Page 4 of Cursed by Death (Ruby Jane #1)

T he door crashed into the wall as my knees buckled and I collapsed to the floor.

An unintelligible noise left my throat, not words but not quite a scream either. My brain shut down, rejecting the sight before me, as I slowly crawled towards the body on the floor.

Thomas stared up at the ceiling, sightless and unmoving. His immaculate suit had been ruined, parts of it shredded and an entire sleeve had been ripped off. One of his legs was bent at an odd angle, his leg clearly having been broken. His right arm, the one where the sleeve had been ripped off, was missing huge chunks of skin, looking like someone had bitten him and ripped chunks away.

Bile crawled up my throat and I choked. My body lurched with each gag and I was forced to move my hand from where it covered my nose to clamp it over my mouth in an attempt to keep my vomit inside of me. The move left my nose susceptible to the smell and it hit me hard. Blood and feces. Not to mention it was fucking hot in here, which made it seem a whole lot worse than what I figured it would be if the air conditioning were still working.

It crawled up my throat no matter how much I tried to stop it and I hunched over as I vomited all over the floor.

This didn’t make sense. Thomas’s body looked as if he, it, had been attacked by some kind of vicious animal. What else could have taken those chunks out of his arm like that? Certainly nothing human.

But that didn’t make any sense. The only door to the little house was the front door and it had been closed when I’d come inside. An animal couldn’t open and then close the door behind them.

Like I said, it didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense right now.

Thomas couldn’t be dead.

I sobbed as I reached over to grasp his hand. It was still warm.

Still warm.

He hadn’t been dead long enough for his body to have turned cold yet.

Oh god.

Whatever had done this to him, had brutally murdered him, be it animal or human, could still be close by. Could still be in this house at this very second.

I could be next.

I hated to leave him like this but Thomas was dead and there was nothing I could do for him. Especially if I were to die next here.

I needed to live so I could find whoever did this to him and make them pay for it. And if I found out who had murdered the one and only person I had left in my life who mattered to me I would do everything I possibly could to see that they were brought to justice for it, however that came about.

I got up and ran out of there, ran out of the house. I stopped long enough to grab the strap of my purse and lift it up from where I had dropped it onto the ground beside the garage. I clutched it tightly in my hand as I ran across the perfectly manicured lawn to the front door of my house.

I glanced over my shoulder quickly and scanned the area, relieved to find no one there, before punching in the code on the panel beside the front door. The door made a soft clicking noise as it unlocked. I hurried inside and slammed the door shut behind me. The alarm beeped at me and I pressed all of the appropriate buttons to have the locks on the door clicking in place once again.

I breathed a sigh of relief even though my home no longer felt like a safe space to me at the moment.

I hit the button on the alarm that would contact the security company, letting them know I had an emergency to send the police to my home. I had never used it before so I had no idea what their response time would be. I was sure the company had given me some bullshit response time when they’d installed it but for the life of me I couldn’t remember what it was they told me at the moment.

My brain was fried and I kept seeing Thomas’s dead body on an endless loop whenever I closed my eyes.

The home phone in the kitchen started ringing and I knew it was the security company calling to ask if I was okay or if I needed assistance. I rolled my eyes, I wouldn’t have hit the damn button if I didn’t need the help.

I let the phone ring as I headed towards the basement and my safe room. With Thomas’s help I had it built in the house not long after I had moved in. It was the first time I had spent a shit load of money on something that the old man had wholeheartedly agreed on.

I placed my palm against the scanner that unlocked the door to the basement. There was a twelve digit numerical code that unlocked the door and a different one that unlocked the front door as well.

The only two people who had the codes and who’s palms gave access were myself and Thomas. Thomas would now have to be removed from the system since he was dead because, as awful as this might sound, hands could easily be removed from the rest of the body.

I had no one else to share these secret codes with anymore.

Before, when I had thought I had been all alone in the world, I really hadn’t been because, even though she had not made herself known to me, my grandmother had been watching over me from afar.

It wasn’t much and didn’t make me think very highly of her, but something was better than nothing.

Maybe.

Or, at least, that’s what I tried to tell myself.

I closed the door, it automatically locked behind me, and I carefully made my way down the stairs. The lights lit up along the wall with each step down that I took. When I took that final step off that last step the lights overhead flickered to life throughout the basement and the entire wall of screens blinked several times before coming on and staying on.

There was enough food, water, and provisions down here in the storage room to last me months, if not an entire year. There was also a couch that pulled out into a bed for me to sleep on and pretty much everything else I might need to live down here for however long the food would last me.

It was the wall of monitors that had brought me down here today. There were cameras covering every single inch of the outdoor space on my property. Though, there were absolutely no cameras inside either of the houses or the garage. I believed in privacy, but I still wanted to know what was going on on my property.

The camera footage wouldn’t tell me what Thomas had exactly gone through before his death, which I wasn’t sure if I was thankful for or not, but it would show me who had entered the cottage. Which would tell me who had done that to the man and stole the rest of his life from him.

I sat down on the couch and picked up the laptop on the cushion beside me that I had discarded and left there the last time I had been down here.

I fired the laptop to life and started clicking around on things, bringing up the cameras I was looking for.

The screens on the wall started backtracking through time. When it showed two men, seemingly identical, walking out of the front door, I slowed it down and paused it.

I zoomed in on their faces, moving from one to the other and back again.

Yes, they were indeed identical. Most people would likely never be able to tell them apart.

But I knew in my heart. The one on the right was Bane. The one on the left was Roan.

It was them.

I knew after all this time just looking at their images on screen and not up close and personal. I hadn’t seen them since they were young teens, but I’d know these men anywhere.

What in the fuck was going on here? Had they killed Thomas?

After all this time, how had they found me?

Did they even know that they’d been to my house, that I lived here?

I watched them walk through the yard and disappear into the trees where the woods kissed the edge of my yard.

I kept watching the video play out. It showed another uninvited guest that left before the twins had showed up and he had stayed far longer than they had. I didn’t get a clear look at him because he’d worn a dark hoodie with the hood pulled up over his head, and his face had been hidden in the shadows.

He was short and slightly overweight, with a protruding belly.

He came out of the same woods that the twins had vanished into. He’d skulked around my house, trying to get inside. When he couldn’t he went to Thomas’s front door.

Before Thomas opened the door for him, the man looked up. The only thing the camera made out clearly was his vibrant, glowing, red eyes.

Eyes that very much did not appear human.

My heart dropped down somewhere near my asshole as I struggled to breathe.

I had never seen them before in real life, but I’d read about eyes like that before when going through all of the many boxes of information my grandmother had gathered over the years.

Those boxes were actually down here in this very basement.

There was information in them that claimed there were things not quite human that ran the dirty, filthy, underbelly of this city.

An underbelly my father had lived in the higher ranks of for years.

Were the twins a part of that?

Did my father have Thomas killed?

A hundred different questions ran through my mind and I didn’t have answers to any of them.

The police arrived not long after, and I had no idea what to tell them about what had happened here.