Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet

by Darynda Jones

  I lowered my head but not my eyes and whispered, “Please, stop.”

  Reyes released the man immediately and fell back on his heels, a salacious warning glimmering across his impossibly handsome face.

  He didn’t want me there—that much was obvious—but it was more than that. He was angry. He who’d set me up just to watch me fall. He who could bite my lily-white ass a thousand ways to Sunday was mad at me. Of all the nerve.

  The opponent lay on the canvas wheezing and writhing in agony. That last little exertion on Reyes’s part must’ve damaged something. Reyes ignored him. He also ignored the ref, who was pummeling him with verbal warnings, and the guy who started to put a hand on his shoulder for support before thinking better of it. Jumping to his feet, he strode out of the cage like he had somewhere else to be. Cheers and congratulatory whoops abounded as he navigated through the crowd. He ignored those, too. Thankfully, the crowd had enough sense to move out of the way when he got close.

  He swam through it with ease, then ducked inside a door that led to a large, boxy construction in the far corner. Offices, maybe. The trainers helped the other guy to his feet and led him away in the opposite direction while a custodian mopped blood off the mat.

  My feet followed where every eye led. To the rooms in the corner. I shoved past the feral crowd and lovelorn women. Several of them hovered near the door but didn’t dare go inside. The fact that the door was completely unguarded surprised me. Another guy walked out, shorter and stockier than Reyes, his hands wrapped in tape, his fists at the ready as he shadowboxed his way to the cage.

  And the crowd went wild.

  I stepped through the door into a type of industrial locker room. Not the kind in gyms, clean and bright, but the kind in old factories, dingy, dark, and dirty. Three rows of the metal units cut the steam-filled room in half. On the left were several walled offices and a desk. On the right—

  “And they want you to make it last longer.” A male voice echoed toward me from that very direction. “We talked about this, remember?”

  I followed it, walking past the lockers until I came to an open area with benches and a couple of tables. The showers were past that, and someone was apparently taking advantage of them. Steam billowed around Reyes as he sat on one of the tables. A man who must’ve been his trainer stood in front of him, wrapping his hands in white tape, just like in the movies. His jeans hung low on his hips, showing just enough of the dip between hipbone and abdomen to weaken my knees. Bandages and more white tape adorned a shoulder and encircled his ribs, and I fought to tamp down my concern. As for the rest of him, his coppery skin stretched with fluid grace over a solid frame of hard muscles and long sinewy curves. He was simply magnificent.

  The first time I saw Reyes, I was in high school and my sister Gemma and I had spotted him through the kitchen window of his apartment late one night. It was a bad part of town, and what I saw proved it. A man—a man who I would later learn was Earl Walker, the monster who raised Reyes and who, years after that event, had tortured and almost killed me in my own apartment—was beating him. Reyes was nineteen at the time. Fierce. Feral. And beautiful. But the man was huge. His fists were slamming into Reyes until he could no longer stand. Could no longer defend himself.

  To stop the man from killing him, I’d thrown a brick through the kitchen window. It’d worked. The man stopped. But that brick was like putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. I found out years later that Reyes had spent over a decade in prison for killing Earl Walker, only to be told that Earl wasn’t really dead. He’d faked his own death, and Reyes had gone to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The problem lay in the fact that Reyes escaped from prison to prove his innocence and used me as bait to get Earl Walker to come out of hiding. I almost died as a result. Cookie and her daughter, Amber, were put at risk as well.

  Those things combined with the fact that Reyes was literally the son of Satan, forged in the fires of sin and degradation, were proving a little hard to get past. But he was also the dark entity that had followed me my whole life. Had saved it more than once. His actions contradicted everything I was raised to believe about such darkness. Such ambiguity.

  And now, I stood at the precipice of a great divide. Did I dare trust him again? Did I dare believe anything he had to say? I had spent two months in my apartment pondering that very thing.

