Page 39 of Beautiful Obsessions
His hands were steady on the wheel.His face had already smoothed back into that maddening calm, as if incinerating two men in a paddock was just another chore to be crossed off after midnight.
There was blood on him, I realized.
Not much.A smear at the cuff.A darker stain near his sleeve.Easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it.
I was.Because I couldn’t stop.
“You’re certifiably crazy, you know that?”I whispered.
The words came out quieter than I meant them to.
His mouth shifted slightly, not quite a smile.
“There are worse things to be, Antonella,” he said in that inflected English of his, each word precise and dark-edged.
I let out a breath that might have been a laugh if there had been anything funny left in me.
“Yes,” I said, my gaze still fixed on him.“I can imagine.”
The car rolled through the sleeping countryside, engine low, tires eating up the dirt road as the flames disappeared behind us.
“But crazy,” I added, “is right up there with the worst of them.”
This time he did glance at me.Only briefly.
But it was enough to feel the weight of his attention slide over my face, my mouth, the mess I was still making of breathing.Enough to make something uneasy move through me.Because I didn’t understand him.Didn’t understand how he could be so controlled with death still fresh on his hands.
Didn’t understand why part of me wanted to recoil from him—while another part leaned in.
Maybe it was the adrenaline.Maybe it was shock.Or maybe it was something worse.
Outside, the dark stretched endless and empty.
Inside the car, the air felt close.Thick.Still carrying the sting of smoke and petrol and him.
And somewhere behind us, two men burned into nothing while I sat beside the man who had killed them and tried not to think about how easily he had done it.
Or how safe I had felt the moment he did.
11
Archie
The water ran cold long before I turned the tap off.
I stayed standing there anyway, hands braced against the sink, head dipped, watching thin ribbons of diluted red spiral down the drain.Blood clung stubbornly to my skin—caught beneath my nails, dried into the lines of my knuckles, smeared along my forearms where I hadn’t scrubbed hard enough the first time.
I scrubbed again.This time harder.
The soap burned where the skin had split across my knuckles.It was a good feeling, because it reminded me that I was still here.Still standing.Still breathing.
Behind me, the safehouse sat shrouded in a heavy kind of silence.It wasn’t peaceful or calm.Just… still, holding its breath in anticipation of what else we’d bring into it.
We’d arrived ten minutes ago.
I’d locked the doors and checked the windows out of habit, even knowing that we hadn’t be followed here.I walked the perimeter twice, just to be sure.Because this was no longer about my safety alone, but also Tone Cavalho’s.
She hadn’t said much on the drive.She’d just sat there, still wearing those ridiculous heels she insisted on, legs crossed like she hadn’t just watched me burn two bodies out in the middle of nowhere.
