Chapter 1
CHAPTER
ONE
HUDSON
“ H oly shit,” Kennedy murmurs from the passenger seat, smile in his voice as he cracks the car door open. “This is ours ? Wow …” He climbs out slowly, eyes wide like they’ll take in more of the creepiness that way.
The boarded-up, dilapidated houses cast shadows from one side of the road, and the busted-glass, paintwork-peeling shopfronts taunt us on the other.
When I’d drunkenly declared we buy Wilde’s End, all it had taken was half a bottle of vodka, an unexpected call from the Realtor while I was hungover, and Hart giving me that look .
The one daring me to prove him wrong. Apparently, I’m more bullheaded than even I thought because here we are.
My situationship, Sutton, laughed in my face when I told him about our plans, called me an idiot, then fucked me over the dining table and left before he even made me come. Between his disdain and Hart’s doubt, it made me dig my heels in more than ever .
Obviously the only mature and reasonable response.
I sit here for a moment, staring out the windshield at a towering view of what the fuck have I done? It’s not often my mistakes loom over me in physical form, so it’s hard not to feel like I’m being sac-whacked with it.
We’re parked on the edge of a dusty sealed road, and up ahead where the buildings end, the road turns to gravel and disappears into the trees.
It’s very green all around, and at least where the buildings are, the grass has been cut somewhat recently.
The old guys who sold the place to us couldn’t keep up with maintaining it, and I’m confident that decision came about twenty years too late.
Where the clean lawns end, the forest begins, looking like it’s trying to press forward and swallow the small town whole. And when I say small, I mean it. It’s one street and nothing but acres of wilderness surrounding it.
The panic creeps its way back up my throat, and I tilt the rearview mirror to see Hart. His sandy-blond hair hides most of his face from me as he looks down at his phone.
“You wanna come look around?” I ask.
“Nope.”
“You’re not the tiniest bit curious?” Considering how vocally he was against this, the fact that he signed right away made me hope that deep beneath his disdain for the entire world, he secretly had ideas for this place.
Hart drags his focus from his phone and meets my gaze in the mirror with hooded eyes. “I’m curious how many knocks to the head it takes for this to seem like a good idea, but I’m guessing that’s not the curious you mean.”
“Keep it up and we’ll find out that number on you.”
Hart chews back whatever he desperately wants to say, then pops the door and climbs out too .
I watch his slow gait as he moves toward the houses, and no matter how much this panic of completely fucking up makes me want to puke, I push it down.
For them. And also mostly because there’s nothing else I can do.
I follow my little brothers out of the car, determined to fake positivity until it sinks in.
“Looks promising.”
Maybe Hart can see through the shit because he shakes his head at me like he’s never been more disappointed. I ignore him as he drifts away.
Meanwhile, Kennedy all but bounces out of the nearest shop.
“I think this one is salvageable,” he says, crossing to look in the window of the next one.
The wooden deck creaks concerningly under his weight, but he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t think it sounds as close to death as I do.
“This one’s a bit more dramatic inside, but maybe. ”
“It fucking stinks,” Hart calls back over to us from where he’s circling one of the houses. “Everything smells like death here.”
“You’ll fit right in, then,” I send back.
The last thing my panic needs is for him to keep throwing negatives at me.
I’m not sure if it’s the buildings or the forest, but it smells like damp earth and decay.
As a builder by trade, I’m no stranger to getting filthy, but this is something else.
A dense blanket of dirt sits in the air and clings to my skin.
It’s cooler than it should be, every sound amplified while the silence somehow rings louder, and there’s a mist clinging to the trees like it’s waiting to creep out and strangle us.
Kennedy’s smiling broadly as he comes back our way.
“Listen to you two. You sound like a pair of city boys. This is probably the coolest thing we’ve ever done in our lives, and you’re complaining about the smell?
” He fills his lungs with a deep inhale.
“All I smell is grass and sunshine and fresh air.”
“And delusion,” Hartwell throws at his twin.
“Better than self-loathing and cynicism,” I point out .
Kennedy isn’t deterred by either of us. He takes off along the street, excited and overinterested in everything. Sometimes I wish I could see the world the way he does, like he’s incapable of a bad thought.
Hart shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “He’s going to love this place until you tell him it’s shit. You know that, right?”
“Lucky I don’t think it’s shit, then.”
“I saw your face in the car. You’re already freaking out.”
“I’m excited.”
“And freaking out.”
I turn my glare on him. “Shockingly, the world doesn’t revolve around you, so can you at least try and pretend for him?”
