The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love (32 page)

She looked at him with big eyes made wet by tears and Santo felt something inside him shut down. He couldn’t do it anymore. Wouldn’t do it. He refused to keep lying.

“I wasn’t there to save you from them,” he said harshly, the words like acid in his throat.

“What?”

“I’m not your guardian,” he said. “I’m not your angel. I didn’t come to save you. Not to protect you. Not to help.”

Her breath hitched and her stormy eyes held so much hurt and confusion, it turned him inside out. She shook her head and took a step back. She couldn’t go very far, not on the small balcony, but each inch she put between them felt like a blade sliding beneath his ribs.

Last night she’d given herself to him, let him touch that part of her she kept hidden away, and no matter how he wished it different, she’d changed him. Santo Castillo had been under his skin from the first moment. But Roxanne, she’d been growing in his heart for longer than that. He didn’t know when or how she’d become so vital to him. He’d told himself that his only reason for coming to this world was to reap her.

He almost laughed now, but the sound would have been bitter. He’d come because in his own twisted and depraved way, he’d loved her from the start. And before Santo had taught him what love really meant, he’d thought that it gave him the right to own her. To take her. To steal her soul and make it his.

But the moments of time with Roxanne, the hours spent living in Santo’s skin, had exposed his selfish desire and changed it. Changed him.

“I’m not Santo Castillo,” he said at last.

She blinked with surprise and he wondered what she’d been expecting him to say. “Then who are you?” she asked.

“Not who. What.”

She still didn’t understand. A frown puckered the skin between her brows. She shook her head.

He went on relentlessly. “I chose Santo because he was on the brink, ready to commit suicide. I took him before he killed himself.”

“You
took
him?” she said, her voice still tangled in confusion and pain. Was it only yesterday that he’d gazed into her eyes and thought her empathy a weakness? His pain had been hers when he’d spoken of Santo’s dead wife.

Now the tables had turned and her pain became his. Sadly, he welcomed it.

“I reaped him, Roxanne. Just as I intended to reap you. That’s why I’m here.”

“You what? You
reaped him
?”

Her eyes were wide, her lashes spiky from her tears. He kept talking, fighting the emotions inside that made him want to take the words back and spin them another way.

“I came in person to make sure you didn’t cheat me again.”

Her lips moved silently before she spoke. “You came to kill me?” she asked, her expression bewildered. “Is that what you mean?”

It broke the heart he’d never wanted.

“I’m a reaper. I don’t kill. I take.”

She glanced over her shoulder at Manny’s body laid out on the floor beneath the blanket, her question clear. Blood had already begun to soak through. He’d certainly killed her friend.

“
That
wasn’t human,” he said dismissively. “It didn’t have a soul to reap.”

She was still shaking her head, unwilling to believe what he told her.

“You said you were an angel.”

“No.
You
said it.”

Her chin came up, indignant. “You let me believe it.”

“It served my purpose for you to believe that I had your best interest in mind.”

She flinched but the dull hurt in her eyes began to burn away as anger filled them. “My best interest?”

She backed up until she hit the railing, watching
him with narrowed eyes. “You killed Santo Castillo?” she said. “Why?”

Was there a way to sugarcoat it? If there was, he didn’t know it and it was too late for that anyway.

“I
reaped
him, Roxanne, so I could pretend to be him.”

Her recoil nearly brought him to his knees. Only the hand braced on the railing kept him upright. Roxanne swiped her tears from her eyes and glared at him.

More than anything, he wished he could make the truth something other than it was. Not lie, but do it over. Be on the right side of this horrible wrong. She wanted it, too. He could see the plea in her eyes. But he stood at a crossroads that even a reaper could see. If he lied to her now and denied what he was, it would prove to her that she
couldn’t
trust him. If he told her the truth, it would be her decision whether or not she
would
trust him. At least there’d be hope that she might. Slim hope, but he held on to it.

“You murdered Santo so you could steal his soul and his body,” she said slowly.

“Take.”

“
Steal,
” she insisted. “If it was yours to take, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Leave it to Roxanne to cut to the quick.

Santo said, “He planned to kill himself. He had a gun in his mouth and he was pulling the trigger. I stepped in just before he blew his brains out.”

“But he might have stopped on his own. He might have changed his mind.”

“He wanted to die. He wasn’t going to stop until he succeeded. I was there to reap him, one way or another.”

“One way or another,” she murmured.

She shook her head, and something dawned in her expression, an answer to a riddle she’d been puzzling, a dark clue to a desperate crime.

“That means . . . You’re just like
them,
aren’t you? The one that took Manny and turned him into . . .”

She couldn’t finish, and the loathing he saw on her face made him want to turn away in shame. He forced himself to face her revulsion and bear the weight of it.

She thought he was like the scavenger demon. He saw now how close to the truth she’d come. He’d fooled himself into thinking his purpose made him better. But when boiled down, his sins were no less. His choices just as wrong.

“And what was last night?” Roxanne demanded. “An added bonus to your game of pretend? Fuck like a human?”

He couldn’t hold her gaze or stop the heat that suffused his face. “I know you don’t believe that,
angelita
.”

“Don’t call me that!” she shouted, her voice loud in the quiet dawn.

Santo looked around warily. Maybe the gunshot hadn’t been heard but coupled with screaming,
someone was bound to investigate. He took her arm and hauled her inside, closing the door behind them. Manny’s body on the floor scorned him, so he pulled her down the hall, avoiding the bedroom and its memories in favor of the bathroom. He shut the door behind them.

Roxanne shook him off and took a step away. Her voice trembling with anger, she said, “You reaped an innocent man so you could steal his body. You
killed him
because it was convenient.”

