BROADSIDED
Nolan
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN A sleepless night, but it was so fucking worth it to set up my little surprise. I feel wide awake. Much more lively than Harper, apparently. I watch through her dining room window as she trudges down the stairs, a loose bun askew on the top of her head, her bangs and wayward strands of hair framing her face. She turns off the lights she left on while she slept as she goes. Odd, that even the lamps in her bedroom stayed on all night. Her gray sleep shorts hug the contours of muscle in her ass, her defined legs bare, tapering to a pair of penguin slippers. Not that it matters to me what her ass or legs look like. Or that I can see her nipples beneath the thin cotton of her tank top when she turns a little in my direction.
Maybe my cock hardens at the sight of her as she passes into the kitchen and I follow to watch from the next window, but it’s biology. Just an automatic response to visual stimulus. Nothing more.
Watching her make coffee is a frustrating experience. Her eyes are half open and watering with a series of yawns. She manages to complete all the steps to prep a stovetop espresso maker, but only barely. It’s almost tempting to burst into her kitchen and do it for her just to hurry things along when it takes her more than one try to screw the top section to the reservoir.
Waiting for the water to boil theoretically takes two minutes, but it might as well be two hours. But I’ve learned something important in these years of waiting. The anticipation of reaching your goal is sometimes even better than the satisfaction of achieving it.
“Maybe not this time, though,” I whisper as she pours the coffee into a mug with a dash of milk. She takes it to the door that leads to a patio overlooking the garden, a pastry clutched in her other hand. It’s a beautiful, sunny morning in Cape Carnage, after all. Who wouldn’t want to sit outside with a coffee and croissant to watch the birds?
I snicker to myself as I peer around the corner of the cottage and watch.
Harper sets her coffee on the patio table and sits, not looking up, all her attention focused on the liquid in her cup. She closes her eyes as she takes the first sip, tilting her face toward the sun to savor the simple pleasure of its warmth on her skin. Even when the croak of a raven interrupts the peace
of her sun trap, her eyes don’t open.
The raven croaks again.
“Shush, Morpheus,” she says. She doesn’t look toward the source of the sound, but I do. My heart thunders beneath my sternum. “I’ll feed you in a minute.”
Harper raises the cup to her lips, her eyes still pressed closed. The raven caws more loudly than before.
Everything seems to happen in slow motion. A crease appears between her brows. She takes a sip of coffee as though steeling herself for a fight with the insistent bird. Her head turns toward the feeder.
Coffee sprays from Harper’s lips as she opens her eyes and finally sees.
The raven is standing on the roof of the bird feeder, leaning over the edge to peck Jake Hornell’s eyeball, the other one already gone. The bird pulls a string of ruined flesh from the cavity and gulps it down. With a flutter of his wings, he croaks at Harper, clearly pleased with himself.
“Jake …?” she whispers.
Glee races through my veins. I back out of sight behind the corner of the cottage just as Harper’s eyes dart across the grounds. Maybe she’ll let out a terrified shriek. A dramatic fall to her knees with her head in her hands.
Maybe she’ll shake her guilty fists at the sky. Surely there will be tears, at the very least. Any second now … I peer around the corner. Harper is standing motionless, her head tilted to one side. Though her back is to me and I can’t see her expression, everything else about her seems to have stalled.
The meltdown is coming. I’m sure of it.
Harper takes a step closer to the bird feeder. Another. A fly passes her in a slow, curling arc to land on Jake’s cheek before crawling into the empty eye socket. As accustomed as I am to the grotesque indignity of death, it’s still fucking disgusting. Surely she thinks so too. She’s going to puke. I know it. Coffee and croissant will be everywhere.
Harper looks down at the phone in her hand and presses a contact before placing the call on speaker. Two rings later, I hear the quiet but gruff “hello”
of an elderly man’s voice.
“Did you find your shoes?” Harper asks.
There’s a pause. “What?”
