“I need to call him,” I say, softly and Gabe nods once.
Eli doesn’t answer.
Jackass.
I growl a curse under my breath and hang up, dialing Archer while Gabe putters around my kitchen. “How long did he say to stay with me?” I ask and Gabriel shrugs.
“Didn’t really put a time stamp on it, sweetheart,” Gabe says. The phone is ringing and ringing and…
“What, Hazel?”
“Watch your fucking tone,” I snap. “Why the hell did you sic Gabe on me?”
There’s a breath of hesitation and I know what it is.
It’s got the feel Eli has, when I ask about work and he hesitates before telling me the barest details. But then. Archer spits a curse. “Triple homicide, a few miles away on County Line.”
I feel my gut seize up, flutter in that shift of nerves that I always get when a story is there inches away and begging for me to snatch it up.
“Hazel, for once in your fucking life, I need you to do what I say. Lock your fucking doors, stay with Gabriel and wait for me to give you the all clear.”
“Archer,” I say, softly and he huffs a sigh.
“We just got here, Hazy-eyes.” He goes distant for a second, and I can hear him talking to Eli before the door to car slams shut. Then his voice is back and it’s my voice. The gruff, low, sexy as sin voice he only ever uses with me, when we’re alone.
“Hazel, please. This—it’s bad. I can’t be worried about you. Gabriel will keep you safe, and you’ll keep him safe, and I’ll give you as much information as I can, as soon as I clear the scene. But, please. For me?”
I let out my breath slowly.
“Okay, Archer.” I whisper.
I hear his huff of relief, too real for him to choke it off, and then, “Baby girl, I gotta go. I’ll call soon.”
I nod and he disconnects and I look over at Gabriel. Flash a smile that doesn’t feel even the slightest bit real.
“So, it looks like we’re gonna be spending some time together,” I say, weakly.
I spent four years in the Marine Corps before I joined the GCPD.
Two of those were spent on deployment, a nightmare of war and blood and death.
I saw people torn to pieces by bombs, girls ripped apart by rape and abuse, men beaten so badly they couldn’t breathe, eyeballs hanging from shattered orbital sockets. I saw my own unit torn apart by gunfire and shrapnel. I saw blood splatter and dead dogs being eaten by children, and dead children being eaten by dogs.
I saw every fucking nightmare I could possibly imagine.
But war?
War is a beast, a fucking monster. But it’s supposed to be. It’s like the devil—something you know and expect and can depend on because it’s supposed to be evil.
That wasn’t the world I came back to. It was supposed to be quiet. Bad shit should happen, but not….
Not this.
Because this? This is worse than anything I ever saw in war.
“You need this,” the scene tech said, her face pale, lips trembling.
Eli frowned. Pamela was too much of a hardass to be this torn up by a dead body, so what the actual fuck?
I take the masks from her and slip it over my face, sliding my feet into protective booties.
And then I enter the house, my brother following me, and we step into hell.
The first victim.
(I had to think of them like that. Had to.)
Was found in the foyer. Less than ten feet from the door. Three bullet holes, one to the gut, one through the shoulder. The last was through the back of her head, punched out the front, taking half her face with it.
She was a mess of blood and brain and bone, most of it splattered in a grisly pattern on the beige carpet.
(It was beige. Once. Now it’s a deep, deep red, and it squishes under my feet as I crouch next to her.)
Back of the head, splayed limbs, the expression of terror on her face—the unforced entry.
She opened the door. Let the killer in.
She ran, when they pulled the gun.
(Oh, jesus, they shot an unarmed grandmother in the back of the fucking skull.)
The first victim knew them. Enough that she let them in, on a cool summer evening. It’s Green County. Not completely unheard of.
(This is. Holy fuck, this is.)
There are two distinct set of footprints, tracking bloody away from the first victim.
There’s vomit, in the middle of the hallway, and bloody hand prints braced on the ground.
