60. Eli
SIXTY
ELI
He’s also a McMahon. I have no idea who Weber is.
We find Dean waiting at the service entrance when I pull the car around back.
Tall, muscular, mid-thirties, with the kind of calm that either comes from years of therapy or years of proximity to death.
In Dean’s case, it’s both. He and I met at a support group for the families of sexual assault victims. Our stories are quite similar, but his is far more tragic—when his sister tried to take her own life in the months after, no one found her in time.
“What have we got?” he asks, holding the door open as I back the vehicle up to the loading bay. His voice is steady. No judgment. No questions beyond the operational. That’s why I brought him in—Dean doesn’t need to know the why. He just needs the what and the when.
“One body,” I say. “Male. Mid-twenties.”
“Wrapped?”
“Plastic and blanket.”
He nods, then looks past me into the car. “You have company.”
“It was an all-hands-on-deck situation. This is Sage and Amy. Amy’s in shock. She’s the one who—”
“I see,” Dean says, pulling open the back passenger door and leaning down to their level. “Why don’t you ladies come inside where it’s a little more comfortable? This is going to take a while.”
Sage nods and thanks him, sliding out of the car and helping Amy to follow. The moment Amy gets on her feet, she wobbles and almost crumples to the concrete.
Dean bends down, catching her under the arms before she can hit the ground.
He braces her with the ease of someone who’s done it before, maybe with old women at open-casket viewings, maybe with the kind of drunks who tip over at funerals because their grief is still in liquid form.
He holds her steady, and her face crumples into his shoulder, the whole fight gone out of her.
“You’re okay,” Dean murmurs, hugging her tiny form against his large frame. “You’re here. Just breathe.”
Amy does, ragged and wet, the breath coming in like short bursts she has to fight for.
I try to step forward, but Dean stops me with a gentle flick of his eyes.
Not that he wants me gone, just that this next bit is his.
I get it. He knows her. They’ve never officially met, but he knows her.
I asked him to start watching over Amy when Tyler ended things, making sure she got home safely and he didn’t find his way back into her life.
But she was never supposed to see him.
Sniffing, Amy lifts her head and studies his face.
“Do I know you?”
Dean doesn’t hesitate. “No. We’ve never met.”
Technically true.
Her eyes stay on him for another second, searching for where she might have seen him. Dean gives her nothing.
He hefts her in his arms, bridal-style, and gestures to me with his chin.
“Can you pull the door?”
I do. The funeral home smells like air conditioning and lilies and Pine-Sol, which is a weird but not-unpleasant cocktail, and we move through a short hallway into a side room that looks half like a doctor’s office and half like somebody’s living room.
There’s a couch. There’s a coffee table.
There’s even a Kleenex box in every corner, as if the room is allergic to suffering.
Dean deposits Amy on the couch and kneels in front of her, big hands gentle on her knees. “Amy. You’re safe here. You need water or something warm?”
Amy is trembling, her fists twisted in the front of Dean’s shirt. “I—I don’t think I can let go,” she whispers, and it’s so earnest I nearly look away.
“That’s fine,” Dean says. “You don’t have to let go. I’ve got you, sweet girl.” He reaches up and runs a hand over the side of her blonde head, thumb swiping away her tears. “You hold on as long as you need.”
It’s a while before she lets go. Dean stays right there, kneeling on the tiles, his arms braced around her, his cheek pressed to Amy’s hair.
He talks to her in this low, steady way, like he’s narrating a long drive through the middle of the night and just wants her to stay awake until they’re out of the dark.
Sometimes he doesn’t say anything at all, just holds her and lets her shake and ride out the surges as they come.
Sage stands beside me, and I pull her against my side.
Watching Dean hold Amy through the shock takes me back to the beach. Sage in Micah’s arms. My jacket swallowing her body. All of us clinging to one another before we understood what we were becoming.
“Do you think she’s okay?” Sage asks.
“No.” I kiss the top of her hair. “But she’s not alone.”
Sage watches Dean murmur into Amy’s hair. “That helps.”
“Sometimes it’s the only thing that does.”
Amy lets Dean go long enough for him to get her a cup of water. He walks her through every sip. After a few more minutes, she’s sitting a little straighter, breathing a little deeper.
“Okay. I think I’m okay now,” she says, her voice thready.
“That’s good,” Dean says, moving to stand. Amy’s hand immediately shoots out and grabs him.
“Shit. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m doing that.”
Dean smiles and sinks into a crouch again. “You’ve been through a lot tonight. It’s okay to want to hold on to something—or someone.”
She takes a deep breath and slowly uncurls her hand. “You can . . . you can go . . . I’ll be okay.”
“All right.” Dean stands and this time Amy doesn’t grab for him. Although I do notice the way she fists her hands to stop herself. “I’ll come back and check on you soon. Is that all right?”
Amy nods. “Just . . . don’t be long . . . Okay?”
“Of course.”
Sage takes the seat next to Amy and holds her hands, giving me a quick smile as Dean and I go to deal with the body.
“Two hours,” Dean says once we’ve got Tyler’s body unwrapped and loaded into the retort. “Give or take. Depends on mass.”
“He’s about one-eighty.”
“Closer to two and a half then.” He adjusts the temperature gauge on the retort. “You want to wait?”
“I doubt Amy will go quietly. So yeah, we’ll wait.”
Dean nods. “Isn’t this the guy we were worried about? How’d he get to her?”
I shake my head. “He slid in with other residents, acting like he belonged. Cap and glasses. We fucked up. He got upstairs. Things got out of hand and—”
“She stabbed him.”
I nod. “She did.”
Dean nods, processing. “She’s going to need someone around for a while. The shock wears off in stages. First night’s the worst, but the second and third aren’t much better.”
