Page 12 of Lawless (Dauntless Island #2)

I set the bucket down. “My brother already knows I’m working for you.”

“Oh,” Dominic said. “I don’t know if I should say I’m sorry or not.”

I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Anyway, since he already knows, who cares if people see us talking?”

“That sounds like a trick question,” he said. “You care, obviously.”

“I don’t,” I said, although it was probably a lie.

“What have you got in the—” He came close enough to look. “Oh, wow. What—what are you going to do with them?”

“Cook them. What else would I do with them?”

He laughed, crinkles appearing at the corners of his eyes. “Yeah, that was a dumb question, wasn’t it? How do you cook them?”

“I can show you, if you want,” I said. “I’ll even sell you one for ten bucks.”

“I might not know how to cook them, but I know that’s a bargain,” Dominic said. “Yeah, okay. I could use a crab cooking lesson.”

I reached into the bucket and pulled out the topmost crab. Dominic leapt back as I held it out towards him, and I tried not to laugh. “His claws are tied up. He can’t get you. Just take him.”

Dominic made a face as he did, like he thought the crab was going to burst out of the string and eat his face or something.

“First lesson,” I said. “Go put him in your freezer for an hour so he goes to sleep. I’ll come back then and show you how to cook him.”

“I—” He wrinkled his nose. “You know, logically I understand that in order to eat him, we have to kill him. Just, usually the supermarket has already taken care of that part.”

Mainlanders . I rolled my eyes at him and picked the bucket up. “Put him in your freezer. I’ll be back in an hour.”

When I got home, I left the bucket of crabs out the back beside the laundry tub and then went inside to check on Mum. She was sitting on the couch, gazing at the TV. One of those daytime soap operas was on.

“Hi, Mum,” I said, and crouched down beside the couch. “Got us some mudcrabs for dinner tonight. What do you want for lunch?”

She smiled faintly at me as her gaze slid over me.

“I’ll heat up some leftover cottage pie, okay?”

Mum hummed.

I made Mum’s lunch and gave it to her, then sat with her while she ate.

It was a nice day outside, bright and warm, but Mum liked to keep the curtains in the living room drawn.

It was always dark in here, no matter the time of day.

Too dim, half the time, to see the framed photos of Mum and Dad on the bookshelf.

Sometimes I wondered if she liked to stay in here to be close to them.

I didn’t like to look at them much. Every memory I had of Dad was backlit by sunlight and set to a soundtrack of the waves lapping at the sand.

I didn’t like to think of him when the world was dark and still.

I watched one of the women on the soap opera detail her nefarious scheme in a monologue.

She was going to destroy her sister’s business empire and steal her man, or something.

She was probably supposed to be the evil character, but maybe her sister was like Nipper Will, in which case, good for her.

I always liked on soap operas how characters said what they were planning out loud.

If you did that in real life, you’d be called crazy, but in real life nobody’s got an audience hanging on their every move. Most of us hardly get noticed at all.

I imagined my own unblinking monologue. Clenching my fist and saying in a fierce undertone: “I will clean out Dominic’s yard, and I will talk to him, and I will stare at his arse, and nobody on Dauntless, not even my brother, can stop me!”

It wasn’t revenge—it was barely even rebellion—but it wasn’t like Nipper Will had a multimillion dollar fashion empire I could sabotage. But it made me feel both powerful and petty to know I was doing something that Will didn’t like.

“Hey, Mum?”

She didn’t look up. Her fork scraped across her plate.

“I have to go do some yard work,” I said. “I’ll come back before it’s dark outside.”

I grabbed a few things from our kitchen before we left, including a big pot, because I didn’t know if Dominic would have everything we needed.

A strange burst of nervousness bubbled through me as I stepped over our back fence into his yard, like I really was that soap opera character planning a seduction, instead of just going over there to show him how to cook a mudcrab.

Button John didn’t think Dominic was that hot, which just showed how ridiculous he was, because Dominic was hot.

Button John had also said he’d do him anyway, because he might have been blind, but he wasn’t totally stupid.

Pickings were slim on Dauntless. And it was all well and good to say you’d do someone, but how did that work?

Like, what were you supposed to do ? Yeah, I was a nineteen-year-old virgin, and, as I knocked on Dominic’s kitchen door, I was suddenly acutely aware of that.

