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Vi could give God two middle fingers, but he never threatened her mate’s life. He never told her that her mate would be the world’s undoing. I didn’t know how to defy Hel and get the information we needed at the same time.
Honestly, I was afraid that I would go to her only to learn that Maddox really was the cause of all these problems. I didn’t want to believe that he’d killed people. I didn’t want to learn that he was causing ghosts to corrupt so horribly. The facts were all right in front of me, but I wasn’t willing to put the pieces together.
Hands clenched at my sides, I stomped and shouted, “Fuck!”
A woman beside me flinched. She gave me a wide berth as she scuttled past me. I bit my lip, a flush rising to my cheeks.
I wondered if this was what a caged shifter felt like. I wanted to thrash and break free of the confines of my current situation, but I knew that wouldn’t actually solve anything. The web would only wind tighter around me. If I was going to get through this, I had to tread the threads carefully.
This spider web analogy worked oddly well, and considering how gross spiders were, I didn’t know how I felt about this. Mind working through this analogy, I went over to Maddox’s SUV and leaned on the back bumper.
The feeling of being watched crawled across my skin. My head shot up. Without hesitation, I probed with my arcana. There was nothing dead in the perimeter, but that told me nothing. I hadn’t been able to feel anything earlier. That likely hadn’t changed.
“Bastien?” I whispered as I pushed my hair away from my face.
I scanned the wooded areas around the edge of the parking lot. The shadows gave away nothing. Thoughts of the dead Reaper came back to me. I’d been there when he died once and for all. I wanted to believe that he couldn’t come back, but my knowledge about our kind was slim. He’d managed to stay alive using Reaper souls. Who was to say that he couldn’t find his way back?
I wrapped my arms around my middle and pressed my back flush against the SUV so no one could creep up on me. A shudder ran down my spine. It was the chill whisper of death, but I couldn’t understand what it was saying. A kind of language barrier had yawned between us, and it left my breath shaky.
For a moment, I considered going back inside. I wanted to run to Maddox, but he wasn’t going to help me. He’d made it clear that he wanted to use me and my abilities. The only reason he would protect me was because he wanted to keep me in his back pocket.
The thought stung more than I’d wanted to admit. All this time, I’d been ignoring the pain of the truth. That exhilaration I’d felt in the hallway when he’d pinned me to the wall was nothing more than a fleeting urge to him, and I knew that now.
I pushed off the SUV and glared into the woods. My skin crawled. Someone was still there, still watching. In a fit of angry defiance, I spread my arms wide and invited them to come out.
No one appeared.
A hand touched my shoulder.
I yelped and spun around. The receptionist offered me a pitiful smile. This older woman, close to Perse’s age, clearly thought that I had more than a few screws loose. It was a look that I was very much used to, but this time, it held a little more than the assumption that I wasn’t all there.
She thought Maddox and I were having a couple’s fight. That look told me that she knew Maddox could be a pain. It reminded me that he’d had a wife, and now the office likely thought he was trying to move on with me.
I slapped my hand over my racing heart and let out a nervous laugh. “You startled me.”
She tilted her head in a kind of agreement. “Fair. With everything that’s been going on around here, lately, I don’t blame you for being hyper vigilant. Weren’t you involved in Maddox’s last murder case? Girls like yourself were getting…”
Her words trailed off like she couldn’t bring herself to say what we both obviously knew.
“Is that how you and Maddox got together?” she asked.
To my credit, my cheeks weren’t hot enough to fry eggs after that question. They were more of a slow-roast heat. I fought the urge to reach up and cover my face.
“He and I aren’t…” Oh, she wasn’t going to believe me, though. I could already tell.
The woman smiled knowingly, even though she’d made a false assumption. I was oddly comforted to know that she wasn’t a detective.
“You remind me of his late wife,” the woman said as she dug her keys from her purse. “The two of you have the same kind of distant look all the time. She was a sweetheart, but it was like she was never really present. Her attention was always elsewhere. It was a bit rude, actually.”
Why did the older generations speak so cruelly when they taught us that if we didn’t have anything nice to say then we shouldn’t speak at all? I would never understand the hypocritical nature. Her blatant statement gave me some insight that I hadn’t expected, though.
I was never really present because I was always trapped in conversation with ghosts that no one else could see. If Maddox’s late wife had the same kind of aloofness, then it made me wonder if she could have been a Reaper, too. Did Maddox have a type?
“He doesn’t talk about her very often,” I said, trying to keep this conversation going even as the older woman made her way to her car.
She paused at the driver’s side door. There was a secretive smile to her lips. She was about to gossip. A trill of warning fluttered inside my chest, but I wanted to know what Maddox was hiding from me so badly that I ignored the red flags.
The woman looked back to the station’s door to make sure that no one else was around before she leaned in to whisper, “I heard that Paige cheated on him before she died. She was living with the other guy. She and Maddox didn’t even try to make things work.”
