Page 88 of Reaper and Ruin

My gut said Nyah was as dead as Toby was, murdered by a madman who was always one step ahead.

27

NYAH

Two days earlier

The sun shined, the birds chirped, and I was so loved-up that I could have levitated right off the ground. My cheeks actually hurt from smiling so much. How was that even a real thing? It should be illegal for someone to be this happy.

But I was.

Oh God, I was seriously delirious with happiness.

I had turned into one of those women I hated. The kind whose whole lives centered around a man. The kind whose only happiness was derived from sweet words, and him holding your hand in public, and tying you to his bed at night so he could do every wicked thing you’d ever dreamed of.

Dax had done them all.

Plus many I hadn’t even had the imagination to conjure up. I blushed every time I thought about it.

I didn’t even care we’d spent pretty much every minute together since we’d first met, other than when we were at work.Didn’t care that any sane human being would have called us codependent.

I was going to marry that man. And soon, because I was already sure he felt the same way. We’d spent half the night talking about how many kids we’d have—at least four—and we’d already, only half-jokingly, discussed an island wedding, just the two of us, somewhere tropical and warm where we could hide from my family and the rest of the world and just live in a cocoon made up only of the two of us.

The way we talked, it should have sent at least one of us running for the hills, and yet it hadn’t. I saw my excitement mirrored in his eyes, and that feeling of it just beingrightnever went away, no matter how much we lived in each other’s pockets.

So sue me if I skipped to work. That was how he made me feel.

It was only as I approached my first job, my cleaning caddy clenched in one hand, that I truly registered the address.

I cringed up at the building, but it looked a lot different in the daylight. In Toby’s photo, the house appeared dark and ominous, long shadows falling across the yard, hiding secrets in the corners.

In the daylight, it could have been any other house. Just a regular suburban home. It wasn’t even in the worst part of town.

An odd feeling skated down my spine, but I brushed it off, embarrassed for getting carried away.

My father would have been mortified if he knew his daughter was balking at the sight of a house, just because it was in the background of a photo where a couple of ex-con thugs had been dealing drugs or whatever the fuck it was Lynx and his friends had been up to in Toby’s photos.

I could practically hear the insults my father would have hurled in my direction.

Soft. Pathetic. Scared of your own shadow, Nyah? Didn’t I raise you to be better?

I ground my molars.

I hated that he was always so in my head, even when he was miles away and I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in months.

But my father wasn’t the sort of person you forgot easily.

Unfortunately.

But in this case, his taunts would have been warranted. I’d already cleaned this house once. The owners hadn’t been home at the time, and they’d left a key for me beneath the mat. It had been a simple, straightforward clean, bathrooms, kitchen, vacuum, mop, out the door and on my way to the next house.

I wasn’t the weak little princess my father accused me of being. Hehadraised me to be stronger than that.

A few weeks wrapped up in the arms of a man who was sweet and kind and gentle hadn’t turned me soft.

I pulled my shoulders back and strode to the door, tapping my knuckles against it. There was no answer, so I checked beneath the doormat for the key, and just like last time, one waited for me. I fit it to the lock and got the door open, before struggling inside with my caddy.

The door closed behind me with a bang loud enough to make me jump. I spun around, staring at it, but there was no one there.