“Come find me and bring weapons?” he whispers against my ear when he pulls back. “What kind of text is that? You almost gave me a heart attack, adorable.”
I step back with a soundless chuckle and turn my head toward the pit.
“What is going on here?” Dominic asks, following my gaze. “Bones said he was dead.”
He tries to keep his voice casual, but there’s a breath of eagerness breaking through. That tells me this was the right call.
“No one said that. You assumed it when he told you the club caught him.” My fingers tighten around the bag in my hand, the artificial crunch of plastic jarring in the stillness of the forest. “You had enough on your plate. You didn’t need this too.”
Plus… I needed my time with Bowie. My confessions were strangely healing.
Dominic doesn’t argue with my explanation, just nods in agreement. He understands.
“This is new,” he murmurs, eyes sweeping over the pit, then the massive iron grate propped against a nearby tree. Joker welded that thing in record time. He came earlier with Fang to remove it and set the stage.
“Who the hell came up with this?”
I press my lips together, but the smile still slips through.
“I did,” I say simply. “You see, before romance, my favorite books used to be thrillers. And sitting at the top of my list wasThe Silence of the Lambs. There’s a pit scene in it that never left me. I used to imagine my mother thrown in one.”
I glance at him from the corner of my eye.
“The metal box you trapped her in worked just as well. But when Bones gave me a choice about the fate of this rancid waste of flesh, I couldn’t resist.”
My voice drops, turning cold.
“Your club brothers have been having a lot of fun with him.”
Especially Fang. He leaned all the way into my little fantasy — borrowed Theresa’s whip, kept coming back, throwing cow shit into the pit and shouting,It rubs the cow shit on its skin or else it gets the whip again.Of course, I never had the heart to tell him that specific line is from the movie. It’s a little different in the book.
But I watched a few times. It was amazing.
Which reminds me…
“Did you know Fang has a cow?” I ask, turning to Dominic, eyes widening.
He smiles, looking at me with — dare I say it? — awe. “Yeah. Daisy. She’s a sweetheart.”
I nod and look back into the pit.
“There’s just one thing…” I continue. “You won’t be able to interrogate him. The first few days, he kept spitting all these foul things, and he wouldn’t shut up about how you were going to die. He barely gave any real answers to any questions. So Bones kind of lost his shit and…” I lift one shoulder. “Well, he cut part of his tongue off.”
My lips twist, remembering how I almost threw up when I saw him after. He opened his mouth wide, flicking that stub at me in accusation. That’s when I told him about his toilet-water coffee. It shut his mouth fast.
“He can still talk, but it’s very hard to understand him.”
A wet, furious gurgle rises from the pit. I ignore it and turn back to Dominic. His jaw is clenched, a muscle twitching in his cheek.
“I did get something out of him,” I say, lowering my voice. “The guards. What they did to you in prison? He arranged that at my mother’s request. I guess he wanted to prove himself to her. The message at the end, though, that was all him.”
The words shiver in the air between us.
I take a pause as long as a breath, and lift the plastic bag holding my mother’s ashes.
“Since they got along so well, I thought I’d reunite them. She deserves to spend eternity soaking in rot, piss, and shit.”
I swallow, but the tears come anyway. I fumble with the knot, my hands unsteady.