He opened the door, a grin spreading over his face. “Hey.”

His uniform was also hot, which felt wrong, because I was a Dauntless Islander, and we were only supposed to think fuck the police in one very specific context. And not the one that involved nakedness.

“Hey,” I said.

His kitchen hadn’t been remodelled like the front of the house, but at least someone had got rid of all the chintzy shit that Short Clarry’d had hanging up when this had been his place, like someone’s nana’s sewing box had exploded.

The kitchen was bare whitewashed walls and mostly empty counter space now.

The only flash of colour was the purple and orange striped tea towel hanging over the oven door.

There was a big cat sitting on one end of the benchtop, like it owned the place.

“Oh, hey,” I said. “You’ve got Princess.”

“Princess? I called him Frank.”

“She was Short Clarry’s cat, and she’s a girl.”

“Well, she’s called Frank now,” Dominic said. “And she doesn’t speak English, so she doesn’t know Frank isn’t a girl’s name.”

“I used to leave food out for her,” I said. “But she’d never come inside our place. I guess she was just waiting for someone to let her back in here.”

“I’m going to need to order some cat food,” Dominic said. “I have to phone the barge company and see if they’ll bring my groceries over every month if Woolworths will deliver to them, so that Mavis can’t starve me out.”

I set my pot on the benchtop next to the cat.

“What have you got there?”

“Stuff we need for the crab. Did you put him in the freezer?”

“Yeah. I even apologised to him first. I’m honestly too scared to open it again. What if he’s not dead? What if he’s in there just biding his time?”

I snorted, those bubbles bursting in my bloodstream again—he was hot and funny—and unpacked what I’d brought from home: salt, a chilli, a lemon, an onion, two tomatoes, and a can of sardines.

“What’s all this for?” The heat from Dominic’s body leached into mine as he stood beside me. “Don’t we just boil it?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but this is for the sauce.”

I filled the pot with water, dumped some salt into it, and put it on the stovetop to boil, and then rummaged around in the kitchen drawers while Dominic leaned against the bench and let me.

“You don’t have a mortar and pestle, do you?”

“No,” he said. “Because this is my kitchen, not Gordon Ramsay’s.”

“I can use a spoon,” I said. I tugged the handle of the drawer I’d seen some knives in a few moments ago, but Dominic was leaning against the end of it, blocking it. When had he moved closer? The line of his thigh was barely a hand’s breadth away from me.

“Sorry,” he said, his voice suddenly softer. He shifted away, and I pulled the drawer open with a rattle. I found a decent sized spoon I could squash stuff with.

I chopped the chilli, onion and tomatoes into as small pieces as I could, then dumped them in a bowl and used the back of the spoon to mash them together. Princess Frank got very interested when I opened the sardines and drained some of the oil into the bowl.

“She can have the sardines if you don’t want them. We just need the oil.”

Dominic’s face lit up almost as much as the cat’s when he gave her a sardine.

When the water boiled, I made Dominic take the crab out of the freezer and put it in the pot. He was so squeamish about it, it was funny. He had a job where he must have seen some bad stuff, but he needed me to tell him it was okay to put a crab in a pot.

When the twenty-five minutes was almost up, I ran the cold water in his sink, added some from the fridge, and then handed Dominic a pair of tongs. “Now get him out, and dump him in the sink. Then, when he’s cool, we bust him open and clean him.”

“Clean him?”

“Yeah, we have to pull the dead man’s fingers off him and?—”

“The what ?” His jaw dropped.

“The gills.” I lifted my chin and held his gaze. “You’re on Dauntless now, copper. You have to learn your way around mudcrabs.”

His mouth twitched. “Oh, do I?”

“Yep.” I nodded at the pot. “Hurry up, or he’ll be overcooked.”

“This is so gross,’ Dominic muttered, but he stuck the tongs in the boiling water and lifted the mud crab out. He didn’t even drop it on the way to the sink. The cold water hissed as he slid the crab in. “Like that?”

“Yeah. It’s a crab, not open heart surgery. It’s easy.”

“All I’m saying is this lunch better be worth it.”

“It will be,” I said. “It’s going to be the best thing you ever tasted.”

And I pretended I didn’t feel another one of those fluttery jolts reverberate through my body as Dominic’s gaze slipped to my mouth and lingered there for a fraction too long to be an accident.