Page 9 of Claimed By The Orc

But then I sobered up and got back to the point. “What does my questionable taste in men and room décor have to do with anything though?”

“‘Cause it wasn’t only room décor and crushes. You wanted to be a football player, Tan. And you could’ve been. You were fucking good. You even started on a D1 team your freshman year. That doesn’t just happen.”

I looked down at the table and traced a groove in the wood. I could hear the girls giggling in the living room. My guess was that Mia figured out we were having a serious conversation and was distracting them. But that meant I had to answer Jake.

It hurt thinking about it, even if I didn’t regret my decision. Still, I would never hold him back. I wanted him to follow his dreams and get to do everything I couldn’t. “Jake,” I said seriously, unable to keep the anguish out of my voice. “I’d never ask you to do that. You deserve more than that. I want to see you accomplish everything you want to. I want everything for you. For all of you.”

Tears filled Jake’s eyes that he wiped away angrily. “Well unfortunately, life is a piece of shit and it doesn’t work that way.”

“Jake—” The doorbell rang. Fuck.

“I’ll get it. Get the girls.” Then Jake walked out of the room, leaving me fucking reeling.

I couldn’t sleep that night. So after the girls were all down, I checked on Mom and Jake, who was on his headset playing a video game with his friends, then I snuck out the back door to take a walk. I’d tried to bring up the scouts to Jake again, but he’d kept brushing me off. I had to find a way to talk to him about it without him getting defensive. I wouldn’t run roughshod over his decisions, but I also didn’t want him to regret it or resent us because he felt forced to stay home to help. Maybe I had to stop relying on him so much when I was working. I could talk to Chelsey, the girls’ babysitter. Maybe she’d be willing to work something out with me that wouldn’t cost a fortune. Or I could talk to my boss about letting the girls hang out at the store sometimes. It would suck for all of us, and definitely cut into my time with my little stalker, Mark, but if I took some of the pressure off Jake, maybe he wouldn’t feel obligated to stay here?

With my thoughts racing a million miles an hour, I hadn’t even realized I had walked toward the sink pit.

The thing had been the subject of many stories and dares growing up. And the cause of so many groundings. Not mine. I was always too busy to spend time doing stupid shit like that. But I’d still heard all the tales at school. All the rumors about kids getting stuck in it and never coming out. All the talk of serial killers burying their bodies there.

I shook my head, smiling slightly. The thing had been practically in my backyard my whole life and I had never seenanything shady happen there, and believe me, I’d looked. I’d been a little fascinated with the macabre as a kid, especially after Dad had died and Mom had gotten sick.

I heard a noise coming from the other side of the pit. I froze, listening. At first, there was nothing and I thought I’d imagined it, but then, there it was again. A scraping sound, like something heavy being dragged. The crunch of a boot. More dragging.

I fished out my phone out of my pocket and held it tight. I didn’t turn on the flashlight because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, but I wanted to be ready if I needed to call the sheriff.

I should turn the fuck around. I didn’t have time to deal with whatever creepy ass thing was happening. I did not want to be the stereotypical dumb jock from a horror movie.

But I guessed I was because I kept walking in the direction of noises against my own free will. I swore my legs had a mind of their own and no self-preservation because I knew damn well this was a bad idea. I crept closer, and I could barely make out the shadow of a man. He was hunched over and focused on something.

“Axum and Nash owe me oshenge buns. A whole case of them! And a lifetime supply of the Cheetos. Maybe they can figure out how to make something similar at home.”

I froze. I knew that voice better than my own. It now replaced Channing Tatum’s in my dreams. It made me smile every time I heard it at work. I anxiously waited for when he wasn’t around.

Mark.

He was clearly dragging something heavy through the overgrown brambles and heading right to the sink pit. Not suspicious at all.

I needed to run. But apparently, I had zero survival skills because I kept right on walking toward Mark instead, like he had a fucking magnet attracting me to him. It was beyond mycontrol at this point. My little stalker had had me in a chokehold since day one, and his red flags becoming a whole fucking red beacon complete with flashing lights and sirens apparently wasn’t enough for me to turn away.

The dragging stopped, and I could get my first clear view of the man. He stood up straight and wiped his head before muttering a curse in a language I didn’t understand.

I rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand because there was no fucking way I was seeing what I thought I was. Maybe I should start laying off the soda too. Or maybe I needed something harder than that because clearly the stress was getting to me. I had to be imagining this whole thing.

I opened my eyes, blinking away the colorful spots, and focused on Mark again. Nope, nothing had changed.

Mark was dragging something that I was pretty fucking sure was a body, wrapped in a clear tarp.

Honestly, that wasn’t the shock it should’ve been. Serial killer and/or assassin had been on my list of possible careers for Mark since the beginning. See also: hitman. What was surprising was the body he was dragging. It was huge, like probably seven feet tall, and maybe the light was fucking with me, but I was pretty sure it was green.

What. The. Fuck?

“Tanner?”

I blinked out of my stupor to see Mark standing upright, his body angled in a way that made it look like he was trying to hide the giant, green, tarp-wrapped elephant in the room. Like it was possible for his tiny build to block all . . . that. He was watching me with big, terrified eyes as if he were scared of me, and for some reason, that calmed me down. He was the one dragging some monster I’d only seen in anime or read about in a monster fucking smut book to the sink pit and yet he was scared of me?

“Tanner, I can explain. Please.” He sounded so panicked that I wanted to give him a hug and tell him that everything was okay, and seriously, what the hell, survival instincts?

“Okay,” I said, and like the dumbass I was proving myself to be, I sat down in the wet dirt and waited. “Explain.”

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