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I don’t add what we’re both thinking. If Mackenzie is this bold, this fucking unhinged to just walk into her sister’s space and start shooting, then what will she try next when she finds out Claudia isn’t dead?
We leave too many things unsaid and get to work. Eli does indeed find a YouTube video, and in minutes he’s got the harness on and is scrambling up the wall of the underground room, placing nuts and cams into the bedrock to build a safe route up to the tunnel entrance. He drags his arms over the lip and shines his headlamp inside.
“There are hooks up here – nice, solid steel ones,” he calls down to me. “Mackenzie probably had a rope ladder she took with her. Throw me that rope.”
I do it, and Eli loops the rope through the hooks. Now, it’s easy for one of us to climb back up if we need to. I grab the rope and pull myself up behind Eli.
This tunnel is so low, we have to crawl on our hands and knees. Damp clings to the rough bedrock walls. We follow the tunnel at an upward angle for quite a distance. It comes out in a hidden rock-shelf near the boundary of the Beaumont Hills cemetery. Eli and I duck around the crumbling graves of less-prosperous individuals as we clamber up the rocky cliff-face to the flatter ground.
At the top of the cliff, I lean against an obelisk and catch my breath. Here, the heart of the cemetery has been manicured within an inch of its life. It’s crowded with elaborate-looking tombs and monuments that lord over the more modest memorials dotted further down the cliff toward the bay. Even in death, they command the premiere view of the emerald waters below. They’re all treated equally by the elements, though – the elaborate carvings blasted flat by the ocean winds, the relentless salt spray obliterating names and dates. Discarded ribbons and flower petals scatter around my feet, torn from the hands of mourners before they can be placed on the ground.
Nothing lasts forever.
“Noah, look,” Eli calls from further along a meandering path that leads to a jacaranda tree, bent and twisted by the ocean winds. Its lower branches sag under the weight of purple blooms that dangle like forlorn trumpets over a pair of crumbling tombstones.
Eli stares at the graves like he expects a zombie hand to shoot from the ground at any moment and drag him down into the depths of hell.
When I look at the graves, I don’t understand what he’s so freaked about. Maybe they’re relatives of his. But Eli moved to Emerald Beach from Tennessee, and I didn’t think he had family in the area…
“The names,” Eli whispers.
I stare at the names on the graves. ARCHIBALD CLARENCE and his wife GERALDINE CLARENCE. “Dude, what about them?”
“I remember the Clarence family,” Eli says. “They were Dad’s clients. Died in a boating accident. They had a Nautical-themed funeral – remember, from the reality TV show? Dad dressed up as a pirate… that was about four and a half years ago. The timing makes perfect sense. Their graves would have been freshly dug. I think we’re standing on the spot where…”
He can’t bring himself to finish the sentence.
The truth slams into me like a fist in the arena. Archibald and Geraldine – I don’t know who they were, whether they were good people, whether they loved each other, but I want to dash their gravestones on the cliffs below and salt the earth where they lay.
This is the spot where Claudia was buried alive.
If we dug up these graves, we wouldn’t just find the earthly remains of this deceased couple – we’ll find an empty second coffin in one and, in the other, the remains of Julian August.
My blood boils with a rage so all-consuming it burns my soul clean. I am washed of my sins, born again baptized in bloodshed. Born again as her soldier, her knight in battle-scarred armor.
Claws could have been killed tonight, just as she was nearly snuffed out that night four years ago, the night that changed everything.
We weren’t there to protect her then, but we’re fucking here now.
Eli looks up at me, and his eyes are hard as stone. “At the prison, they said Brutus visited my father several times. Dad was terrified of Mackenzie, because he thought she was six feet under. Because he helped put her there. We have to find Mackenzie. We have to make sure no one ever gets the chance to hurt Claudia again.”
“We’ll do more than find her,” I growl. “I’ll pull every bone from her body out her asshole, one by one.”
The sun rises over the ocean by the time we crawl back into the tunnel – a flaming chariot fighting back the darkness, tearing the sky open to spill blood across the horizon. I find Claws in Howard’s office, upending drawers and flinging papers into a messy pile on the floor. I run to her and wrap her in my arms, pulling her away from the bookshelves before she tips them over and buries herself under piles of her father’s old junk.
“What are you doing?” I murmur into her hair, holding her so tight I know I’m cutting off oxygen. But I don’t care. I need to feel her in my bones.
“I missed something. I know I did.” Claws kicks a pile of books, then winces, rubbing her toe. “You blocked off the tunnel?”
“We followed it out to the cliffs at Beaumont Hills cemetery. We can’t do much in the daytime, but we’re heading back tonight with some quick-set concrete to finish the job,” I say. “Tiberius is picking some up on the way back from his little chore.”
“Good.” Claudia clings to me like I’m the only thing keeping her upright. “That’s good.”
The sun’s heat stretches through the open French door, lighting my skin, reminding me that I’ve burned up on the battlefield of my own rage. Two modest graves blot my vision, but what surges in my veins isn’t rage – because the rage that’s lived inside me since my brother’s death is only destructive. It takes and takes and takes, eating me from the inside until I was nothing but an empty, bitter husk.
But seeing love and tragedy exist in harmony at those two tombstones has burned away the rage. A couple who wanted to spend eternity together had their final resting place corrupted by a blood feud without end. The knowledge of it gives my rage form, substance, life.
What flows in my veins now is only her. Only love.
