Page 124 of Reaper and Ruin

I waved him off. “I’ll be fine. The walk will do me good.”

He crossed the room as the kids whined for him to keep playing, but his gaze was all for me. He brushed his lips over mine. “If you change your mind, you’ll call one of us?”

I kissed him back. “I promise. But I already feel better.” It wasn’t a lie. The nausea came and went in waves, and so far I hadn’t even thrown up, so I was feeling pretty lucky overall, apart from the nagging worry that I would be arrested and lose it all.

But I wasn’t going to confess that to X. I said goodbye to the kids and let myself out of the front door. Levi and Whip leaned against the ice cream truck, standing so close their arms touched, despite there being more than enough room to stand apart.

Levi held his phone out, the call on speaker so they could both hear it.

They looked up as I approached, and I caught the end of their conversation.

Dax’s familiar voice was on the other end. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. But it might be a while. King is going to continue your apprenticeship in the meantime.”

Levi caught my hand but continued his conversation. “I understand. I really fucking do, and don’t think this is about me. I’ll be fine with King. But, Dax, fuck, man. What are you going to do?”

Dax heaved a sigh and shrugged. “I can’t just sit here, hoping she’ll return. I need to know what happened. I need to go search for her or something.”

Levi bit his lip, and when he didn’t say anything, Dax went on. “I love her, man. What the hell else am I supposed to do? What would you do if it were Violet?”

“Burn the world down until I found her,” Levi agreed without a second of hesitation. He squeezed my fingers, like he was reassuring himself I was still there. “Go. Don’t worry about the shop. We’ll do whatever needs doing until you return.”

He ended the call.

Tears pricked the backs of my eyes. “He still doesn’t believe she’s dead.”

Levi shook his head. “We have no proof she is. No body.”

“Travis said…” We all knew what Travis had said.

Whip sighed. “I hate seeing Dax like this. I think we should go out to the dump site again and make sure Nyah’s body wasn’t added since the last time we were out there. If Travis killed her in the days before we killed him, he still could have had time to add her body to his and Paul’s collection.”

Levi shook his head. “I reckon they were storing bodies somewhere else first. And Travis moved them when he realized it would fuck with us.”

Whip screwed up his face. “You’re probably right. But those women out there, unidentified… It doesn’t sit right. We need to bury them properly at the very least. What’s left of them.”

I shuddered at the knowledge those women’s bodies were still there, with nothing we could do to give their families closure. Alerting the police to their whereabouts would mean pointing them at evidence of crimes we’d committed too. We could move them, but they would all be in various stages of decomposition.

My stomach rolled again at the thought of the horrifically messy job, and I doubled over, clutching my belly.

Both guys lurched for me.

“Vi?” Levi asked, panic in his voice. “What’s going on?”

I told myself to tell them. But I was clammy and going to be late for work if I didn’t get a move on. So I waved them off and forced myself to straighten. “Nothing. Just a bit of heartburn or reflux or something. Nothing to worry about.”

Neither seemed convinced.

I ignored them. “I’ve gotta get to work.”

“I’ll drive you,” Whip said instantly.

“Or I can take you on my bike,” Levi offered. Then grimaced. “Though taking corners on a bike if you aren’t feeling great might not be the best idea. Whip, you take her.”

I tried to argue with them, that I really wanted the walk, but the nausea didn’t pass as quickly as it had earlier, and suddenly the ride to work felt like a great idea. Especially since I was going to be on my feet for the rest of the day.

I kissed Levi goodbye, and Whip opened the door of his car for me. I climbed in, instantly rolling down the window so I had air.

We drove in silence, my stomach too queasy for me to make conversation. Of course I had to feel the worst I had yet on the day I had to go back to work. But I couldn’t delay it any longer. Francine was going to fire me if she had to cover my shifts for another week. She’d been very understanding about my abrupt need to take a week of personal leave, but when I’d called her ithad sounded like the sort of forced polite you had to be, rather than true concern for whatever was going on in my life.