The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love (9 page)

Roxanne pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them, watching. Waiting.

At last he spoke in a deep, thick voice. “Yeah. It’s true. She was eight months pregnant. She’d just come home from the grocery store. They gunned her down on the doorstep with her hands full of diapers and ice cream.”

T
he spare statement held a serrated edge. It lacerated pieces of the human inside him and somehow grafted the raw remainder more tightly to the being he was becoming.

“Why?” Roxanne asked, her eyes rounded with concern. His pain—a pain he didn’t even understand—had somehow become hers as well. Empathy, they called it, but like so many things, he’d never grasped what it entailed. He still didn’t.

“Why would they shoot your pregnant wife?”

“It was a message to me. Revenge for an arrest I’d made.”

The words came easily enough. They’d festered in Santo’s heart like splinters in a pocket of pus, just waiting for the slightest pressure to eject them. It hurt to
speak them, and yet it somehow brought relief. As if recounting this tragedy to the woman listening with her heart somehow lessened its impact.

Again, he didn’t understand, but the human within him—that part of Santo that had wrapped around the reaper—understood the succor Roxanne offered. Understood and grasped at it like a dying man would his last breath of air, even as the part that
wasn’t
human, that would
never
be human, fought it.

“What was her name?”

“Marisella,” he said.

The name resonated inside him, calling up memories of dark, laughing eyes and warm, welcoming arms.

“Marisella,” Roxanne repeated.

He nodded, wanting to be done with it. Roxanne knew what she needed to know, and they didn’t have time for this.
He
didn’t have the desire to rehash Santo’s failures. “I was on the job when it happened. I should have been taking care of my family.”

He turned his face away, unsettled. Confounded by the power of the emotion. How did humans deal with this hour after hour?

Roxanne reached out to touch his bare arm. Her hands were cold against his heat but the gentle brush of her fingertips soothed, healing the lesion that bled inside him. “You can’t blame yourself for not knowing what was going to happen. For not thinking clearly.
Death—it doesn’t just kill the one we lose. It kills a piece of us, too. The ones who live.”

He stared at her in shock, her statement such a blatant contradiction to the truth that it left him speechless. No one knew death the way he—
a reaper
—did. He took life in a clean sweep. No stray pieces of their human loved ones got shuttled along. Yet, he could feel the gaping craters inside. Feel that somehow Roxanne was right. Those missing chunks in Santo Castillo had been stolen with his wife’s life.

“Who have you lost that made you want to splatter your brains on the wall just so you didn’t have to face yourself in the mirror?” he asked gruffly.

“My mother died when I was born. I know that doesn’t compare, but I miss her—miss that I didn’t get to know her. Then I lost my dad when I was a teenager.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, because it seemed to be the words humans spoke at times like this.

She lifted a shoulder. “I’m sorry about your wife.”

A strange stinging irritated his eyes and blurred his vision. Tears, he thought, surprise chasing them back.

He stood, pulled on his shirt, and crossed stiffly to the window, then braced his hands against the window frame and rested his head against the glass. The morass of emotions had brought him to a place he needed to escape. He couldn’t think clearly when so many things
churned inside of him and he still needed to deal with Roxanne.

She wouldn’t like what he had to say next. She’d feel betrayed when she fully realized their circumstances. He knew she hadn’t put it all together yet. But she would. She would.

“We need to move,” he said, not turning around. “It will only be a matter of time before they run my credit cards and track them here.”

“They?” she asked, confused.

He gave her a cool glance over his shoulder, relieved to have tempered the roiling confessions, breaking free of the sticky tentacles of Santo’s feelings. Roxanne watched him with those stormy eyes, wanting to understand and yet innately circumventing the obvious. She did that, when confronted with something she didn’t want to handle.

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear in a gesture he’d seen her make before. It had a defensive quality, the way she let her fingertips brush her cheek, as if checking to see that her disguise was in place. Inside him, he could hear the echo of her words.

How can I ever have a normal life?

And here he was to tell her to give up that dream because she’d never be
normal
by her standards. The longer he spent in her company, the more convinced he became of that.

“The police are looking for us, Roxanne,” he clarified grudgingly. “We need to be gone before they find us.”

“The police?” she repeated. “But I thought . . .”

Suddenly, everything the newscaster had said registered in her expression. She’d been sidetracked by the story of Santo’s wife and obviously missed it at first. Now her jaw fell open as she thought about what had been said. She stared at him with hurt and shock that he could do nothing to change.

Mired in another emotion he didn’t know how to parse, he waited for her wrath.

R
oxanne couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe
him.
He’d lied. About who he was. About
what
he was. He’d said he’d been sent by the police to help her. He’d told her he’d spoken with fellow officers just a few hours ago. He’d promised that someone would be in touch with Ryan and Ruby. She’d taken some measure of comfort from knowing that, whether true or not, her brother and sister thought she was okay. But he hadn’t done it. Any of it.