  His heat reached me then, and I stepped closer. The familiar warmth that radiated out of him in soft nuclear waves was like a stinging ointment, soothing and unsettling at the same time. I stood under the glaring fluorescent, but he didn’t look up. It gave me a chance to study him more closely, to assess how freedom had changed him. Not a lot, I quickly realized. His hair was the same length it was two months ago. Thick strands hung down over his forehead and curled behind an ear. His jaw—that strong, stubborn set he always carried—was shaded with a day’s worth of growth. It framed his full mouth to such delicious precision, my own mouth watered in response.

  I forced my attention off his face to his wide shoulders, laid bare for the fight, exposing the ancient tattoos he’d been born with. The tattoos that doubled as a map, a key to the gates of hell. I could read a map as well as the next girl, but how did one use such a map to travel onto the other plane and traverse the desolation of infinity to get to a place nobody wants to be?

  Without looking up from the trainer’s ministrations, Reyes asked, “What are you doing here?”

  He was so startlingly beautiful, it took me a moment to realize he was talking to me. I hadn’t seen him in two months, and even before that, I’d seen him in the flesh on only a few fleeting, harried occasions, each one eliciting similar feelings of preoccupation and light-headedness. No matter how angry I seemed to be, his attraction, his raw succulence acted as a magnet. And I was apparently a paper clip. Every cell in my body urged me forward.

  The trainer glanced up in confusion, then realized someone else was in the room. He turned to me, a sharp disapproval lining his face. “You can’t be back here.”

  “I need to talk to your fighter,” I said, thrusting as much authority into my voice as I could muster, which admittedly wasn’t much.

  Finally, and with infinite care, Reyes raised his lashes until I could see the shimmer of his rich brown eyes. I tried to force my heart to keep beating, but it stopped dead in its tracks. His lips parted slightly, and my gaze fell to his mouth again. It thinned in response, and he said, “You need to leave.”

  Ignoring the rush of heat that flooded my body at the deep, sensual sound of his voice, I squared my shoulders, stepped forward, and handed him the paper I’d crumpled the minute I saw him in the cage. “I brought your bill.”

  His thick black lashes lowered, and he reached for the paper with his free hand. “My bill for what?” he asked, perusing what I’d written.

  “For my services. I found your father for you. Almost died in the process. My private investigations business is just that, Mr. Farrow: a business. Despite what you might believe, I am not your personal errand girl.”

  He quirked a brow the moment I used his surname but recovered quickly enough. He turned the paper over. “It’s written on a Macho Taco receipt.”

  “I improvised.”

  “And it’s for a million dollars.”

  “I’m expensive.”

  The barest hint of a grin lifted one corner of his mouth. “I don’t have a million on me at the moment.”

  “We can go to the nearest ATM, if that would help.”

  “Sadly, no.” He folded the paper and stuffed it into a back pocket, and the only thing I could think was how I would’ve loved to be a Macho Taco receipt at that moment in time. “I’m broke,” he added.

  Even without reading his emotions, I knew that was an outright lie. Good thing, because I wasn’t getting much in the way of deceit. Lust, maybe. A hot, visceral desire that had my knees fighting to stay locked. But no deceit. Speaking of which …

  “Why are you fighting?” I looked around at the pa
ltry conditions. Even illegal fights should be sanitary. This was crazy.

  “I told you, I’m broke. I need the money.”

  “You’re not broke,” I countered.

  He shook off the man wrapping his hand and rose from the table.

  I stepped back in a wary retreat. He followed, every movement fluid. Powerful.

  I had a few tricks up my elastic cuff. Time to shock and amaze. “You have a cool fifty million just waiting for you to wrap your hot little hands around.”

  He stilled, which was his tell. Where others gasped or rounded their eyes when surprised, Reyes stilled, so I knew I had him.

  “You’re mistaken,” he said, his voice like silk over cold, hard steel.

