Page 32 of To the Grave

“It wasn’t because we didn’t trust you,” Otis said.

“Then why? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I didn’t trust myself,” Jace said.

I shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I didn’t trust myself to stay away from you,” he said. “I knew if we let you in on the secret, I’d be in your bed every fucking night, creeping around this place just to look at you.”

I sucked in a breath. It was the closest Jace had come to expressing his feelings, to admitting that what I felt for him, he felt for me too. “That’s not good enough.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll say it as many times as I have to,” he said. “But it worked.”

“What do you mean it worked?” I asked.

“I found something. Something important.”

“Are you going to tell us or do you want us to guess?” Otis asked.

“It’s about my dad.” Jace hesitated. “I don’t think he’s dead.”

Chapter 24

Jace

There was no easy way to do this. No easy way to tell them what I’d learned and make things right with Daisy, all while bringing myself back from the dead. The details — of my time away from her, of what I’d found on the compound — were all jumbled together, coming out in a way that didn’t seem quite right given everything that had happened.

I’d been alone for a long time, had gotten used to being alone with all the thoughts running through my head.

Wolf shook his head. “What the actual fuck?”

“Exactly,” I said.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t still shocked — and a whole fucking lot of other things — but I’d been sitting with it, trying to figure out if the discovery meant it was time to go home.

To go back to Daisy.

It had hurt to be away from her. Hurt in my body. My bones.

I’d lurked around the house even when I knew it was dangerous, knew she might see me. I’d lingered in the trees around the old cemetery, listening to Daisy talk to me, trying to send her answers with my mind, wishing I could cross thedistance between us and pull her into my arms when she cried. I’d watched her fade away before my eyes, get thinner and paler until I didn’t know which of us was supposed to be the ghost.

“Wasn’t your dad cremated?” Otis asked.

“That’s what I was told, but I was just a kid. Not even five years old. Truth is, I don’t really remember it.”

I rememberedhim, but only in flashes: a gruff voice telling me to go play, a giant of a man with a beard and hard green eyes. Sometimes I even thought I remembered the funeral service. I saw people standing on the banks of the river, Mac tipping an urn until a stream of ash poured into the water.

But I didn’t know how much of it was real and how much of it was imagined.

Especially now.

“How do you know this?” Daisy asked.

For the last three months, I’d only seen her from afar, and as fucking pathetic as it sounded, I just wanted to look at her. It wasn’t even four a.m. and she was as beautiful as I’d ever seen her, brown hair tousled and cheeks pink, her violet eyes blazing with anger and something I wanted to believe was relief.

I could still feel her tight pussy around my cock when we’d fucked in the kitchen, her warm flesh in my hands, the fevered sweep of her tongue in the moments before common sense had gotten the better of her.

Fuck. I was hard again, which was hella inconvenient since I was pretty sure Daisy would never let me touch her again.

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