Chapter 11 #2
The bottle of whisky was in my hand before I could think, hurtling across the garden, disappearing into the hedge.
Every memory I kept locked deep inside flooded out.
Frannie’s sweet smile. Her mean way of talking when she was mad.
The way she looked when I finally found her, when it was far, far too late to save her from any ounce of pain she’d endured on my behalf.
“One who won’t get you hacked to pieces. ”
My voice was strangled, my eyes clouded with unshed tears. If I cried for Frannie, even once, I’d never stop. Rhiannon’s voice broke over a gasp. “This is about Francesca Lyon, isn’t it?”
I spit out the only words I could think of to protect myself. “Don’t say it was hundreds of years ago.”
She was standing in flash, moving in that silent, invisible way of hers, her arms around my waist. “Eryx,” she whispered. “I would never say that.”
My teeth gritted, but some tight thing around my heart came a little loose. I swallowed. “She was just fifty-three. Barely grown.”
Rhiannon hummed, a deep, soft sound that vibrated through her and into me as her belly pressed into mine. “I don’t know what happened, but I can see how deeply you cared for her. I can take it, whatever it is. Please trust me with your pain.”
She wiped the tears from my face, her fingers soft as silk on my skin. Trust me with your pain. I’d never thought it took trust to let someone else hold what hurt before. It had never occurred to me. Maybe that was why I couldn’t let anyone love me. I didn’t know shit about this kind of trust.
But maybe for her, with her, I could try.
Slowly, I nodded. “They gave her every cut I made on their guy, and more …” I choked out, unable to say more about the details. Rhiannon’s fingers glided over my face, comforting and cool. “She died like that because of what I did, Rhiannon.”
She let out a little noise, somewhere between a sob and a sigh, as though it hurt her to hear me in pain. Her voice shook a little with the rage that burned in her eyes. “She died like that because of the people who killed her, Eryx. Not because of you.”
“If I hadn’t tortured Vance Hoight, they wouldn’t have—”
“What did Hoight do?” she cut in, her voice sharp as a knife. “You didn’t torture him for fun.”
I swallowed hard. This was too much. I didn’t talk about this for a reason. Hoight was sick, one of the sickest shitbags I’d ever killed. “Raped and murdered six necromancers. He wouldn’t give up the location of the last body.”
Her long fingers closed around my chin. “Look at me, Eryx.” It was too hard. I couldn’t. Not when the memory of Frannie’s cut up body flooded my mind. “I said, look at me.”
The way she ordered me was so deeply urgent, it made me think she needed me to look for her, not for me. So I did. Her expression was all fierce grace and vengeful deity. Rhiannon Bronte was a fucking goddess.
“Did you get the location of the last body?” she asked.
I would have done anything to get that girl’s body home to her parents.
Her dad was a trash collector and her mom ran a daycare out of their house.
The girl Hoight had taken was the first in her family to go to college.
Her loss had shattered them. They were necromancers, and without a body, they believed her soul would never be at peace.
Even telling them that Ares had sent her soul on hadn’t been enough. They needed the body.
So I got it for them, and I wasn’t a bit sorry for it. But Hoight was one of O-Tex’s finance whizzes. He cleaned up shit that nobody else could. And the Corps had sent mercs after Frannie to teach me, and Ares, who’d made the call, a lesson.
“Yes,” I finally answered. “I got the body, and Frannie got what I deserved.”
“Did you kill the men who did it to her?” Rhiannon asked.
“I killed the ones who tortured her. But I could never get the ones who killed her. Hoight worked for O-Tex.”
Rhiannon bit her bottom lip, blinking back tears.
“Corps scum. We’re all at their fucking mercy.
” She took a few ragged breaths and then said, “First of all, I don’t take the same view you do on who’s to blame for Frannie’s death.
” I opened my mouth to argue, but she shook her head.
“Second of all, I understand why you think what you do about yourself, Eryx Necroline, but I don’t share that view either. ”
When I didn’t try to cut in, she smiled the grimmest smile I’d ever seen. “But I respect your feelings about what you’re capable of. You’re allowed to feel what you do.” She shook her head, staring at Oleander Cottage. “Gods know I understand it.”
And then she hugged me tight, laying her head against my chest. Like I was someone worth hugging. Like I deserved to feel her soft body pressing into mine, to smell that sweet, sensual, floral skin-scent of hers up close.
“Hug me back,” she ordered. A sob rose up in my throat. “Hug me back as tight as you can and cry.” I started to say something, but the woman was on a mission. “Cry for Francesca,” Rhiannon whispered. “Cry for what you lost, Eryx. Cry for what those bastards took from you.”
And because it was Rhiannon Bronte, and she could boss me around any day of the week, I clung to her like my life depended on it.
I cried hundreds of years’ worth of grief and guilt into her hair.
Slowly, she pulled me down to the cool stone of the patio, keeping me pressed tight against her, rocking me and whispering, “Let it all out, love. Scream for Frannie.”
And Saints damn me for it, but I did.