  “Your sister told me,” I explained. Though not biologically related, Reyes was raised with a girl whom he considered to be his sister in every way. They were both subjected to extreme abuse, though in very different ways. Earl Walker, the man who tortured me, also raised them. In his own sick kind of way, he would refuse Kim food and water until Reyes would comply with his horrendous demands. Kim and Reyes both grew up in a nightmare at the hands of a monster, and in an effort to keep Kim safe, Reyes disavowed any knowledge of her when he was arrested for Walker’s supposed murder. And yet, he had somehow managed to make her a millionaire while in prison.

  He bit down. “That’s not my money. That’s hers.”

  I folded my arms. “She won’t spend it. She swears it’s yours.”

  “She’s wrong.” He took another step closer. “And I thought we agreed that you’d stay away from my sister.”

  We didn’t agree so much as he threatened, but I decided not to bring up that point. “This was a while ago, after you’d escaped from prison. You’d been hurt and I was concerned.”

  “Why do you care?” Another step. “Last thing you said to me was fuck off.”

  I made myself stand my ground. He was only coming toward me to force a retreat, a tack he took when he needed to exert his authority. “I only said that in my head.”

  “The look on your face said it all.”

  “The same face with the huge gash in it where your father sliced it in two?” He walked right into that one. “That face?”

  He blanched. “He’s not my father.”

  “I know. But fighting here like this is crazy. It’s like you have a death wish.”

  “You’re one to talk.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  His jaw worked in frustration before he answered. “I’m trying to keep my distance, as per your wish.” He stepped closer, and this time I had no choice but to retreat. But one more step brought me up against a cinder block wall. He braced one hand above my head just to tower over me. “But you’re not making it very easy.”

  A surplus of emotion shuddered deep in my core. Reyes Farrow ignited every cell in my body as though I were made of gasoline, one spark away from being engulfed in flames. He knew what he did to me. He had to. And that alone kept me sane. Kept me from reaching out and running my fingers along the bandages at his ribs. Dipping them into the front of his jeans.

  I drew in a steadying breath instead. “I saw you this morning.”

  A soft frown stole over his face, so I explained further.

  “By my apartment building. I saw you standing there. Are you stalking me?”

  “No,” he said, dropping his arm and turning away from me. “I’m hunting another animal altogether.”

  “And that animal just happens to live in my building?”

  He smoothed the tape on his hands. “No, but what that animal wants most does.”

  His words caused my pulse to quicken, my breath to shorten. The only thing that wanted me, the only animal Reyes would hunt, was a demon.

  Then he was in front of me, his hand around my throat holding me when I wanted to run. “You reek of fear.”

  I fought his hold to no avail. “And whose fault is that?”

  “Mine, and I apologize again, but you have to get the fuck over it.” He pressed into me until my skin had no choice but to absorb the heat radiating off him in waves. I breathed it in, gasped as it pooled deep in my abdomen and washed down my legs. “They love it,” he said at my ear. “It’s like a drug. In the same way the smell of blood lures sharks, the smell of fear lures them closer, drives them into a frenzy. It is both bait and aphrodisiac.”

  “And you would know this how?”

  “Because I was one of them, and I want nothing more than to drag you into those showers, rip off your clothes, and have my way with every inch of you.”

  I closed my eyes at the image he offered me. “You want to do that anyway.”

  “True, but this is stronger. You’re the reaper, and nothing on earth is more mouthwatering to one of my kind than the prospect of licking fear off your skin.”

  He’d never told me that. He’d never told me a lot of things, but that particular tidbit would have been nice to know.

  “I never told you, because it’s never been an issue,” he said, startling me.

  He did it again. Read what I was thinking. I looked up at him in surprise.

  “It’s all over your face, Dutch.”

  There it was again. Dutch. The mysterious name he called me. A name I had yet to understand.

  “I can see it,” he continued. “Your confusion. Your doubt. I can’t read your mind. But like you, I can read your emotions. And it’s never been an issue, because you’ve never been afraid before. Not like this.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said, my words breathy with a combination of awe and trepidation. “I’ve always been afraid of you.”