He wanted her to
run from the police.
He’d flashed his dimples and shown her his badge—
twice
—and used both to manipulate her.

And she’d
let
him.

And now he expected her to run with him as if none of that mattered.

“That reporter said you’ve been suspended,” she said, pointing at the television, hearing it again in her head. It hadn’t sunk in at first because she’d been so distraught about the story of his wife.

Santo said, “Would I still have my badge and my weapon if he knew what he was talking about?”

He reached in his bag and pulled out a holstered gun she hadn’t seen before. At her enraged look, he clarified.

“They’d have taken them away if they’d suspended me.”

“Then why is it on national news that they did?”

“Why do they say things about you that aren’t true?”

“That’s different.”

“To you.”

She stared from the gun to Santo again. “Did you have that last night? Why didn’t you use it? You could have saved—”

“No. I didn’t have it. I left it in the car.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I planned to be in and out.”

“You ordered a
drink.
You were there for almost an hour
leering
at me.” His brows went up, saying in the simplest terms that she wouldn’t know that if she hadn’t been leering at him, too. Roxanne felt her cheeks warm. “You
were
watching me.”

“Yeah. That I was.”

He didn’t say anything else, but his gaze moved
over her features, unapologetically letting her know that given the chance, he’d do more than look.

“I didn’t know what your brother was up to,” he told her. “I didn’t think I’d need to be armed when I went in.”

She gave him a sideways look. “But you said you were here to
protect
me from
demons
.”

“I am.”

“But if you didn’t know about the demons, what did you think was going to happen to me?”

Santo went still and watchful. She felt him weighing options, gathering and discarding statements, deciding what to tell her. What
not
to tell her. She waited impatiently, her anger flaring, tired of him editing his lies. She wanted to force the truth from him, but she didn’t know how, and she probably wouldn’t believe it anyway.

“I was there because I knew you were supposed to die last night.”

She gave an unladylike snort. “Is that how this is going to go? You’re just going to keep lying to me?”

“I’m not lying, Roxanne.”

“Is this fun for you? Kidnapping me and scaring the crap out of me by talking about demons?”

Santo raked his fingers through his hair in frustration. Roxanne watched, equally vexed.

“You saw what came through that kitchen door,” he
said. “You know they don’t belong in this world. And you know I’m right. Your brother invited them in. If you want to pretend it was something other than that, knock yourself out. But we
both
saw Reece talk to him. We
both
heard the one with the mask call him by name.”

She hated him for making her remember that. Hated the doubt that crowded in on her thoughts.

“I know demons don’t fit in with your idea of normal, Roxanne. But even you can’t lie about what we saw last night.”

Roxanne glared at him. “You didn’t just call me a liar, right? Because you’ve got me beat there, Detective. Why don’t we talk about your wife some more? Was any of that the truth?”

His face paled, and now his dark eyes looked like pits. She shook her head and pinched the bridge of her nose, refusing to release the tears that pressed against her eyes. But he’d hurt her. She’d trusted him and he’d hurt her.

“I don’t understand this, Santo. Any of it. I can’t figure you out. What do you expect of me? Just tell me who you are.”

His guarded look fueled her anger. He was sorting his words again, determining which version of his lies to tell her.

At last he said quietly, “You know who I am.”

Fury built inside her and she had no desire to bring it down. She strode to the table, snatched his badge holder up, and threw it at him. It bounced off his chest.
Santo didn’t even blink and she wanted to scream. She wanted to pummel his chest until he told her the truth. The
real
truth. The one that would make sense.

She shoved him. Hard. It barely moved him so she did it again, putting all her strength behind it. He staggered a step back and caught her up to him, pinning her against his body.

“Who
are
you?” she shouted at him.

“Ask better questions, Roxanne.”

“No. You answer the one I want. You tell me.”

She tried to squirm free and he tightened his grip, keeping her arms pinned at her sides. He was a big man with hard muscles and more than a bit of his own anger. She should have been afraid to have rattled his cage. Instead she wanted to do it again.

He put his mouth near her ear. “You know who I am.”

His voice throbbed with something that spoke to her tumultuous emotions. She jerked her head away.

“I’m the one,” he went on softly.

The one.

Through her anger, she heard it, felt it. And against her will, some part of her understood it.

When she stilled, he moved his lips to the other ear. “The one who won’t let anyone hurt you. The one who’s going to keep you safe when they come for you. And they will.”

She leaned back so she could see his face. She’d be
a fool to believe anything he said. But she’d be an even bigger fool to ignore the warning even when it came from lying lips. She
had
seen the monsters—demons—come through the back door. She’d heard the masked man say Reece’s name. And she’d known when he’d looked at her standing next to Santo that she’d become a blip on his radar he wouldn’t ignore or forget.