Page 12 of What We Bury

“Yeah.” He wrings the bloodied shirt out and drops it back over his head, the wet fabric clinging to his muscles like paint. “Try not to think about it.”

I want to laugh in his face. Instead, I stand and the world lurches, my knees wobbling. He reaches out to steady me but Isidestep, swallowing hard. His jacket is heavy as lead, hanging off me like a costume. I look down at my bare feet. Somewhere under that jetty, Amy’s shoes are sitting in a puddle of blood and vomit next to a dead man.

“My shoes,” I say. Because apparently that’s what my brain has decided is the emergency.

“Leave them.”

“They’re Amy’s. She’s my housemate.” I glance down at the ruined dress, plucking at the fabric. “This is hers too.”

“Then she’s down a pair of shoes.” He stands, brushing sand off his knees. “Go home, little savage. You did good tonight, but we’ve got it from here.”

Little savage?

He turns away, headed toward his friends, but I stand frozen. My toes dig little useless furrows in the sand. I want to say something sharp, mean, annihilating—but all my words fail. Instead, I wrap my arms around myself and walk. Barefoot across the cold sand, up the slope to the boardwalk, the jacket zipped to my chin and my hands buried in sleeves that aren’t mine.

Halfway up the slope, my hip knocks against something solid in the right-hand pocket. Heavy. The wrong shape for a phone.

I slow. Free my hand from the sleeve and slide it into the pocket until my fingers close around it. Cold metal. A folded blade, snug in its handle. The knife.

The one I?—

My first instinct is to drop it, get rid of it, bury it, like carrying it is a felony that’ll get me executed right here on the boardwalk. But as I turn it over in my palm, the memory of the kill comes rushing back—the shock, the heat, the impossible rage. The feeling of vengeance and power.

Power. The secret little inch of me that’s never been anything but a trembling rabbit in a steel-jawed world gets a chemical hit, just remembering it.

The blade is heavy. I know I should throw it as far as I can into the tangled brush at the edge of the sand, but instead I tighten my grip around it inside the pocket, feeling myself steady. And I keep walking.

FOUR

KNOX

I’ve watched a lot of people walk away from violence. Usually they shuffle or stumble. Weaving around like broken toys with faulty wiring.

Not her.

Barefoot on concrete, spine straight as a rifle barrel, she’s tiny inside Eli’s jacket—the sleeves swallowing her hands, the hem brushing her thighs. She looks like a kid playing dress-up, but there’s nothing childish about the way she moves.

I shadow her down the city blocks toward the rougher part of town.

She’s cute for a thieving murderess.

Eli took my knife after she finished with it. Which means my blade is riding in the pocket of a woman walking herself home from a homicide. Custom made. Expensive. Mine.

And she knows it’s there, too. Half a block back I clocked her hand inside that pocket, holding on like the weight of it is keeping her upright.

Smart girl.

Most people would ditch a weapon the second the danger passed. Not her. She found a blade in a strange man’s pocket on the worst night of her life, and her first instinct wasn’t to drop it in the sand and run.

She kept it.

She turns down a street that would make most women cross to the other side. Doesn’t even hesitate. Either she’s too fucked up to think straight or she knows something the rest of us don’t.

Honestly? I’m hoping it’s the second one.

Watching her work tonight—the precision, the focus, the sheer fuckingjoyshe took in making that bastard pay? It was fury made flesh. The most beautiful thing I’ve seen in years.

And I’ve seen some shit.