“Your shoes. The Christina Riccis or whatever.”
“Stefano,” the man barks. “Stefano Riccis, you heathen.”
Though I can’t see her face, she raises a hand to suppress a laugh, as though this is both an expected and amusing reply. “Stefano Riccis, of course. Did you find them? Did you happen to take them for a … wander
…?”
“Why would I wander in Stefano Riccis?”
“I dunno, maybe you wanted to take them on a little test drive …? Last night …?”
“Be specific, Harper. I’m nearly at the part where Alicia steals the wine cellar key in Notorious.”
Harper turns just enough that I catch her eye roll before her gaze skates across the garden. I barely manage to keep my “What the fuck?” whisper to inaudible levels as confusion and disappointment swirl in my blood. “Fine.
Did you take those Stefano Riccis over to a certain Jake Hornell’s place and chop off his head to bring back as a souvenir? Is that specific enough for you?”
There’s a pause. The raven caws from the roof of the bird feeder before he leans over the edge to poke at the eye socket. The buzz of the disturbed
fly is muffled in the cavernous dark.
“No,” the man finally says.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“You know your memory sucks, right?”
“Harper, I did not kill Mr. Hornell. If this is some horrible practical joke like the time you convinced me you were finally going to let me kill that pretentious old windbag Simon McCarthy but took me to Irene Kennedy’s seventy-seventh birthday party instead, I will never forgive you.”
“You had a great night. You have the hots for Irene, admit it.” The man grumbles a string of arguments to the contrary that sounds entirely forced and untrue as Harper chews on one of her nails. She puts her weight on one foot to rub the back of her calf with the top of the other, as though the caress of the penguin slipper is soothing. She seems to stew on his answer, but after a deep sigh, she finally says, “Okay. I’d better run.”
“Wait … go back for a moment. Jake’s head?”
“Gotta go. I’ll see you at lunch.”
“Harper—”
She hangs up and stuffs the phone into the front of her shirt to perch between her breasts on the flimsy elastic of her top’s built-in shelf bra, then stares at the decapitated head, her hands on her hips as though this is merely an inconvenience. “Well,” she says. “This is … weird.”
Weird …?
I nearly ask it out loud, slipping into the shadow of the cottage as Harper pivots a slow turn as though hunting through the garden for clues. She walks back inside and I retreat to the kitchen window to watch as she trades her penguin slippers for a set of Dakota work boots. The contrast of the beat-up leather against her bare legs and those ridiculous shorts has me shifting as another erection starts. I try to think my way out of that fucking biological response. She killed your brother, I tell myself. She almost killed you. She is absolutely not sexy.
She turns her back to me as she heads out the door. I catch a glimpse of her round ass in those napkin-sized shorts and drag a hand down my face as though I can swipe the image clean from my brain. “Chrissakes,” I hiss, my cock not receiving the message as the door slams behind her in a stamp of sound.
I press my back to the cold stone as Harper marches past me toward a garden shed that sits adjacent to the low garden wall. It’s not far from where
I killed Jake last night. If she were to lean over the wall, she might see the blood that stains the grass just past the hydrangeas. But she doesn’t. Instead, she disappears into the shed and, a moment later, she strides with purpose from the building with a pair of gardening gloves in one hand and a spray bottle in the other. She returns to the bird feeder and sets the orange bottle at her feet before she pulls the gloves on, and then she’s reaching into the bird feeder to yank the head free from between the roof and the platform.
What.
The.
Fuck …?
When I lean farther around the corner, she’s gripping his ears, trying to tug the head free. I wedged it between the roof and the platform pretty good last night, to be fair. I was a little worried about a raccoon climbing up there to run off with all my hard work while I jogged back to the inn for more supplies. It took me several hours and multiple trips to chop up the rest of Jake Hornell and run his body to the shallow burial site next to the Ballantyne River that I picked out months ago from topographic maps, the place I intended to use to dispose of Harper’s body. I don’t think packing dismembered limbs and a collapsible shovel into a backpack to run them for two miles was really what my firefighter and SAR training was meant for, but at least I got a good workout in last night.
