CHAPTER 49 ELODIE
ELODIE
“Elodie, have you lost your damn mind?” Caden’s voice is angry, shocked, and it’s hitting me from a great distance, the ringing in my ears fogging up everything else.
I’m just staring at this empty, corpse-less coffin.
I feel myself lean forward, brace my hands on the sides of the coffin, and peer deeper inside.
Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps I just need to take a closer look.
But when I dip my head inside and see nothing but an empty shell, my chest mirrors it.
I’m cavernous. Hollow. There is nothing inside me for anything to cling on to.
My brother isn’t here. And neither is my heart.
“Elodie!”
His yell finally snaps me back. I blink several times. Broken from a trance, I slowly turn around. The torch he’s shining stings my eyes and I squint, not able to see him.
“Look,” I whisper, but there’s no way he can hear me above the roaring rain.
“Get up here right now.”
“No!” I scream. “Look!” I throw an arm down, gesturing to the coffin beneath me. “He’s not here.”
“Just get up here. Now,” he speaks softer, but still impatient and angry.
Why should I go to him? He nearly shot me a couple hours ago. He hates me. I press my weight down onto the coffin. “No.”
I can practically hear him roll his eyes as the beam of the torch drops onto the ground and he finally comes into view behind it. “Elodie, so help me, I will come down there and drag you out.”
“He’s not here, Caden! The coffin’s empty!”
At this point, I need him to acknowledge it. Because my heart’s beating so fast and my head’s spinning so hard I’m beginning to wonder if I’m hallucinating.
With a long sigh, Caden comes down onto his knees and leans over the hole.
An eternity of silence follows. I hold my breath. “Do you see it?”
I can just about make out his eyes in the darkness. “Yes.”
“What do you see?”
“Nothing.”
“So, where is he?”
“I don’t know, Elodie!” Caden cries, irritation coating his voice. “They told me Max’s body was too messed up for anyone to see, maybe it was the same for Lewis. Maybe there was nothing left to bury.”
I throw my hands up to my ears to block the words out, to shove away the unbidden images that come with it. “No! They would have buried him still!”
“Just, please, come out of there and we’ll talk about it,” it’s the softest he’s spoken to me yet, a tone one might use to calm a wild, rabid animal.
I shake my head vigorously. “I’m not leaving him.”
“He’s not fucking in there to leave!” he yells at me. “Oh, fuck this.” Caden swings his feet over the edge and slides down.
He grabs me and I try to fight but come to find there’s zero strength left in me. My punches fall flat and my legs flop like fish beneath me as he hoists me up and practically chucks me up onto the ground.
I lie there on my back, staring up at the black sky, rain hitting my face like little taunting drops of devastation.
Where are you, Lewis?
Caden climbs out and sits on the mud next to me, feet dangling into the grave. The empty grave. “I’m taking you home.”
“I have no home.” I sound far away. My voice isn’t mine.
“Yes, you do. Look, Elodie…”
I spring up and cut him off. “Where’s your brother’s grave?”
He frowns. “Here. Why?”
I lunge forward, grabbing his arms. “We have to check.”
He looks horrified. “Absolutely fucking not. We need one sane mind between us.”
I yank his shirt, bringing him close to my face, desperation overruling everything else. “We have to! What if they’re not dead, Caden?! What if neither of them are in the coffins, what else could that mean?!”
Caden grabs onto my arms, prying me off him but I cling tight. “Elodie, listen to me. You’re running on no fucking sense at all. You’ve been through a lot, grief is a funny thing–”
“No.” I shove a finger in front of his face. “Don’t you dare patronise me. You know what this could mean. I may seem crazy, I may look fucking manic, but we have to know, don’t we? If they’re alive, wouldn’t you want to find Max? Don’t you want to know?”
“Not being buried is a far-cry from being alive. They’re dead, Elodie. Dead.”
“Stop saying that word!”
“But they are! If they’re not, why haven’t they come back?” His face cracks into something sorrowful. “Why wouldn’t Max come back to me?”
My thoughts spiral. “What if they couldn’t?”
“What?”
I can see it in his eyes as raindrops fall in front of them.
I can see just a modicum of curiosity, so I push.