(Eli makes a noise that’s like a choked sob. I grit my teeth, and give him a sharp look, questioning. My brother looks like he’s gonna fall the fuck apart. “I can process-”
“Shut up, Archer.”)
The victim’s son found her.
He’s the one who threw up and smeared blood prints on the ground in the hallway. The second victim.
(Oh jesus oh fuck fuck fuck.)
Is found in a closet.
She’s bound, with duct tape, at the hands and feet. Two shots to the head, neat and tidy. Close up, and not the gun that killed the first victim.
She looks startled. Not scared.
(Silencers. They fucking used silencers. And she knew them.)
It’s at the back of the downstairs, well away from the first victim. The door was left open, after they shot her, and blood dried, dripping down the wall where she’s slumped with her forever startled expression.
(What the hell was the last thing she saw, that put that startled look in her eyes?)
There are no tracks in her blood.
(She was fucking collateral damage. Her and the grandmother. They weren’t here for her, but they sure as fuck didn’t have any problem killing her.)
The third victim is upstairs.
(Eli gags when we reach the top of the staircase, and for a second, as I look, I can’t process what I’m seeing. I have to process what I’m seeing. I have to do my job. Stay detached.)
There is blood. Everywhere.
She wasn’t restrained.
There are footprints, and they crisscross across the room.
She was running. And one of the killers—there were two, there had to have been two, because of the footprints next to the first victim—was chasing her.
And there’s blood, everywhere.
Like they worked her over with a knife.
It sprays, obscenely beautiful patterns against the stark white walls, dried now to a rusty red.
This was the target.
There is a fourth victim here, a girl, maybe nineteen, shot point blank.
(Who the fuck is she and why did they kill her? I wonder if Pamela has ID’d them.)
The target. The third victim. They didn’t just chase her and torture her with a knife.
They beat her to death.
She’s almost unrecognizable as a human. She’s a red smear of meat and guts and bones.
(Eli throws up. I hear him retch, messy and loud and my stomach almost rebels.
This isn’t hell. This is so fucking far past that.)
There’s a bloody barbell next to the lump of meat and bone and hair, and I crouch next to it and the victim. Faintly, I can see the impressions of the barbell in her skin.
This was personal. Whoever this girl was, whoever the hell the killers were. This was the goal. They had a problem with her.
The other three dead bodies were incidental, or—
(Oh fuck, did they kill them, just to torture her? Before they cut her up and beat her to death, did they slaughter her family first?)
She was the target. And it was personal.
It wasn’t a random home invasion by a drug addict looking to score some money or prescription pills.
This was calculated and personal and fucking savagely executed.
And the killers walked out, without ever being seen.
I feel sick, when I step out of the house. Eli is already outside, crouching next to the bushes, and Pamela is hovering over hi
m, all caustic concern.
I arch an eyebrow at her and she shrugs. Pats my brother on his back and shifts away.
The Chief is approaching and I growl Eli’s name. He nods, and pushes to his feet.
Chief eyes my brother for a minute and then, “How bad did you fuck up my crime scene, Eli?”
He flushes.
“You been in there?” I ask, and it pulls Billing’s attention to me. He nods, slowly and I glance back.
I can still see each of them, sprawled out and dead. “You ever seen any shit like that before?” I ask.
And Billings, damn him, shakes his head.
“It was personal,” Eli offers and Billings glances at him. Eli squares his shoulders. He might be in the doghouse for fucking up the crime scene, but his instincts are still sound. And he’s right.
“There’s too much rage and intent for it to be random.”
“Why do you say that?” Peter says, sharply.
“Because they tortured the girl. The others, they killed. Quick and painless. But she was all kinds of intentional. They wanted her to suffer. No one tortures a girl like that unless they’re being pushed by motive.”
Chief grunts and hands me a thin file.
“They were found when the old lady’s son came home. She lived with them, but it’s his house. He worked third shift, and came home to this.”
He’s the one who threw up in the hallway. Makes sense. He came home to a dead mother, and his daughters in the house.