Hart stares at me, same speckled green eyes we all share studying my face. “No.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Well, that’s news to me,” he says flatly.
“Which house do you want?”
Hart turns his gaze back to the narrow, shiplap two-story structures, lips pulling into a sneer. Before he answers, he stoops down, picks up a rock, then covers his eyes. He throws it as hard as he can, and it bounces off the third house down before clattering back onto the road. “That one.”
“The roof looks a light breeze away from caving in.”
“Hope I’m under it when it happens.”
I don’t let his morbid comments get to me. “It’d be a fast way to shut up the whining.”
Hartwell doesn’t bother answering, just paces closer to the house he chose.
He reaches it as Kennedy does, and before Kennedy can get a word out, Hart says, “Mine,” and takes the stairs two at a time ahead of him.
He needs to slam his shoulder against the front door three times for it to unstick, and then he disappears inside.
Kennedy turns to me with hope lighting up his expression. “You know, I didn’t want to get ahead of myself, but I’ve got a good feeling that we’re onto something.”
Sepsis and gangrene? I bite back that response.
“If only we knew what that something was.” I scan the street again.
I’m not an easy guy to rattle, but I now know why it’s called a ghost town.
There’s something so deeply haunting about buildings that have been abandoned and now stand as markers of time.
Apparently, this place had a hard and fast mining boom before a tragedy hit that caused the mines to collapse and people to move away.
This was all left behind and forgotten about by everyone except the previous owners. And now us.
The oppressive silence weighs on me as discomfort creeps up my spine, like a primitive throwback to survival instincts I had at one point in my life.
“That something is money,” Kennedy says, bringing his hands together.
“You’re right that we could turn this place into a rich-people haven.
It’s going to take a lot to make the town sing, but I can see the vision.
” He turns and points into the trees behind the storefronts.
“There’s a river down that way. Clear out the trees, and there’ll be so much waterside property space.
It doesn’t look like much now, but the possibilities are there. Can’t you see it?”
Through the panic trying to blind me, I can.
He’s only repeating my words back to me, but when they come from Kennedy, it’s so much easier to buy into.
He believes in what he’s saying, and we might be two hours’ drive from the nearest town, but that’s easy enough to make into a selling point. It’s secluded. Private. Exclusive.
And thank fuck we’ll be able to do most of it ourselves because it’s also going to be very, very expensive.
Buying this through the business and taking out loans was risky after everything we’ve built, but we still have contracts bringing in guaranteed income, and if we can pull this off, we’ll be able to take the foot off the gas for a minute.
Living just to work isn’t how it should be.
We need this. All three of us.
It’s an overcast day, and while there’s enough light to see with, it’s a whole other experience when I enter the closest house.
Dark and still. No sound except birds outside and the breeze that finds its way past cracks in the building and whistles ahead of us down the hallways.
None of the cars or shouts or random sirens of LA, none of the slow, background construction work from the town we live in.
It makes every creak in the floor or groan of a door sound so much louder.
I’m locked with tension as we pass from one barren room into another that consists only of a bed frame and a mattress half hanging off it. The walls are stained with age, and dirt and dry leaves have stolen their way inside to crunch under our feet.
“I keep expecting someone to jump out at me,” Kennedy whispers as he creeps deeper into the house. “Do you feel it?”
I lie. “Nah. It’s just a house.” But I’m whispering too, like I’m worried speaking too loudly will disrupt it. “Besides, Hart’s alone. Surely a murderer would go for easy prey first.”
Kennedy stops suddenly. “Should we check on him?”
“He’s fine ,” I insist, but now that I’ve said that, my subconscious is getting paranoid.
Logically, I know there’s a slim chance some random killer would be hanging out in the middle of nowhere waiting for us to show up, but …
“If you want to go and check on him, I promise not to laugh too much.” Because I’d sort of like to go and check on him myself.
“Promise not to laugh at all ? ”
I take a moment so it looks like I’m thinking about it. “That’s a big ask. But maybe this once, I’ll let it slide.”
Kennedy leads the way outside again, and leaving the stuffy house behind doesn’t help to dissolve the way the hairs on my arms are prickling to attention.
I cast my gaze around, from window to window, one side of the street to the next, and then finally, up the tree-covered hill that rises slowly behind the houses.
It’s as abandoned as we were told it was. The last guys were looking after this place for thirty years and never saw a soul.
We’re fine here.
It’s the perfect place for us to leave the funk we were in behind, and if Hart can’t gain some life perspective here, it’s never going to happen.
At least I can say I tried.