“What if something happened to them, or they did something… that caused them to go into hiding, or they were taken? What if the whole thing never happened? What if they’re out there, either together or apart, and they need help?
” The possibilities race through my mind.
Them being alive and in trouble is the only answer I’ll accept.
The only reason Lewis wouldn’t have come back to me.
Caden studies me, battling some internal war. Finally, he hangs his head. “I can’t dig his grave up, Elodie.”
He’s scared. I get it, sure. I’m fucking terrified. But just the almost-impossible idea that they might not really be dead is driving my whole being right now. I grab his neck and pull him closer, forcing him to lock his eyes with mine. “We have to know.”
We stare at each other in the darkness, paralysed by possibility.
“This is ludicrous. Completely insane,” he says.
I ease the grip on his neck, bringing my fingertips up to cup his jaw. “Then it suits us perfectly, doesn’t it?”
After a few more silent seconds, with only the violent patter of torrential rain and aggressive wind filling the air, he sighs. “You got another shovel?”
***
It’s harder this time round. Whether that’s because I’ve spent all my strength or the adrenaline’s just not as prominent when it’s not my own brother.
Either way, it takes fucking forever to get down to Max’s coffin.
Caden does most of the work, anyway, clearly fuelled by the same need I was a little while ago.
This could change everything. Lewis alive? I could get my life back.
Finally, Caden’s shovel thumps against wood.
I step back, leaning against the mud wall and shine my torch for him, even though the sun is finally breaking the horizon, letting him do this as alone as possible.
He hesitates. For a while.
“We have to know, Caden,” I say softly.
His shoulders visibly drop in resignation. “We’re both fucking lunatics.” But he heaves the shovel up and back then drives it into the wood.
It gives straight away and the lid splinters. He drops to his knees and burrows his hands into the gap and pulls it apart.
Everything goes still. The only movement in the whole world is the frenzy of my heart racing in my chest.
Suddenly, of course, logic sneaks back into my brain.
What if Max is in there? What if I’ve just made Caden do the most unthinkable act ever and disturb his brother?
He’s going to fucking kill me. At least we’re already in a graveyard.
Maybe he’ll be nice and bury me with my brother.
Or where my brother’s supposed to be. Make use of the empty coffin, at least.
But the new fear dissipates when Caden turns and pins me with terrified, angry eyes. “It’s empty.”
Fuck. Fucking fuck.
I gather enough breath to say, “So, where the fuck are they?”
He turns back to the coffin and whispers, “And who the fuck did this?”
This means everything. This changes everything. Everything we thought we knew, what we thought we lost.
The number of questions and confusion and anger swelling up in me is insurmountable.
Caden pushes up and turns to me. “Come home, Elodie,” he whispers, “we can figure this out… together.”
Suddenly, I’m rushed back to our last encounter. How things were left between us. I ran away from him. Did he come to drag me back, kill me, punish me? If I go with him, won’t it just go back to the way it was? Does this change anything between us? Saving his life didn’t, so why would this?
The trepidation makes me shake my head. “That’s your home. I’m not going back there. You don’t want me. And now I have a way more important task than being a prisoner and beaten into something I’m not. I need to find my brother.”
“And I need to find mine!” He yells but pulls himself back in, raking long fingers through his sopping hair. “Please, I… I want you to come back with me.”
“Why? So you can have a punching bag again? So you can make my life even more hell for escaping you?”
Caden slumps back against the mud wall and lifts his head to the sky. The torchlight illuminates the column of his neck, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Elodie, I just…” He drops his head and shakes it. “It won’t be like that again.”
I scoff. “Don’t think I’m dumb enough to think this changes how you feel about me.
I’m not playing this game with you again, Caden, I can’t.
I won’t… I won’t survive it.” I hate how I’m admitting it to him.
I hate how I’m so overcome with emotion about this revelation about Lewis that it’s knocking all my walls down.
But I can’t anymore. I can’t fight him anymore.
Caden rushes over to me then and he grabs my arms, but it’s not aggressive.
“Elodie, I came to bring you back home. Because it’s our home.
I want…” Another rake through his hair, then places it on my arm again.
He sighs. “It’ll be different, I swear. We need to figure this out together.
We both have skills that’ll help us more if we put them together. This is all that matters now.”
His words are puncturing my will power. We can figure this out quicker together, but how will he treat me different?