“I know. Problem is, I don’t think she can come to ours. She doesn’t know what we do. Bringing her into the house means bringing her into—everything.”
“She just killed a man and you’re helping her dispose of the body,” Dean says. “I think she’s already in.”
He’s not wrong. But there’s a difference between a woman who stabbed her ex in self-defense and a woman who knows she’s surrounded by vigilantes who hunt and hang the men the law leaves behind. One of those can still be explained as a terrible night. The other changes her entire reality.
“She can stay here,” Dean says. “Upstairs. There’s a full apartment—two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom. I lived in it for a while after my divorce, but it’s clean and no one will bother her. I’ll be close by if she needs anything. She can stay on the premises until you figure out the next move.”
I trust Dean with my life—I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t—so trusting him to watch over Amy is a no-brainer.
“She might need you a couple nights,” I say, thinking about how she clung to his shirt, how she’s already attached her panic to the first safe person she saw.
“Fine by me. Keeps me out of the house.” He smiles. “You ever sleep in a place like this? Not as bad as you’d think. Gets quiet. Doesn’t even smell weird after the first day.”
We’re heading back toward the family room when gravel spits against the loading-bay door.
Both Dean and I run to the service entrance as Knox’s truck stops crooked across the concrete.
The passenger door opens before the engine dies.
“KITTEN!”
Milo cups his hands around his mouth and screams for her.
“KITTEN!”
Fuck.
Sage appears behind me.
Knox climbs out of the driver’s side while Milo rounds the front of the pickup. A tarp is stretched tightly over the truck bed, secured from rail to rail. Whatever is beneath it has been packed high enough to distort the shape.
Milo is drenched.
His shirt is soaked dark. His bare hands are red to the wrists, and someone’s blood has dried through his hair. His eyes are fever-bright. He rocks forward onto his toes when he sees Sage, like the energy inside him has nowhere left to go.
“Is any of that blood yours?” she asks.
“Some. Maybe. I don’t think so. Nothing important.” The words tumble out too fast. “Fourteen, kitten. Twelve accounts, fourteen men. Two brought friends. Friends! To a rape party. Who invites a friend to that shit? More to the point, who the fuck accepts?”
A laugh jerks out of him.
Sage doesn’t move.
Milo keeps going.
“I lured them. Pretended I was Tyler. One brought beer—can you believe that? But it’s okay.
I killed them. Oh, and we took their phones and watches and everything they had because Fenrir can use them.
Knox brought bags. Gasoline. Not enough tarps, though.
Wouldn’t have needed the gas if we had enough tarps—”
“Milo.”
He stops talking, but his body doesn’t stop moving. Fingers flexing. Shoulders twitching. Weight shifting from foot to foot.
“I fixed it,” he says. “They can’t hurt you now. They’re dead. Gone.”
Sage crosses the space between them.
Milo glances down at himself. “Don’t. I’m disgusting.”
“I don’t care.”
“I did it for you.” His voice catches, but the grin stays stretched across his face. “Because of how much I love you, kitten. You’re safe now.”
“Come here, Milo.”
She wraps her arms around him.
Milo breaks.
The change is instant. His grin disappears against her hair. His hands hover behind her as if he’s forgotten what they’re for, then slam around her hard enough to lift her onto her toes.
A sound tears out of him.
His knees buckle.
Knox catches him under the shoulders before he can drag Sage down with him, taking Milo’s weight while Milo clings to her shirt. His entire body convulses around each breath.
“I had to,” he chokes, finding his feet again. “Tyler came back. They keep coming back. I had to make sure they couldn’t—”
The words disintegrate. He buries his face in Sage’s neck and sobs.
“I’ve got you,” she murmurs. “You’re with me now.”
Milo tries to answer. Nothing coherent comes out.
Knox steps back, satisfied Milo’s holding his own weight.
Dean and Amy have appeared in the service doorway. Amy is wrapped in the blanket, one hand locked around Dean’s forearm. Her gaze moves from Milo to the covered truck bed.
I turn to Knox when he moves to stand beside me.
“Are there seriously fourteen bodies under there?”
He nods.
“All Kennel?”
“Everyone who came through the door.”
“Anyone get out?”
“No. He got them all.”
I look from Milo to the truck bed. “He did this alone?”
“All I did was guard the door and keep them in the warehouse.”
“Holy fuck.” I rub a hand down my face. “Fourteen is a lot.”
“He did it quick too. Never seen anything like it.”
I stare at the tarp and try to fathom what happened. Fourteen bodies. One warehouse. One Milo.
“How quick?” I ask Knox.
“Four minutes from first contact to last.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Milo’s still shaking against Sage, his fingers white-knuckled in her shirt. She’s murmuring something I can’t hear, her cheek pressed to his blood-matted hair. The choker gapes and the rope scar at her throat catches the security light.
I need to think. Protocol. Containment.
“Dean,” I say. “How many can you handle?”
He doesn’t blink. “This place got a massive upgrade during the pandemic. So the number isn’t the problem—getting this done without drawing attention is.”
“Can you do it?”
He shrugs. “I’ve got services booked through the weekend, so they can only run after hours. But if I run both retorts through the night, and we stack them.” He pauses while he calculates. “I can be done Tuesday morning.”
“All those bodies?”
Dean nods. “It’s what we burn.”
“Okay. Let’s get moving then.”
I look at Amy, who’s watching us the way you watch the nurse prepare a needle—braced but not yet hurting. “You don’t have to be here for this part,” I say to her.
She doesn’t answer. She just pulls her blanket tighter and moves to sit on the metal step beside the door. Then she watches as we carry fourteen bodies into the morgue.