Page 160 of The Truths We Burn

I reach her, my hands caging her face between them, pulling her lips to my own. I drown myself in her touch for a solitary moment between the mayhem. My piece of heaven inside my very own hell.

“Do you trust me?” I whisper against her mouth.

She nods, wrapping her fingers around my wrist. “Always.”

I lead her farther into the kitchen, searching around for the materials I need. I toss a copper pan onto the stove, opening her fridge and grabbing some random piece of frozen meat before grabbing the vegetable oil.

We don’t have time to get rid of two bodies. We don’t have the time to clean up our evidence from being inside this place. There are too many variables involved, and we need to get rid of this mess now.

“What are we going to do?” she asks, watching me as I turn on all the burners on high, placing the pan onto one of the open ones along with the meat.

I drain the entire bottle of oil across the stovetop, the pan, along the kitchen counter. Our best bet out of this is making this fire look like an accident, like the people who died inside weren’t murdered; they’d simply gotten trapped by the flames.

This was it.

The moment we’d all waited so long for.

Rome hadn’t been built in a day, that’s what Alistair kept telling me when I’d get impatient.

But it burned down in one.

“Burn it. All of it. To the fucking ground. And it’s not we,” I say, looking at her, knowing if something were to go wrong right now, I’d do anything to protect her from it.

She had never been the innocent Eve in the garden.

She had always been my Lilith. My equal. My queen. A phoenix.

I reach into my front pocket, pulling my matches out.

“This is your revenge. Your embers to make and your ashes to rise from. You never needed anything but the match.”

Sage

I sit against the wall of the Pierson’s many spare bedrooms. Naively, I thought the inside of this place would look more like a morgue than a home. I fully expected to find a coffin inside of Thatcher’s bedroom. It made sense that he would sleep inside one. It would match the creature people loved comparing him to.

I’d been wrong.

The extravagant house that he called home was everything you would expect from someone with money like his. The first time I’d been here a few weeks ago, I was too distracted to pay attention to how much money the Piersons had.

While we were all well-off, Thatcher was bathing in wealth. His great grandfather’s hard work of pioneering a real estate company had secured his family’s lives well beyond his years. Even if Thatcher, his kids, and their grandchildren never worked another day in their lives, they would never want for anything.

The extremely tall ceilings and Gatsby inspired architecture made my family’s house look like a servants’ quarters. Much like Alistair, Thatcher lived on an estate.

We were staying along the west wing, where we were told most guests stayed. And it felt weird to be staying in such a casually expensive home after what we had just done.

Shutting my eyes, I rest my head against the wall, seeing nothing but smoke and a swirl of orange flames. I had stood frozen on the front lawn of my house, the flashing sirens simply a dull whine in the back of my mind.

My hand was curled through the slits of Rook’s fingers, both of us standing there hand in hand as the blue flashing lights reflected off our faces. My neighbors had come outside to examine the chaos. This would be the talk of the town for a good three months.

Tears were streaming down my face, not because of what I had lost inside, because while that fire was burning, it felt like it was over. For the first time since Rosie’s death, there was this peace that had settled over me, even though everyone around us saw the complete opposite.

My father, Detective Breck, all the painful memories that house had brought me over the course of a lifetime were now turning into nothing but ash and dust. Soot that firemen would wash off their boots in the morning.

Now, sitting here, I still can’t find it in me to regret what I had done.

I know that killing someone is supposed to be this mark on your soul that stays with you forever, something that eats away at the humanity inside you until you finally break and tell the world what you’ve done.

But it doesn’t feel like that.