Page 27 of Watch Your Back (Devil’s Backbone #2)

She’s mine now, and I’m never letting her go. Can I share her with Heath? We’ll see, I guess.

N ate, Heath, and Carter stared at me like I’d grown another head, but at least Royce snickered under his breath, grinning as he met my gaze.

“Purely coincidental, Squirrel,” he assured me as he rubbed his jaw. “Funny, though. I hadn’t even noticed.”

“Can we circle back to the dead guy?” Carter asked, gruff and demanding. I liked when he used that voice in the bedroom, but right now it felt like a scolding, so I pouted a bit. “How’d you all go from questioning him to Heath becoming a murderer?”

Heath huffed a sound, still looking deathly pale. “I thought there would be a cool membership card that you’d give me, Bass.”

Carter rolled his eyes like he was at his wit’s end.

It also sort of suggested the guy in Paris wasn’t Carter’s first slipup, and I filed that information away for later.

“You’re an idiot, Briggs,” he muttered, sighing.

“I’m guessing he did something or said something that triggered a dormant hypnosis? ”

Heath grimaced, and Royce snort-laughed.

“This wasn’t done under hypnosis,” Nate replied in a grim voice. “Triggered, yes, but only into normal human rage. Here, I recorded the whole thing just in case we needed documentation later.” He pulled out his phone and tapped his thumb over the screen until he located the video in question.

On the little recording, Dr. Fox—I had to assume—was tied to a dining chair in the middle of the kitchen we currently stood in. A noticeably cleaner kitchen.

“You can probably fast-forward through most of it,” Royce suggested with a shrug. “I’m thinking it’s maybe more important to deal with this first and dwell on reasons later?”

Carter grunted. “Good point.”

Still, I took the phone out of Nate’s hand and pressed play.

In the interest of time, though, I did as he suggested and skimmed the first part, pausing only when I saw Heath grab the duck off a shelf.

Then I rewound enough to hear Dr. Fox’s gloating confession that not only had he been messing around in Heath’s head for months but that he’d also planted the idea of suicide when Heath had started remembering some of the hypnosis-induced acts he’d partaken in.

“Wow,” I muttered aloud, pausing when Heath in the video reached for the duck again. I didn’t need to watch the rest; the outcome was painted all over the kitchen right now.

“That’s it?” Nate asked, frowning at me with an intensity that made me uneasy. “ Wow ? That’s your whole reaction to this?” He waved a hand at the dead body—rapidly cooling, I’d bet—and shook his head with disbelief. “Just… wow ?”

I handed his phone back and shrugged. “What do you want from me? Hysterics? I don’t know if my acting skills are totally up to the task, but I can give it a go once we get this sorted out, if you’d like?”

He stared back, incredulous, before muttering something under his breath about psychotic women and something about how he should have known I was unhinged.

Whatever. Nate’s opinion of me meant very little with how big our more immediate problem was. No way in hell was I losing Heath to a murder conviction when what he’d done was only one step further than self-defense. Sort of.

“Okay, we need to cover this up,” I said, parking my hands on my hips.

“Without giving Carter’s bitch mother any excuses to force him into some kind of medieval marriage contract.

Crap, your car!” I snapped my fingers at Carter, gesturing to the street where we’d left his very recognizable Koenigsegg Gemera.

“Go. Move it. Quick. Where did you guys park?” I directed the question to Royce, since Nate was still staring at me like I’d revealed myself as a blue alien.

Carter silently went to do as I’d instructed.

Royce shook his head. “Two blocks away. And we already checked which neighbors have security cameras, so we’d know which ones needed to be wiped later. Um, not that we intended this ending, but it seemed the smart thing to do.”

“He made us dress as Mormons,” Heath informed me, still seated on the floor but looking marginally less pale. “We rode bikes and everything, just to knock on people’s doors.”

I bit back a laugh at that mental image. “What did you say? Do you have any clue what Mormon missionaries even say in those door-to-door pitches?”

“No clue,” Royce replied with a grin. “Do you? No one actually lets them get the whole pitch out before slamming the door, so all we needed was the suit, bike, and a polite hello, to sell the act. Anyway, only two neighbors had cameras, and Nate reckons they’ll be easy to wipe.”

“Kinda wish I’d seen that,” I muttered, then ruffled my hair with my fingers, thinking.

“Okay, so Nate, you can handle the security cameras? That just leaves…this. Um…and we can’t rely on Carter’s shady cleanup guy because he answers to his mother, who sounds like the devil incarnate.

Uh…your DNA is probably all over the house too. None of you are wearing gloves.”

Royce and Nate both looked down at their hands, and Nate whispered a curse. Idiots.

“You seem…very calm about this,” Heath commented, wincing as he looked at his own hands. Then he pushed to his feet and crossed to the sink to rinse them under the tap. “I’m not saying that as a bad thing. Just surprising.”

I shot him a wobbly grin because, internally, I was barely holding it together. “All those years of true-crime podcasts had to come in handy one day. Now, I am assuming there’re no pig farms nearby?”

