Page 31 of To the Grave

“Get to the part where you tell me why there’s a gravestone in the cemetery for Jace when he’s sitting at the kitchen table,” I said.

Get to the part where you tell me why I spent the last three months wanting to die when Jace was alive all along.

“Everything is true up to the part where we told you Jace got trapped under a fallen beam in the fire,” Otis said. “We found the pictures of your mom and Mac, the fire started, we tried to make a run for it.”

“And then?”

“We were on our way out when I realized something,” Jace said.

It was the first time he’d spoken since we’d all sat down around the table, and hearing his voice sent a shock of cognitive dissonance through my psyche. I saw the marker in the cemetery (Jace William Kane — Beloved), the crow, all the days when I lay on the dirt half wishing I was dead too.

And yet here he was, alive and well.

“What?” It was hard even to talk to him. Somewhere under my shock, I was happy he was alive, however fucked up this all was, but there was too much shit on top of my relief to really feel it.

“Your mom wasn’t — isn’t — the only one with secrets,” Jace said. “Mac has them too, and maybe the MC itself.”

“So you…” I tried to get my head around it, tried to push out the words that would explain why he’d torn my heart out. “You faked your own death?”

We were still staring at each other when Otis spoke.

“To be fair, doll, it was a spur-of-the-moment kind of decision with the fire and all.”

“I’d tried talking to Mac about your mom,” Jace said. “He’d made it pretty fucking clear it wasn’t open for discussion, andI couldn’t really see the other old-timers at the club wanting to dish about it either.”

“We had heat, sunshine.” Wolf spoke gently, his blue eyes lit with sympathy. “The fire made that clear. No pun intended.”

“We didn’t tell anyone we were going to the compound to search the outbuilding that day,” Jace said. “And it’s not like one of us told anyone.”

“You think you were being followed?” I was almost relieved. It was way easier to focus on the mystery of my mom and Mac, the missing girls, whoever was trying to get us to stop digging for answers.

“Maybe,” Jace said. “Or maybe someone knew there are secrets at the compound, someone who knew we might come looking.”

He hadn’t taken his eyes off me since I’d returned to the kitchen, and my breath caught in my throat as I met his gaze.

He wasalive.

Alive, alive, alive.

I ordered my stupid sappy heart to take a seat.

“We had about five seconds to make the decision,” Wolf said. “The building was on fire, and as you saw, it wasn’t a little kitchen fire.”

I remembered the way the outbuilding had looked when I’d gotten to the compound, flames licking out the windows, smoke pouring from every crack in the old structure in the moments before the roof caved in.

“We had to get out of there if we didn’t want to be dead for real,” Otis said.

“If you want to be pissed at someone, be pissed at me,” Jace said. “It was my idea.”

"Bullshit. It might have been your idea, butyou” — I looked at Wolf and Otis — “went along with it. You let me think he wasdead.”

My breath caught on the last word, a sob threatening to break free of my throat as the memories of the past three months came crashing back: the bone-deep grief, the apathy about the rest of my life, the crushing loss.

So much loss it could have filled the universe.

Wolf started to get up, on his way to comfort me, but I crossed my arms over my chest. “Don’t. Just… don’t.”

He sat back down.

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