“The girl upstairs—the third gunshot vic—was a friend. Beth Griffin was visiting Crystal Watson.”
Wrong night to get together with the BFF.
“You two have point on this. It’s your priority,” Peter says, his voice a low growl.
“What about the prostitutes?”
The Chief gives us a blank stare. “What the fuck about them? Did you see that house, Archer?”
And that’s that.
We spend the day processing the scene. By the time Pamela and her boys have finished cataloguing all of the blood splatter, footprints, bullet casings and wounds, by the time the bodies have been carted away for the medical examiner and proper identification, by the time I finally leave that nightmare house of horrors—my head is pounding, and Eli has descended into utter silence.
I leave him to it. Frankly, I’m not in the mood to sift through my brother’s brooding. Not when I’m so fucking deep in it myself.
We were fighting, when I caught the call that shattered the day.
Fuck, it’s only been one fucking day. We sat, happy, this morning at Mama’s and listened to Hazel banter with Eli and tease Hailey.
I swallow hard.
“Did you call Hazel?”
I glance at my brother who looks at me dully. We’re halfway back to the house. To our house, but it occurs to me that I don’t want to go back to our empty place.
And Eli could use more than that too.
So I swing the Roadrunner around sharply, a hard crank of the wheel. Eli mutters a low curse, but rolls with it.
“Where—“ he starts blearily, and I shoot him a quick look.
“Oh,” he says, instead.
And it fucking settles me. Not all of the anger and worry, not the gnawing fear and outrage that some monster destroyed the peace in my town. But some of the edges of nerves settle, and I can take what feels like the first full breath of the fucking day.
Nothing has changed. There’s still a fucking monster out there, and tomorrow, Eli and I have to sit down with the parents of a murdered girl, the devastated father who lost his entire fucking family.
But for the moment—all of that drops away because there isn’t a goddamned thing I can do until the ME finishes with the bodies.
The one thing I can do is take care of my family. Take care of Eli who doesn’t need to be alone. And take care of Hazel who I’ve been worried about all day, and who is so fucking good at settling me when I’m spinning out.
I want her, here. Not for sex—I’m so fucked up right now, so lost in my head I don’t think sex is on the table. But I want my best friend, the one who can sit in my silence and still be so fucking present it doesn’t feel like I’m alone.
When she’s close to me, I don’t feel like I’m alone.
And I fucking need that, right now.
Gabe and I spend the day watching shitty movies.
I fuck around on my computer, playing with the idea of working on my article, but my heart isn’t really in it. My mind—both of our minds—are a few miles away, where my brother and Archer are dealing with a murder scene.
A triple fucking homicide.
He stress cooks, and steals my computer and bitches when I refuse to let him run to his house. Smith whined and paced and acted like a little bastard, getting under foot, until Gabe finally threw himself on the couch and then the traitor crawled up on him and settled to his absent-minded caress.
“Do you know what happened?” Gabe asks, around three. By now, we’ve been together for almost four hours by the edict of my brother and we’re no longer antsy and snapping at each other. We’re just…waiting.
For what, I don’t think either of us knows.
“No,” I say, remembering that hesitation in Archer before he said triple homicide.
The one that is keeping me glued to my couch and not snatching my computer up to dig up all the fucking information I can, to find out what the hell could possibly be motivating it.
It keeps me glued here because I need Archer to know that I’d never betray his trust.
That’s what makes us work, what makes us special.
That we trust each other.
Even after everything.
So I shove it all down and I propose a movie marathon and Gabriel jumps on that, making us messy buttery popcorn sprinkled with M&M’s while I find the cheesiest horror flick I can think of on Netflix, and queue it up for us.
We’re on the third movie, and Gabriel has broken into my whiskey stash when I hear the Roadrunner rumble up. The damn thing could wake the fucking dead. It jars both of us up on the couch, and Gabe’s glassy eyes clear as he stares speculatively at the door.