And I’m not the only one getting a workout.
“Fucking … just … comply … with … instruction … Jake …,” Harper hisses between gritted teeth as she pushes and pulls until she finally yanks the head hard enough to dislodge it. She shrieks as it faceplants into her chest, but it’s really more a sound of irritation than the abject terror I was hoping for. “Even in the afterlife, Jake? Seriously? That is fucked up, dude.”
I just … do not understand. And frankly, I’m a little pissed off. I spent all night chopping this asshole up and hauling him around, and I didn’t even finish, for fucksakes. There’s still a bag of body parts strapped to my back.
It takes a long-ass time to saw a person into pieces in the pitch dark and not wake up your sleeping enemy. And I was aiming for a big reaction.
Screaming. Tears. Horror. Panic. But what I’m getting just seems more like mild confusion sprinkled with a hint of annoyance, like this is nothing more
than an unwelcome inconvenience to her morning routine. She’s just standing there, seemingly unfazed, with the head clutched between her hands, staring down into the bloodied, vacant holes where the eyes once were.
The raven caws from the branch of a nearby apple tree. “Want to fill me in?” she asks the bird, who caws again, though I swear he looks in my direction. “For the amount of free food I give you, I think you need to start contributing more than the occasional trinket.”
Harper turns a bit more in my direction, but she doesn’t fully face me or notice me watching from the shadows, all her attention fixed to the head in her hands. There are two bloodied marks on her tank top from when the eye holes smacked her chest, and I’m nearly overwhelmed by the unexpected urge to find a way to resurrect that gym-bro douchebag so I can kill him again.
I shake my head, trying to clear it of the intrusive thoughts that seem to appear every time I look at Harper. It’s probably just the desire to claim my prey. That guy was obviously a threat. It’s nothing but more biology. I’m like any apex predator, unwilling to yield its next meal or slice of safety in an unforgiving world.
“You look like you had an eventful night,” Harper says to the head as she turns it over and examines the edges of his torn skin. I never got a good look at it in the dark, but there must be marks from the ax on the vertebrae.
She lets out a low and thoughtful hum, sticking one of her gloved fingers right into the flesh to pull it back and scrutinize the bone as she turns the head in the light. Her nose crinkles. She seems to deliberate. Having reached some kind of conclusion, she shrugs, and though her expression still appears unsure, she gives Jake Hornell’s head a single, decisive nod.
And then, to my horror, she fucking sniffs it.
In an instant, she recoils. Harper’s face is a mixture of disgust and confusion when she holds the head away from her as far as she can. “So gross,” she whispers.
She wants to talk about gross? I’ll bring the fucking gross.
“I could not fucking agree more,” I say as I step from my hiding place. I hold up Jake’s severed hands and give her a slow clap as Harper spins to
face me. The head is still clutched in her gloved grasp. Her eyes are the color of sharpened steel, the surprise and confusion in them fleeting. Her shock quickly dissolves into a glare that’s ready to flay the flesh from my
bones.
“Ballmeat guy,” she hisses.
I give her a dark and devious grin, and her eyes narrow. “Is that how you remember me? ‘Ballmeat guy?’ Well,” I say, tapping one of Jake’s fingers to my cheek in the mimicry of a thoughtful countenance, “that kind of makes sense, coming from you.”
I creep a few steps closer, but I stop the moment I see her go rigid with fear. Why I would halt so abruptly, I have no idea. It’s just an ingrained response, matter over mind. And my mind is saying she’s the person I’ve been searching for. The soul I’ve come to collect. If anything, it should be a struggle to keep myself from rushing forward to close my hands around her throat. It’s the least that she deserves.
I force myself to take another step in her direction. “Who’s Arthur?”
Harper’s cheeks flush crimson. “You’re …” she counters, eluding my question. “You’re stalking me?”
