“Kids?” I licked my dry lips and stared between the four of them carefully. Curiosity tingled inside me. I wanted to knoweverythingand craved to be part of their world, which was stupid and dangerous. I thirsted for what they had.
Sam waved his hand at Dalton, clearly giving him permission.
“Pigs.” Dalton shoved another piece of cheese in his mouth. “They eat everything but the hair and teeth. You need to starve the little babies and then when it’s time, when they’re absolutely famished, you feed them the bodies. Those babies can eat through bone quicker than you can imagine.”
Oh, right. He’d mentioned the pigs earlier in the day. “What do you do with the hair and teeth?” I asked, glancing between everyone at the table. They were eating as though they weren’t talking about disposing of dead human bodies.
“Bury them in the fields out back. Unless the cops have a reason to look, they won’t be found.” Dalton chuckled.
It made sense. Excitement stirred low in my stomach and I shifted on my seat. I glanced at Sam, taking in the hard line of his jaw and his sharp eyes, and my cock chubbed at the thought of him killing these people, blood dripping from his hands. Maybe I was fucked up from all the years on the street. Who the hell got turned on by that? Me, apparently.
Sam glanced at me and his eyes glittered knowingly.
“So, what do you do, Bee?” I quickly averted my gaze. The last thing I wanted was to get a full-blown boner at the dinner table with Sam’s family.
She flashed a wicked smile. “I’m a detective.”
I blinked. Then, blinked again. “Wait. Seriously?”
She threw her head back and laughed, her blond hair swaying with the movement. “Yeah, but if you’re asking what I do to help Sam, other than give him names, I also occasionally join in on the fun of taking down our perp. Sometimes we need two people for the job.”
I snorted. “Reasonable.”
“Lucy is a court reporter.” Bee slid her hand into Lucy’s and their fingers threaded together. They stared at each other lovingly, and my heart ached at the sight.
My gaze glided to Sam, and to my surprise, he was already staring at me, mouth quirked in a half smile.
“Sometimes she finds the worst criminals before I do,” Bee finished. “It depends on where crimes were committed.”
“I’m also good with tech.” Lucy brushed her nose against Bee’s, then leaned back again. “Sometimes we need informationabout our targets and I can find it. And if I can’t, I know people who can help.”
“It all works out in the end,” Dalton said. He shoved some pork into his mouth and finished eating it. “We’re a team.”
“Why do you do it?” I stared around at them carefully, starting with Sam and finishing with Bee. “You don’t seem like you’re psychopaths.”
Lucy laughed. “We’re not. You don’thaveto be a psychopath to be a killer, little Ezra. God, you’re so cute.” She glanced at Bee. “He’s so adorable, isn’t he? I just want to eat him all up.” She gave me a mischievous glance that told me she knew exactly what she’d said, and I rolled my eyes.
“The most adorable.” Bee winked at me.
Dalton shook his head when Sam signed to him, then turned to me. “Sam said he’s never been diagnosed by anyone, so it’s not to say he isn’tsomething,but that doesn’t matter. We do what we do because these people areworsethan us. They take advantage of innocent folks and they hurt them.”
“If you ask me, Sam’s got some antisocial personality traits.” Bee shrugged. “It’s why his dad always had an issue with him.”
Sam glared at her.
“His dad?” I frowned and looked at him. “You had a problem with your dad?”
He gave me a small smile and started typing on his phone that lay in the middle of the table. A computerized voice spoke for him.
“My father hated me. Mom died when I was twelve and my dad had to raise me on his own after that. He never wanted to and he always said I was different. I barely spoke even as a kid, but after Mom died, I withdrew, and Dad thought I was “a freak.” When I was thirteen, he tried to get me to speak to him over something stupid. I think it was baseball. He’d forced me to sit with him and watch it, make a man out of me, but I wasn’tinterested. When I wouldn’t talk to him, he grabbed me by the throat and strangled me. I don’t know if he was trying to kill me or what, but I remember I couldn’t breathe.”
He held up his hand to me and shifted slightly to pull out a small notepad from his pants’ pocket before beginning to write. The other three had conversations of their own, but I focused on Sam and the way his hand moved as he wrote. When he was done, he passed the pad to me.
I thought I was going to die, so I reached out for the first thing I could find. It was a pen. I stabbed him in the neck with it and there was blood everywhere. My throat was on fire and I was in pain and couldn’t breathe and Dad was dead.
I paused, closing me eyes to take a shaky breath before I opened them again to continue reading. He’d switched to paper when he was confessing his deepest sins, and each word was inked into my skin as though he was writing on my flesh.
I was a scared kid and didn’t know what to do. I called my aunt, Dalton’s mom. She came over, saw what had happened, and took me to the shower. She told me to wash the blood off and by the time I was done, the body was gone. It was in the trunk of her car. She called my uncle and when he got there in his truck, she told him to take her car and get rid of the body. Feed it to the pigs.