When I try to stand though, he jerks me back, holding me on the couch. “Gabe!” I snap, and he side eyes me, all golden sharp gaze.
“Just wait,” he says, soft and serious.
So I do and then Archer and Eli stumble in. Because of course they both have keys to my house.
And I swallow a scream.
Because they are both fucking covered in blood.
“Holy shit,” Gabriel breathes, and I choke back the inappropriate laugh.
Eli is swaying, so unsteady on his feet that for a second, I think he might be drunk.
He’s not though. He’s just so far past the point of dealing, he’s almost asleep, dead on his fucking feet. Archer though. Archer is all furious energy, exhaustion etched in long lines on his face, but he’s not falling asleep walking—he’s furious energy and crashing relief.
He steps forward, and jerks me off the couch and into his arms, a sigh of relief slipping free.
“Dude,” Eli slurs. “Get off Hazel. Your fucking filthy.”
He makes a noise that reminds me, vaguely, of a growl and my arms—when the fuck did I wrap my arms around him—tighten a little, holding him tight when he’d pull away.
I’m not ready to give up his warmth.
Even if he is disgusting right now. He stays where he is, a warm blanket of home.
“Someone gonna clue us in on why the hell you’re covered in blood?” Gabriel asks, his voice almost a grin. “Gotta say, boys, you look like you’ve been through a slaughterhouse.”
Archer flinches, a full body thing in my arms and I twist to glare at Gabriel as Eli starts to cackle hysterically. “Dude,” Archer says, grumpy and Eli shakes a hand, helplessly, still laughing as he stumbles out of the room. I pull away from Archer and he shakes his head. “Leave him, Hazel. Let him take a shower and get his shit together.”
/>
I hate it. But I do what he says, and focus on Archer. “You should shower, too. Grab some of Eli’s shit, and go to my bathroom.”
Archer hesitates for a half a heartbeat, and then he nods and stumbles a few steps away, mumbling, “Thanks, Hazy Eyes.”
When we’re alone, I stare at Gabe, and he looks terrified. I’m not used to seeing Gabe so scared. “Make dinner. Sandwiches, maybe some tomato soup—Mama sent some home, it’s in the freezer.”
Gabe jerks a little, and nods, his fear fading. Because he has something to do—and he always functions better when he has something to do.
While he bustles around the kitchen, I retreat to my bedroom and change quickly, out of the now bloody tank top and yoga pants.
Archer really was filthy.
The door to my bathroom opens while I’m gathering up his dirty clothes, discarded haphazardly on the ground of my bedroom, and mine.
And I know I should retreat. I should get the hell out of here, because we’re both too raw today, too on edge from the day.
But I look at him. A tiny stolen glance.
And freeze.
He’s wearing a pair of Eli’s oversized sweat pants, hanging low and precarious on his hips, and water is dripping down his chest.
Broad and tattooed and god, I forgot.
I forgot how gorgeous he is.
His hair is wet, and his lips are bright red, like he’s been biting them, and his eyes—oh god, his eyes. He stares at me, so hard and bright and intent that my entire body trembles, because he looked at me like that, when he fucked me.
That one time, a thousand nights ago.
“Hazel,” he growls, and I stumble back a step. I can’t face him right now, not with Gabe and Eli down the hall. So I retreat, and the second I do, he goes still, shock flickering through his eyes.
“Gabe is making dinner,” I babble, and then I almost fall out of my bedroom, and slam the door shut behind me.
Dinner is a silent affair, while Archer watches me sidelong. Eli is almost asleep at the table, and part of me wants to know what the hell happened because, hello, journalist. The other part of me—the part that is all sister—wants to know what the actual fuck could knock my strong, unshakable brother on his ass like this.
But I don’t ask. I pick at my grilled cheese and stir my soup and trade glances with Gabe nervously until the food is gone and the silence is stretching too tight and tense and— “I think that’s my cue. I’m going home.”
Dirty Sexy Secret (Green County Book 1) Page 8