Page 37 of Beautiful Obsessions
And a darker, more dangerous part of me wanted to lunge at him and demand how he could stand there so calmly with two deaths on his hands.
But I didn’t move.I just stared.
Because I didn’t know what I was feeling.
Horror.Shock.Anger.All the things I didn’t want to name.And worse—what it meant about me for not being afraid of him.
“We have to deal with this now,” I said, gesturing toward them.“You can’t just leave them here.”
“I am aware.”
“Are you?”I shot back.“Because it looks a lot like you just made a mess and expected someone else to clean it up.”
A flicker of amusement passed through his expression.
“I assumed,” he said calmly, “that you would be grateful.”
I let out a sharp breath.
“You’re un-fucking-believable.”
But I was already moving.Because as much as I hated it, we couldn’t just leave them here.
I stopped beside him briefly, my voice low, edged with anger.
“Wait until Raze hears about this,” I muttered.
“I’ll take care of your brother, Tone.In fact, I’ll tell him myself.”
My jaw tightened.“Well, good fucking luck.”
His gaze dropped to me again.Steady.Unshaken.His eyes held mine, something cold and absolute settling behind them.
“Just so you know, I would do it again.”
A shiver ran down my spine despite myself.Because beneath the control, beneath the calm—there was something else.Something lethal.And that—more than the bodies only feet away from us—was what unsettled me most.
“Areyou sure you don’t know who they are?”Archie asked.
His voice came low through the darkness, steady and unreadable, as if we were discussing the weather and not standing beside a car carrying two dead men.
We had driven deep into empty farmland, far enough from the city that the night felt stripped bare.There was no traffic.No lights but ours.No sound except the wind dragging through dry grass and the ticking engine of the old grey Mazda that now held two bodies cooling in the back seat like discarded meat.
Archie had driven the Mazda out there himself.I had followed behind in my own car, headlights cutting over rutted dirt roads and open paddocks, trying not to think too hard about what I was doing.Or who I was doing it with.
I stood with my arms folded tight across my middle, staring down at the dead men while Archie slipped his phone back into his pocket.He had taken photos of both faces—quick, efficient, clinical.Evidence, he’d called it.A way to put names to them later.
Up close, they looked even less familiar.
Mediterranean, maybe.Dark hair.Olive skin.Hard faces gone slack with death.They didn’t look local.They didn’t look Russian either, not from what little I knew.More importantly, they carried nothing.No wallets.No papers.No phones worth tracing.
Ghosts.
Men who had set out tonight planning to do harm and had instead ended up stiff in the back of a borrowed car in the middle of nowhere.
I should have felt something.Revulsion.Pity.Shock.Maybe earlier, I had.Back on that road, when the gunshots first tore through the night and their bodies were still warm with violence, I had felt all of it at once—rage, horror, disbelief.But now?Now all I felt was a strange, ugly numbness spreading through me.Because the more I thought about it, the more I knew Archie had likely been right.
These weren’t good men caught in a bad moment.
