour cleaning up the inside of the building, bleaching out the blood stains on the concrete as best we could with some cleaning supplies Shiloh found in a cupboard, and wrapping the body up in a discarded piece of cloth that could have been a car cover at one time.
My hands ache from wrapping the fabric tightly around the corpse, making sure that no matter what happens, it won’t float away prematurely and disclose the burial at sea I just performed.
Shiloh said it wasn’t the best job of cleaning up a scene, but promised it would be good enough, drawing even more questions to the forefront of my mind.
Now that the gruesome task of disposing of Iggy’s dad is over, I turn to him and find that his eyes are on mine, almost like he knows what he now owes me.
“The truth,” I whisper, my words catching in the cold and lingering between us in a wisp of chilled air.
“Okay,” he whispers back, offering a small nod.
“Is this the first time you killed someone?” I ask, the words trembling out of my mouth.
“No,” he whispers, wrapping his arms around himself like that will protect him from the questions I’ve earned answers to.
I bite back a demand to know exactly what missing people and discovered bodies he’s responsible for.
Not because I don’t care to know their stories, but because if this ends with police, the less details I have the better.
Still, I want to know something. Anything about how this happened. “How many?”
“Seven.”
I go numb because that isn’t what I expected. Seven people dead at his hands. One or maybe two really shitty people like Iggy’s dad, I could have made some sense of, but seven? “Shiloh…”
“I know.” The words are soft and fragile falling out of his mouth, and I take a small step away from him as I come to the last question that’s biting at my brain. The memory of the knife he had in his hand the night we met rattles me, and I have to know.
I have to ask, but I fear the answer.
“The night we met… Did you mean to hurt me? Kill me?”
“Donovan…”
“The truth,” I demand as my gut swoops and curls in on itself, because I already know.
“Yes,” he whispers, the word hardly audible over the rush of blood in my ears and the buzz of fear that creeps into my body.
“I can’t do this,” I say, taking a step away. “I’m done.”
“But I didn’t. You were beautiful and I couldn’t and now… I can’t. I don’t want to,” he murmurs, looking at me. Pleading with his eyes that I listen to him as he steps close to me.
I step away, crossing my arms as his face falls. “No. I’m done. I can’t do this, Shiloh. This? This is insane.”
“Donovan—” he whispers, my name choking out of his mouth.
“I’ll keep your secret. I won’t turn you in, but we have to be done, Shiloh.
” I pause for a moment, thinking things through as my heart starts the process of breaking into tiny pieces.
There’s no way this can be salvaged, though, so I have to just push through the pain like I do on the ice. “We’re done.”
Shiloh lets loose a small noise of despair as I turn away from him, walking as fast as I can from him so I’m not tempted to turn around and haul him against my body.
I choke back the tears that threaten to fall as I pull my Jeep keys out of my pocket and climb in, turning on the vehicle to head off into the darkened city.
I should go home and shower. I’m not sure what clings to my skin and my clothing, but I can’t make myself turn off these brightly lit downtown streets. Like a beacon has been lit, I’m called to be elsewhere right now, to try and put myself back together as best I can.
I have practice in the morning.
I have a game in a few days.
I need to be whole enough to do my damn job.
I park along a quiet side street, then step out of the Jeep, tucking the keys into my pocket.
The streetlights overhead shine bright, but they make me feel like I’m beneath a spotlight, and my skin prickles with discomfort.
As I’ve often done before on nights where everything goes wrong, I make my way down a darkened alley, then tuck my big frame through a hole in a fence.
“Stars,” I whisper, because I need to remind myself out loud that there are things in the universe bigger than me and my broken heart at this moment.
Tipping my head up to find them, I spot the big dipper clustered among its friends, twinkling and shimmering in the clear winter night. I take a deep breath, waiting for the peace to come.
Begging the peace to find me and settle the thoughts rattling through my brain.
The fact that Oakley was right.
The fact that Shiloh is a murderer.
The fact that I could have died here, in this very place at his hands on the night we met.
I won’t admit that a shitty, sad little piece of me wishes he had killed me then, rather than letting his lies of omission take root in my heart.
That would have been far kinder than letting me believe he was a simple artist with a tortured past, trying to live his best life here in Boston.
It would hurt less in this moment to not be here beneath the stars, reeling in the aftermath of this night and the truths about him I finally know.
The stars twinkle overhead, but they don’t seem quite as bright.
The sky seems less peaceful and the world feels like it’s been thrown off center here in this place where I almost died at the hands of the man I’ve quietly grown to love more than breath itself.