Page 6 of Graves

Darting through a few parked cars, I sprint to the other side of the road. My feet are quick but light, barely making a singlesound. It’s an art to be mastered when you are as large as I am, but it’s one I’ve perfected.

He’s practically twenty feet from her, and my heart is pounding with fury as I close the final steps between us and slip my arm around his neck. My hand covers his mouth to muffle his screams, though I know my angel plays her music entirely too loud to hear regardless.

Taking my knife from my pocket, I flick it open before plunging it into his side, right into the kidney. Even through my hand, his scream is piercing. He reaches for the knife, gripping the handle, but I smack his hand away as I pull my knife from his fingers and push him to the ground. I jump on top of him and begin letting out my wrath on this worthless waste of life. He was going to touch her, hurt her. He’ll never even get the chance to set eyes on her again.

I grip the sides of his face, digging my thumbs into his eye sockets until I hear a loud pop in each, and his screams fill up the night air. My eyes flick forward to see my angel crossing the street, completely unaware of the scene behind her as she makes her way to the front of her apartment building. Good. I wouldn’t want her to set those unique beauties on someone as unsightly as this man.

“Freeze! Hands where I can see them!” a voice shouts from over my shoulder.

Are you fucking kidding me?

I have two choices at this moment. I could grab my knife, turn, and have it lodged in the cop’s jugular in less than two seconds, but based on the sound of the passenger door opening,I’d say he has a partner with him who will no doubt get a few bullets into me before I can get to them, and honestly, I still walk with a slight limp since the last time I was shot.

My second choice is to play victim until Dominic can get a crooked enough judge to get me out of no doubt an attempted murder charge. I don’t like that one at all, but it seems to be the only one that gets me back to my angel the fastest, so I’ll make it work.

I quickly slide into character, leaping away from the scum as I scramble across the ground and hold my hands up shakily.

“P-please, help,” I stutter. “H-he attacked me. Tried to stab me with his k-knife.”

The cop holding me at gunpoint pauses for a moment, his eyebrows dipping as his mind tries to catch up with the curveball I just threw him.

“Looked like you were the threat, not him,” he says, still holding that gun on me as he looks at the other guy.

I look to his partner to see a hardened judgment in his eye as he too holds out his gun. My mind starts racing with a plan to get out of here when another cruiser pulls up and two more cops get out. Fuck. Looks like my angel will have to sleep on her own tonight.

When they slap the cool metal handcuffs onto me, my eyes flick up to the second window to the left on the third story. The light flicks on in the same moment, and a small sense of ease settles that she’s safe, at least for tonight.

I’ll see you soon, angel.

Chapter Four

DOMINIC

Iroll up the cuffs of my black shirt to my elbows as I sit in the metal chair and wait on the other side of the plexiglass window for my idiot twin. What the fuck was he thinking?

He didn’t tell me much.

Last night, I got a phone call from him saying that he got arrested at the corner of Thompson and 47that 1:15 a.m. I knew what he was saying without saying it. So I pulled up the street cams and wiped the footage of his attack, made it look like a technical glitch, and erased my footprints in casethey dove deeper into the issue.

The question is, what the hell was he doing?

For the last few months, there has been something off about him. Don’t get me wrong, there was always something off about my brother. We lived the same life but dealt with the events of that life in two totally different ways. I internalize and only allow out what is absolutely necessary, where Zayden feels everything. He feels so deeply and so wildly that he jumps over the line of crazy and lives in full-on psycho town. It’s a miracle he hasn’t gone all Jack the Ripper on the world these days. I think our line of work keeps the demons inside him at least semi-satiated, so I make sure the work is steady and the plans are iron-tight.

Which is why I still can’t, for the life of me, figure out why a highly skilled killing machine could make such a reckless and careless attack on some random drug addict that came out of nowhere. The video didn’t make sense to me the first time I watched it, but it only took one rewind for everything to become much clearer.

It was her. Something about that girl set him off. The man was obviously about to harm her in some way, and I watched my brother intervene, no, annihilate the guy before the girl even had a chance to look over her shoulder.

I’ve seen my brother’s control slip. His irrational actions take over from time to time, but never like this. Never to the point where he got arrested. Because of what we do, it’s important we maintain perfect records, that way we are never suspects. Well, pair that bullshit lie about a cop being onto us, a cop whodoesn’t even exist, might I add, with my brother’s idiocy, and I’ve had enough of this shitty week.

The door in the back buzzes before it opens, allowing several guards to escort inmates to various phones. The last inmate is the tallest, with inky black hair to match my own, two arms filled with tattoos differentiating us, and an entirely too-casual demeanor for being where he is at this moment. Zayden towers over his guard by at least a half-foot, and the guard looks far more intimidated by Zayden than he should.

If only he knew how scared he really should be.

Zayden plops down into the chair across from me, picking up the phone while I do the same. I raise an unimpressed eyebrow at him, which only causes him to roll his eyes and lean back into his chair.

“What?”

“What?” I parrot. “How about, what were you possibly thinking?”

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