Page 59 of Sins of the Hidden

"I-I..." My voice failed. I gestured vaguely at the half-finished pastries, unable to find words that wouldn't cause more pain.

Something flickered across his face—a shadow of memory, there and gone too quickly to interpret.

"You're shaking," he said, the accusation absent from his voice, replaced by something softer, more wounded.

His eyes were fixed on my hands. Something softened in his expression.

"Mari used to shake like that, too." His voice gentled, thick with memory. "She'd get overwhelmed easily. Even back in high school, I learned to recognize when it was happening." He looked away, jaw tightening.

I didn't know what to say. My heart still hadn't slowed down.

He pushed away from the wall protectively and crossed the kitchen, retrieving bags from a cabinet and boxes from an upper shelf. When he slammed them down beside me, I flinched, a small sound between a gasp and a whimper escaping my lips. His eyes caught mine, and for the briefest moment, something shifted in his expression. "Mari always kept the kitchen prepared." His voice gentled around his wife's name. I noticed his thumb absently tracing a pattern on the cardboard as he spoke.

His eyes drifted to the small scorch mark on the counter, and something almost like fondness crossed his face. "Thatburn mark? I made that one night, trying to help her bake. Valentine's Day. I wanted to surprise her with cookies." A ghost of a smile twitched at his lips. "Caught the damn counter on fire. She laughed so hard she cried. Wouldn't let me fix it. Said it was a reminder that I wasn't allowed near the oven without supervision."

I looked at the baking supplies around us, staying silent as he continued. His gaze traveled through me as if I were glass, focusing on something—someone—that existed in a dimension I couldn't access. In the hollows of his eyes, I saw her for a moment: a woman laughing, dusted with flour, eternally preserved in the amber of his memory. His silence told me everything: pack quickly and leave this consecrated ground.

He followed close behind as we entered the common area, his steps falling in a rhythm that seemed coordinated with my heartbeat. Never more than an arm's length away—Mari's supplies, I realized, physically pained him to watch being carried away. He made directly for Victoria, loss hardening back into rage with each footfall. "You know better than to let her use Mari's kitchen," he said, each word emerging like a bone fragment working its way through flesh. His hands gripped the bar, knuckles whitening to reveal old scars from past fights as the wood groaned in protest beneath his grip.

"This is her happy place." The confession emerged as a prayer too broken for God to hear.

"It's been three years, Husk," Victoria whispered, her own eyes wet with a pain she'd carried alongside his—a lesser burden, but a burden nonetheless. She reached toward him, then stopped, her hand suspended in a space that had been mapped and remapped by countless similar aborted gestures. "I miss her too. Marilyn was?—"

"Is." The word burst from him, making me flinch. His fist slammed into the bar. Wood splintered. Blood flowed from hisknuckles, but he didn't even notice. "Don't you fucking dare use past tense for my Mari."

Victoria recoiled, her lips parting in shock before pressing into a thin line. Her eyes glistened with tears she wouldn't allow to fall, not in front of him. She understood his rage, had weathered it countless times before, but each outburst reopened wounds that never fully healed. Her gaze darted to me, a silent apology in her eyes before she squared her shoulders and faced the storm of Husk's grief once more.

"She is my best friend. She is my wife. She is my everything." Each statement hammered down with the terrible precision of nails in a coffin—not Mari's, but his own. His speech, always commanding, fractured on the final word, the sound raw with agony. "She's out there somewhere, and that kitchen... that kitchen is waiting for her. Just like I am. Every fuckin’ day." He moved toward Victoria with the inexorable momentum of his brokenness that had nowhere else to go, his body language not threatening but beseeching—begging her to maintain the fiction that kept him breathing.

Victoria's fingers curled around the edge of the bar, knuckles whitening as though bracing against an incoming storm. She drew a careful breath, choosing her words with the precision of someone navigating a minefield. "We all want her back, Husk," she said softly, her voice barely audible above the hum of the air conditioning. Her gaze dropped to the splinters embedded in his bleeding knuckles. "Mari wouldn't want--"

"Don't you dare talk like she's gone." His voice dropped to a ragged whisper more devastating than his shout had been.

Silence descended, broken only by the gentle metronome of his blood dripping onto the floor. No one moved. Even the air seemed to still itself out of respect for a loss so absolute it bent reality around it.

"Okay." Victoria looked at me sympathetically, "Sorry, sugar."

"I-It's okay," I managed, lifting the bag of borrowed supplies. The weight pulled against my shoulder. I clutched the baking supplies, feeling strange taking them. "I-I'll just go to my parents' house."

The clubhouse doors banged open with enough force to rattle the bottles behind the bar. V entered with all the menace I'd spent my life avoiding until my father's secret profession had pulled me into this world against my will. His hair was disheveled, strands escaping the low bun at his nape. The surgical mask clung to his face, crumpled and askew. His dark eyes swept the room with sharp focus, cataloging every detail until landing on me, questioning the bag silently. Then sliding to Husk, standing too close.

His eyes darkened, cold fury crystallizing across his features as the metallic scent of violence rolled off him in waves, mingling with leather and ash. Dark stains marked his black, tight-fitting long-sleeved shirt, smeared across his forearm where his knuckles split open, exposing raw flesh over bone.

Chest heaving, he crossed the room in four deliberate strides, his body immediately positioning between Husk and me. He stopped so close that I felt his body heat even with inches between us. His hands were stained with blood. Then I saw it—the bat hanging from his grip, leaving a scarlet trail on the floor.

"Why the fuck were you with her?" he growled.

Husk's expression hardened, anger giving way to defiance. "Helping her pack up."

V's grip clenched around his bat, tendons in his forearm standing out like cables. "You were alone with her." Not a question—an accusation.

"In Mari's kitchen," Husk clarified, danger edging his voice. "Think I'd dishonor my wife's memory?"

V stepped closer, air compressing with tense possibility. The bat scraped against the floor—like nails on a chalkboard. A promise.

"Don't care about Marilyn." His chin jerked toward me, eyes never leaving Husk.

"Say that again," Husk challenged, eyes narrowing.

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