Page 114 of Deathless & Divided

Sipping from the water, she stared out the kitchen window into the driveway. A familiar blue Porsche caught her eye instantly. She nearly dropped the damn glass. Damian’s car was parked beside hers and guessing by the dew drops gathering on the blue paint, it had been there quite a while.

He hadn’t mentioned needing to come over. In fact, Lily was positive Damian said he had work to do and might not even see her the next day. Their wedding was just two weeks away; Lily didn’t mind that he had business to handle because she could always use a day to make sure everything was going smoothly with the two wedding event coordinators that Dino hired. Besides that, Lily had taken up two summer online classes for credits she needed in order to be ahead of the game for school in the fall.

She had a lot of stuff going on.

Damian did, too.

Why hadn’t he told her he was coming over?

The digital microwave clock blinked 4AM. More confused than ever, Lily turned the garage light on and looked out the window connecting the garage to the kitchen. Dino’s white Bentley wasn’t parked beside Lily’s Maserati. Damian promised to have her car repaired before the wedding but Lily had been using Dino’s car to run errands or to do whatever else she needed in the day. Her brother was too busy trying to keep a firm handle on the DeLuca crew with Theo to be worrying about his car.

But now Dino’s car was gone, too.

Listening for any sounds in the house, Lily couldn’t hear a thing. Nothing that said her brother and Damian were inside, anyway. Lily dumped the remaining water from her glass down the drain, keeping an eye on Damian’s car at the same time.

She figured it didn’t matter. Maybe Dino and Damian had business and met up or something. Padding back through the dark house, Lily came to a stop at the foot of the stairwell. The faintest sound, something Lily was sure she had never heard before, hummed from the back of the house. The noise got louder, like metal grinding on metal.

What in the hell was that?

Annoyed, Lily made her way to the back of the house quickly. She slipped on her ballet flats and pushed open the back door leading to the deck. Darkness covered the back property except toward Dino’s small storage shed at the far end. White light spilled from the open garage door as sparks flew. Smoke and dust billowed out around the halo of light, illuminating a figure bending down with some kind of tool as the person worked on what looked like a … vehicle? Or rather, the frame of some kind of vehicle.

Maybe she should have turned around, went back inside the house, and pretended like she hadn’t seen a thing, but something inside Lily’s gut wouldn’t let her. Before she even understood her own actions, Lily had walked down the steps of the deck and was half way across the back yard.

The closer she came to that grinding sound and the man in the light, the worse she felt. The tightest sensation wrapped around her heart, filling it to the brim with dread and making every beat hurt.

When Lily was just a few steps away from the garage door, her heart might as well have fell from her chest and shattered across the lawn. The vehicle … She knew that vehicle. She knew the shape of it because the image of it had permanently imprinted itself inside her memories ever since that shooting at the Trentini home. It didn’t matter that all that was left of the vehicle was nothing more than a steel frame and twisted black metal.

No, Lily knew.

The torch lit up again, blowing into the chassis. The man dropped the tool and picked up what looked like a grinder of some sort. Sparks flew everywhere, lighting up the mask the person wore to protect his face. The awful grinding sound started up again, making Lily cringe from the volume of the noise. Lily’s ears ached and the terrible stench the grinder created as it cut through the hot steel burned her nose.

Lily turned on her heel, needing to get away from that vehicle and what it all meant. She didn’t make it very far. The grinder shut off just as she took her first few steps. She heard a muffled curse before the familiar voice became a hell of a lot clearer.

“Lily?”

No.

Why?

Everything inside screamed those two simple words. Nothing was right. Everything was so terribly wrong and foul.

Lily spun on her heel in the dewy grass. “Why?”

Damian dropped the welding mask to the cement floor of the building. “Lily—”

“Why is that here?” she interrupted, her voice barely breaking a whisper.

“It’s nothing, Lily.”

Lily scoffed, dark and hateful. “Right. It’s nothing. Tell me that’s not the vehicle used in the Trentini shooting. Tell me that!”

Damian didn’t look away as he said, “I can’t.”

“Because it is.”

“Yes,” he confirmed quietly.

Lily’s heart broke all over again. “Why?”