  That seemed to give him pause. He loosened his hold long enough for me to scramble out of it. And scramble I did. I rushed out of his grip and backed warily away from him. He kept one arm braced on the wall and inhaled deep gulps of air as though trying to get a grip on his emotions.

  “You need to leave before I change my mind about letting you.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not leaving until you promise to stop fighting.”

  He snapped to attention. “Are you kidding?”

  “Not at the moment.” If I ever had any power over him, now was certainly the time to use it. I raised my chin to face him head-on. “I forbid you to fight.”

  A sudden burst of anger hit me like a wall of fire. He straightened and advanced.

  “You are the one who insists I keep this body. Now you want to tell me what I can and cannot do with it?”

  He was right. I’d insisted he keep his mortal body once when he’d wanted to let it pass away. And it was a decision I still stood by. “Pretty much,” I said, squaring my shoulders.

  “Well, then, what exactly would you like me to do with it?”

  What an amazingly loaded question. He was towering over me again, stepping closer, forcing me back until I hit the table he’d been sitting on. His heat seeped into every pore on my body.

  “I need answers, and I can hardly get them if you end up dying in an illegal cage fight. Do they even have an EMT on duty?”

  “Dying?” he asked, scoffing at the very idea.

  I pointed to his bandages. “You’re not as indestructible as you might think.”

  He laughed, a harsh sound that echoed against the metal lockers. “Do you honestly believe a human could do this to me?”

  It took a moment for realization to sink in. When it did, I felt my jaw drop as I gaped up at him. “They … you mean—”

  “Rey?”

  I recoiled, fought to keep the room from spinning as I grasped his meaning. Demons. They were here. Back on Earth. And he was fighting them.

  I looked past him toward a woman walking into the room.

  “Are you ready for the next fight? They’re asking for you.”

  He didn’t look at her. Didn’t take his eyes off mine.

  “Wendell wants you to make this one last,” she said, her voice weak, uncertain. I could feel anxiety coming off her from where I stood.


  When a tall woman with short blond hair stepped into the light, I realized who she was and almost seized. Elaine Oake? The woman with the website? The woman with the museum dedicated to all things Reyes Farrow, stocked with dozens of items stolen from Reyes and smuggled out of the prison by guards? Guards that she paid? She was here? With Reyes?

  When I thought of how she was nothing more than a prison groupie, a rich woman who had stalked Reyes the entire time he was in prison, who’d paid guards to get information on him, to steal items from his cell and take pictures when he wasn’t looking, my astonishment shifted from the thought of demons roaming the hills and valleys of Earth to the thought of this woman roaming the hills and valleys of Reyes’s body. An acrid and infuriating kind of jealousy erupted in my chest and surged out of me in a humiliating burst of resentment.

  I fought to tamp it down, but she had to see the utter shock on my face. Hers showed, too. As well as her insecurity. Reyes was dangerously close, and clearly she didn’t like that. Then recognition flitted across her face, followed by another tangible wave of shock.

  “Rey?” she asked again. “Do you know who this is?”

  He released a heavy breath from between his suddenly clenched teeth. “Yes.”

  “Oh, okay.” She stepped over to us. “Are you here on a case?” she asked me, the hope so evident in her eyes, I almost felt sorry for her.

  “I’m here collecting on one, yes.”

  “Oh, well, whatever it is, I can pay it. I’m Reyes’s manager.” She turned toward him and placed a timid hand on his arm. “You need to get ready. This fight is almost over.” Then she forced a smile. “They’re all here for you anyway. That fight was just a filler, something to cleanse the palate between rounds.”

  He was fighting again tonight? And she was cool with that?

  My knee-jerk reaction was to rip out her short, perfectly coiffed hair, and I chastised myself inwardly. Reyes was not mine. I had no say in anything that he did, including the fights, and he knew it. He’d been in prison for over a decade for a crime he didn’t commit, and here I was trying to control him. Just like they did. Every single day for over ten years. Every movement, every thought, controlled by a trustee or a guard or a warden.