“Convenient?” he repeated bitterly. He’d had no idea he’d be stepping into such a fucked-up lost cause, or that the human could possibly touch him, impact him.
Change
him. “It’s like riding a roller coaster, all the feelings. There was nothing convenient about it.”

“How can I believe anything you say?”

“Because I
hate
saying it. Because I hate
you
hearing it. If telling you another lie would fix this problem, I’d be doing that right now. But it won’t. All that’s left is the truth.”

“Everything you told me about your wife. About how lost you felt. It wasn’t even you. You never even
knew
her.”

“I knew her,” he said.

“Why? Did you
reap
her, too?”

At his wince she cried, “You did? You killed her and her
baby
. Did you do it to make Santo miserable so you could use his body?”

“I knew her because Santo knew her,” he said grimly.

“It doesn’t work that way. You don’t get his life by associat—”

“It does work that way,” he said sharply, slamming his hand on the counter, suddenly so angry he could hardly speak. “I didn’t know it at the time, but it does. It bleeds over. The way he talked. His thoughts. His memories.” He looked into her eyes. “The way it feels to be in his skin. I might have begun separate, but that part is long gone.”

“And what does that make you?” she asked.

Mouth dry, he shook his head and looked away. “Fucked.”

She studied him, those eyes lit with anger and intelligence, shadowed with hurt and shock.

“You thought you’d be stronger than him,” she breathed.

“Yeah. I did.”

She leaned her hip against the counter and contemplated that.

“I can close my eyes and see the places he went,” he said in a rough voice. “Smell the air. Picture the people we loved.”

“We.”

“I feel what he feels. He wants what I want.”

“And what is that?”

You.
It burned through him like a flash fire, urging
him to reach out
now.
To touch her while his senses burned,
now
. To light her up with the same inferno
right now
.

He swallowed hard and lowered his eyes, but instead of a distraction, his gaze caught on the soft rise and fall of her chest, the way the big sweatshirt clung to the curve of her breasts.

“So all this was—what you did to Santo—it was all because of the door thing? The door I didn’t even know about? You came here, stole another man’s identity, and wrecked my life because of that? Why didn’t you just kill me like you did him?”

He met her eyes again, not letting her look away. “Before the other night, you’d died three times, Roxanne. Who do you think was waiting for you on the other side?”

She stilled and her breath caught. His answer had shaken her. Good. She’d been rattling his cage from the start. He couldn’t see her when she came to him in the darkness, but he could feel her. Her life, her light. For those brief moments in time, he’d been able to imagine what it might feel like to stand in the sun and bask in its warmth.

“That was you?” she whispered.

He nodded.

Her eyes widened and color rushed to her face. “But you weren’t there the last time,” she blurted.

“That time, I was here. Still waiting,” he said simply.

Always
waiting.

“It was me waiting for you in the darkness, but every time you just slipped away,” he said huskily. “Finally, I couldn’t bear it anymore. I came to see for myself why you were able to cheat death. To cheat me.”

“So that’s it?” she asked in a wounded voice. “I bruised your enormous ego so you decided to make me
pay
?”

“You know it was more than that.”

“I don’t know anything about you except you stole someone’s body like you were hot-wiring a car.”

“I know,” he said. He took a step forward, encouraged when she didn’t retreat. “I understand that now. I swear to you, Santo
was
ready to die. I’m in here with him. I know. I’m not excusing what I did, Roxanne. It was wrong. But I’m not sorry. I did us both a favor.”

She grew quiet again. Thinking. More than anything, he wished he could pry into that head of hers and find the secret decoder to her thoughts. But she remained a mystery to him. An enigma he longed to understand.

“All I knew,” he said, putting it on the line, “was that I had to come for you. It just took me a while to figure it out.”

She blinked those beautiful eyes, but she didn’t hide them as her silence called him a fool.

“And no matter what happens next, I’d do it again.”

Her breath hitched softly. “When did you reach that decision?”

“The moment you opened that pretty mouth and made me question everything I thought I knew.”

Her color deepened. “Is that the truth?” she asked.

“As God is my witness.”

She turned her back on him, staring at the white knuckled fingers gripping the sink. “So what now? Should I
put my affairs in order
so you can take me back to the darkness with you?”

“No.”

“You don’t want my soul anymore?”

“No,” he whispered.

“Then what
do
you want, Santo?”

As much as he wished for it, the question didn’t dance with innuendo. It came at him straight on and fast. She wanted an answer, and he would never get what he truly desired without first giving it.

“You,” he said simply. “A life with you. How did you put it? I want to be like everyone else. And I want that with you.”

The deep throb of emotion in the words rattled his precarious sense of self, but he met her gaze in the mirror and didn’t look away. He didn’t let her look away either.

She stared back, her eyes shadowed but no longer hard. He could see the battle going on inside her. She’d been pretending to be normal her entire life, and now a reaper—a reaper who’d come to hunt her, who’d stayed to protect her, who’d
fallen in love with her
—asked that
she embrace something so far from normal that it boggled the mind.

“I’ve been living alone in death for far too long. I want to stay.”

And there it was. That elusive idea that he’d been sidestepping and evading from the start. It had been lurking like a creeping shadow since that very first moment when he’d been galvanized by the storm of Roxanne’s eyes.

“You want to stay,” she murmured.

“Yes.”

But it went so much deeper than that, and the idea that she knew it, that she understood, tugged at him like an anchor giving way. He felt the soft suction of his hold dislodging, and the dizzying
whir
of being towed up. Up. To an unknown he couldn’t grasp.

He followed it nonetheless, taking another step closer to Roxanne, breathing in her intoxicating scent, yearning for so much more. He turned her to face him.

“How will you do that?” she asked. “Are you allowed to stay?”

“No,” he answered.