subtly, to try to win her trust before digging for information. It’s just a waiting game now.
But I’ve never exactly been known for my patience.
On the fifth day after our meeting with him, we’re in the middle of dinner when a heavy thud from outside makes us all look up. Tires screech in the distance as someone peels away in a hurry.
My muscles tense. Shit.
“What was that?” Grace looks around the table, and I can see on her face that her mind has jumped to the exact same thought as the rest of us.
Hale mutters a curse under his breath, shoving his chair back as he stands quickly. Ciro, Zaid, and I follow, moving almost as fast as he does.
This time, we don’t leave Grace behind. Like she’s been doing all week, she stays with us, moving as one of us as we stride across the foyer, weapons in hand.
But as soon as Hale opens the front door, I flinch in regret. She takes one look at the body that’s been dumped on the doorstep and lets out a strangled noise. Her hazel eyes go wide as she stumbles backward.
“Shit. Get her out of here,” Hale mutters, a string of curses following his words.
We all shift into memorized positions—positions that were never assigned to us, but ones that we’ve adopted on instinct for times like these. Ciro shields Grace’s body with his own but doesn’t touch her as she turns away from the scene. She presses a hand over her mouth, her body heaving as she struggles not to vomit.
I cringe again, fighting the urge to abandon my job and help her.
My brother quickly snaps me out of it as he brings out a body bag, and without hesitation, we reach down and try to get as much of Leland’s mangled body into the bag in one piece as possible. With the thing so fucking destroyed, it’s nearly impossible.
Whoever killed Leland did it in just about the most gruesome way I’ve ever seen, and I actually find myself hoping he died quickly. There’s no fucking doubt in my mind that he was dumped here to send a message.
Camilla knows.
And this is her way of telling us.
“That woman is a fucking psycho,” I mutter.
Zaid nods, his lips pressed into a tight line.
My twin and I haul the body down to the basement. Our forensics team will go over it and examine it as soon as possible. In the meantime, we set the lumpy, blood-soaked bag on a metal cart. Leaving my brother to check over the body one last time, I start to backtrack, cleaning up the mess we made on the way.
“Lucas, get back over here,” Zaid calls.
There’s something in his voice that makes me freeze. I stride quickly over to him, and the look on his face confirms what I heard in his voice. Whatever he found, it’s not good.
“What? What is it?”
His expression is grim, his lips pressed into such a tight line that they’ve gone white at the corners. He holds out a small piece of heavy grade paper, about the size of a business card. It’s streaked with blood, and it must’ve been attached to the body somewhere or maybe stuffed into a pocket. It reminds me eerily of the tag the butchered dog wore—the one with the name reading Grace.
Zaid presses the note into my hand with a low curse. I turn it over, reading the words written in an elegant scrawl. When I look back up at my brother, all I can do is echo the word he just said.
“Fuck.”
7
Grace
The scene outside the men’s house was so similar to the last time, I’m not sure why it took me so off guard. But I suppose your first time seeing a body so mangled like that, so dehumanized…
Nothing can prepare you for that.
This time, the men didn’t leave me in the dining room when the sound came from the front hall. None of them tried to stop me when I followed behind them. Lucas immediately pushed me back when we all realized what exactly was on the front stoop, who exactly had been dumped there, but not before I soaked in every detail, a new image forever seared into my mind.
The dead dog is long gone in my memories, replaced by that.
That absolute mutilation.
She’s sick. My mother is absolutely sick to even order something like this. To be able to give the order, knowing full well what the end result would be…
Who is this woman?
How