Page 26 of To the Grave

“Fuck yes,” I grunted. “Your ass is so tight, doll. So fucking tight.”

Wolf groaned and I knew he was coming too, spilling into her pussy like I spilled into her ass, both of us filling her up while shudders wracked her body and she swore like a truck driver.

She collapsed onto Wolf when it was over, her back rising and falling with her shallow breath, her hairline damp with sweat.

Wolf’s wrapped his arms around her and I eased out of her ass, then lay down next to them. Her head was resting on Wolf’s chest, her eyes closed as she caught her breath.

I flung my arm over her back and a few seconds later her eyes fluttered open. I was mesmerized by her face: her plush lips and high cheekbones, the sweep of her eyelashes against her creamy skin.

But it was always her eyes that pierced something in my chest, that made me feel like someone had punched a hole in my lungs so that I couldn’t breathe quite right.

“Welcome back,” I said.

Her smile was a little sad, but it was real. “Thanks for bringing me back.”

“Don’t leave us again, doll.” I didn’t have to think about the words. It was my biggest fear.

She held my gaze. “I won’t.”

I wanted to believe it was a promise, but if there was one thing I’d learned in life it was that nothing was guaranteed.

And there were things Daisy still didn’t know.

Chapter 19

Daisy

We crashed back to reality hard on Sunday by putting in a full day of work on the house. I was avoiding the kitchen — I didn’t have the bandwidth for such a huge upheaval — but we were running out of other things to do. It was all finishing touches now, and Otis spent the day installing some of the new light fixtures stacked in boxes around the house while Wolf replaced molding that had been replicated by a restorer in the city.

Decorative molding in the mid-1800s was made out of plaster, not wood, and Wolf was uniquely good at handling it, his musician’s fingers skillfully installing the delicate pieces that had been created out of custom molds.

My house budget — dwindling at a rapid rate — had taken a hit with the decision to have the moldings restored to match the original but I’d compromised in other places to make it happen. I wanted the house returned to its former glory, wanted it to be whole even if I wasn’t quite feeling that way yet.

I spent the day on the third floor covering holes in the walls with fresh plaster in the last of the rooms that needed it.

I was a mess by the time I was done, and I took a shower, then had takeout Chinese with Wolf and Otis before heading to bed early while they played video games. I was exhausted but I still spent some time with Blake’s phone — a nightly ritual since I’d gotten it back — before sleep.

So far I hadn’t found anything useful, just a bunch of pictures of him and the Beasts in happier times and texts between them weeks before the final tense exchange on the day of the party.

If I hadn’t already known what had happened, his phone would have told me something was wrong between them. They hadn’t been texting regularly for months before his death, and the last pictures of them together were almost a year before his murder.

My eyelids were drooping by the time I finally set the phone aside with a frustrated sigh. Wolf and Otis had told me about their latest visit to see Aloha, but I had no idea how to even begin looking for Blake’s email, let alone his passwords. I could go back to my dad’s house and look for the alleged missing phone, but the thought was overwhelming. I was starting to feel like we were never going to find out who was behind the kidnapping of the girls, and every day I held my breath, waiting for more breaking news that another girl had been kidnapped.

The police gave a press conference every time someone went missing. There were posters and search parties, pleas from family and friends if the girls had them.

But the boundaries between cities, towns, and villages cut through mountains and rivers, and the girls had been taken from a variety of areas around Blackwell Falls. Three different police departments were involved in the investigations, all of them more accustomed to dealing with brawls at one of the dive bars in Southside or a fender bender on one of the mountain roads than a missing person.

Eventually the missing girls fell into the background, the public moving on to the next tragedy.

I sank into my bed with a sigh. I loved sleeping with Wolf and Otis, but our all-night fuckfest at the inn and work on the house had caught up with me.

I woke up hours later sandwiched between Wolf and Otis, both sound asleep. The house was quiet, cool air leaking in from the cracked window. My heart was beating strangely fast, like I’d woken from a bad dream even though I didn’t remember having one.

I listened, feeling like I was missing something, but the house was quiet.

I waited for my breathing to return to normal, then lay in the dark, trying to settle back into sleep.

Ten minutes later, I knew it was a lost cause. I was awake.

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