“You’re not serious,” Nate said in a strangled voice. “That’s not a thing.”

“Yes, it is,” I countered. “They don’t eat clothing or shoes, so you’d have to strip him. And they would shit out teeth eventually, but otherwise it’s proven to be effective.”

Royce was already on his phone, shaking his head. “Nearest pig farm is a five-hour drive from here and commercially run, so I doubt they’d be cool with us feeding the piggies some chopped-up psychologist for dinner.”

I tapped my fingertips against my lips, thinking it over again. “It also wouldn’t erase all the evidence here.”

“We could set it on fire,” Heath suggested, scrubbing the blood from his fingernails with a dish brush. “Fire would get rid of DNA and fingerprints and shit. And it would be appropriate, considering how he made us burn down the old science hall.”

A silence filled the room as we all considered that option, broken only by Carter returning to join us. He was sweaty and puffing slightly, and I trusted he’d parked far enough away to not have it be an issue.

“What are we thinking about?” he asked, looping an arm around my waist and kissing my hair. The bandage on his arm had a few dark splotches and would need to be checked once this was all over.

Crazy fuck.

“Arson,” Nate replied, scowling.

Carter nodded thoughtfully. “It would clean the scene, for sure. Good thinking, bro. We’d need to stage it as a break-in gone wrong, though, because even fire can’t disguise the blunt force trauma in Dr. Fox’s skull. Doable, though.”

After a little more discussion, we decided on our plan.

Ideally, we needed to wait to set the fire until after ten p.m., when most of the neighborhood would be asleep, but we didn’t want to risk anyone finding the body in the meantime and didn’t want any discrepancies to come up between time of death and the fire.

So, after sending Nate and Royce back out into the neighborhood with their bikes to deal with door cameras, we started dousing the kitchen and the corpse with accelerant.

When we were satisfied that we’d done all we could to cover our tracks—including untying Dr. Fox’s restraints and wiping down every surface that might have fingerprints—we left via the back door. Carter then smashed the glass from the outside to stage it as a break-in and tossed in a lit match.

As casually as we could, considering I was barefoot and wearing men’s clothing four sizes too big for me, we walked the three blocks back to Carter’s car.

None of us spoke, not even as we watched the plume of smoke start rising up into the sky.

It was like we were all holding our breath, waiting as the minutes ticked by before a well-meaning neighbor would call the fire department.

By some dumb luck, either no one noticed or the fire department was busy, but a full half hour passed before the trucks came flying around the block with sirens screaming.

“They’ll be lucky to find any evidence at all now,” Carter murmured as we drove back to their apartment. “It only takes five minutes for a house to become fully engulfed. At this stage, I’ll be shocked if they even find Dr. Fox’s skeleton.”

“Mmm, I wouldn’t be so sure,” I replied, googling how hot a fire needed to be to turn bones to ash.

“The fire would need to be burning at 1400 to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit for three hours to fully cremate him, and house fires on average sit at 1100 degrees but can in some situations reach 2000 degrees. I’m not saying it’s not possible.

I guess it depends how long they take to put it out? ”

Carter glanced over at me quickly before returning his eyes to the road, saying nothing. Heath started laughing in the back seat, though.

“Here I was thinking you’d be the useful one in covering up crimes, Bass,” he chuckled, “but it seems you’ve met your match.”

Another glance from Carter, but this time it was a whole hell of a lot more heated. “Damn right I have.”

Well, fuck. That did funny things to my insides, so I bit my lip and turned to look out the window for the rest of the drive. It wasn’t until we were parking that another thought struck me.

“Nate can clear our search histories, right?” Because I’d just been googling how hot crematoriums run in comparison to house fires, and Royce had searched pig farms. It wouldn’t take a genius to hold us accountable for murder based on those breadcrumbs.

Heath grinned, looping an arm over my shoulders as we waited for the elevator. “He can, for sure. But I love that you thought about it.”

“You love everything about Spark,” Carter murmured as the doors slid open and the three of us stepped inside. “Not that I can blame you.”

Oh wow, that took a serious turn. “We should, um, we should probably have a conversation…the three of us. Maybe it can wait until we aren’t waiting for the police to knock on the door, though.”

Heath tilted his head thoughtfully. “I don’t know; there’s no time like the present. Besides, how else will we work out where you’re sleeping tonight? Because you’re not going back to the dorm.”

My jaw unhinged slightly. “I’m not?” I squeaked with an edge of protest. I didn’t like being told what to do…

but under the current circumstances, maybe it wasn’t the worst idea to hang out with the guys for a bit.

“Well, good luck getting Nate to agree with that.” Because he’d been less than impressed whenever he found me hanging out with Heath during the week.

Carter and Heath both grinned at that, though.

“Why would he have any objection, Spark?” Carter asked in a teasing voice. “You guys are engaged after all.”

I groaned, smacking my forehead. I’d almost forgotten about that too.