How can I trust he won’t just snap back to the same old Caden as soon as we walk through the door?
My mind sifts through the last twenty-four-hours.
The ice tub, the vitriol in the car at the store.
The whole nearly-shooting-me-in-the-face fiasco. How can all that just go away?
“I don’t feel safe coming back.”
Caden clenches his jaw. “I will make that house the safest place for you.”
“It’s not the house that’s unsafe, Caden.”
He chews the inside of his lip. “I will not be unsafe either.”
The weird thing is, I’ve never felt safer around someone. It’s that paradox that makes my head spin in constant turmoil. He would protect me from everyone else, apart from himself.
Why do I feel so safe with a man who’s so dangerous?
I stare at him, unable to decide. The right thing to do is to say no, but the word won’t leave my lips.
“I need you to come back, Elodie,” he says, so quietly it’s like he’s afraid to say it. To bare so much of himself to me.
Most of me is screaming to resist, to refuse, to run.
But there’s a part of me that’s just so tired.
Exhausted from this game of push and pull between us.
I could stand here and decide that he only drove all this way to drag me back so he doesn’t have to admit he lost, doesn’t have to go to his dad and tell him I left.
But there’s something in those of eyes of his as he looks at me under the rising sun of another day.
Something just glimmering below the surface of the daunting green of his irises that tells me there might have just been a shift in his undying need to win.
Something that matches the way he’s holding me, like he might just need me to stay…
Like he might just need… me. A desperation in the way his hands travel up my arms to my shoulders, resting in the arc of my neck.
“Please,” he almost whispers.
I look into those eyes, deeper than I’ve ever dared. There’s sincerity there, and something that I’m hoping won’t have me later regretting it, but disarms me.
I drop my head, close my eyes and send a silent prayer to whoever might listen to a soul as unredeemable as mine. “Fuck. Fine.”
He sighs then moves his arms down to my thighs. My heart momentarily skips, thinking he’s about to do something terrible – because it’s Caden – but he just hoists me up and places me onto the edge of the grave. I scoot back as he jumps out himself.
I look at the hole, then the mounds of mud around it. “I guess we should cover them back up.”
Caden waves it off. “I’ll make a call. They’ll be covered before the grounds open.”
We both sit there, with our legs dangling in a grave that we just dug in the middle of the night, after he almost shot me in the face, after I ran away from him because he’s the worst person ever.
And now we’re sitting together with the same resolve…
about to form an alliance that will keep us under the same roof once again.
The roof I thought I’d never have to see again.
I start giggling as the gravity of the situation sets in. Or it really is psychosis.
“Fucking hell,” I say through laughs, shaking my head.
I push myself up on jelly legs and Caden does the same. If we’re both wearing black, you couldn’t tell.
“Let’s go and get cleaned up,” I say, “we look like we’ve just crawled out of a grave.”
For the first time since I’ve met this terrible person, I see a hint of a smile that’s not sinister or scheming quirk the corners of his lips.
We walk in silence until we get to the entrance. Caden helps me over the gate and then effortlessly climbs over after me.
Alfie’s car’s parked behind Caden’s, blocking me in.
I turn to him, but he cocks an eyebrow at me. “We’ll take my car back. You’re riding with me.”
I fold my arms. “And what about Alfie’s car?”
“I texted him. He’s already in an Uber to come get it.”
I purse my lips.
He jerks his head and starts moving again. “You’re not leaving, Elodie. Stop being dramatic.”
Okay, I’m not leaving, but I find it funny that he doesn’t trust me not to drive his car back. A part of me would still be tempted just to drive in the opposite direction, and it makes me smile that he knows me well enough to know that.
We get into Caden’s car after he moves Alfie’s out the way, mud and water splatting all over his spotless interior.
Once we’re on the road, the soft tones of “Way Back Home” by Ed Prosek filling the car, Caden says quietly, “You fed my dog.”
I press my lips into a thin line to hide my grin. “You nearly shot me in the face.”
He tilts his head to give me an incredulous look. “That doesn’t make us even.”
I scoff, because in his absurd brain, I know he means feeding his fucking dog is way worse.
I roll my eyes like I’m fed up with him, but for some strange reason, I don’t feel fed up with him at all.