“I’m not stalking. I’m hunting. He was stalking.” I wave to the head still gripped in her hands. Her brows flicker as she tries to work through everything that’s happening. When her gaze returns to me, she tilts her head.
“So you killed him for me …? To keep me … safe …?”
My mouth opens and closes, but no sound comes out.
No. … Definitely not.
I feel like I’ve run face-first into a brick wall. Nothing about her is what I expected. Nothing about this has gone the way I wanted.
“Listen,” I say, dropping the severed hands to my sides, “if we’re going to be bitter enemies, I really think we need to improve our communication
skills.”
“Why do I want to be enemies with you?”
“Perhaps because I just killed Jake, the man you have a crush on, and left his head in your bird feeder …?”
“I don’t have a crush on Jake.”
I sigh. “I’m starting to gather that.”
“If you’re stalking me—”
“I’m hunting—”
“You’re doing a pretty shit job of it, because you clearly didn’t notice that Jake Hornell is a fucking creep. Hence his nickname, Touchy Feely Creepy Jakey. I think you just did me a favor, actually.” She shrugs, feigning a casualness that never makes it to her cutting glare. “Maybe that
makes us friends.”
“We are not friends.”
Harper sighs, as though I’m merely here wasting her time, another inconvenience that she can just barrel through before returning to her clearly fucked-up life. “Figured. So, enlighten me. Why are you here?”
I take a step closer. “You really don’t remember me?”
“You like tea bagging and turkey sandwiches,” she says as she edges a step backward. “I think I remember you pretty clearly, yep.”
“That’s not the first time we met.”
Harper’s eyes travel over my face, roaming the contours of my features so slowly that I can feel her glare linger on my skin. “I guess I left an impression.”
I laugh. It’s the first genuine, uninhibited laugh I’ve had in a long time, now that I think about it. Just like the smile that broke free when I teased Harper at the coffee shop yesterday was the first one since my accident that made my heart jump in my chest. I’d forgotten how much I missed that feeling, the one that swoops through you, like being at the top of a roller coaster and suddenly free falling. “You can say that,” I finally manage when my laughter subsides. Clearly, Harper doesn’t think it’s quite as funny as I do, and I’m a little surprised it hasn’t jogged her memory.
“Well, I think we’ve established that I have no idea who the fuck you are and, contrary to whatever you think, I’ve never met you before. So, thanks, I guess, for doing me an obviously unintentional favor that could send you to jail for the rest of your life. But unless you’re staying to talk about hobbies over breakfast,” she says as she raises the head between us, “maybe you should just leave.”
My grip around the bloodied severed wrists tightens. Harper seems to sense the threat, cataloging every minute change in the tension of my muscles, or the fury in my eyes, or the dark, merciless smile that creeps across my lips.
“I don’t think I’m going anywhere just yet,” I say, taking another step closer. She’s only a few feet away. Just a flash of motion and she’d be within my grasp. I force myself to remember that it’s not time yet—there are still a few weeks to go. But it’s so fucking tempting to rush toward her now. I could squeeze those words from her delicate throat, the ones I’ve been waiting to hear: It’s my fault.
“Harper?” a woman’s voice calls from inside the house. Harper’s eyes widen. Her mouth pops open around a silent oh.
“Who the fuck is that?” I hiss, but the kitchen door is already closing, someone’s footsteps nearing the outside corner of the house. The raven caws and flaps away from his perch on the peak of the stained bird feeder to hide among the branches of the oak, as though he’s unwilling to become an accessory to the crime that will surely spell our imminent demise. And Harper and I? We can’t seem to do anything but stare at each other, both of us frozen in time.
“There you are,” a woman says as she rounds the corner with a book in her hands, barely glancing up at us as she enters the back garden. She nods at me before turning her attention back to her book. “’Sup.”
I give her a weak, thin “Hey,” sliding the severed hands behind my back.
But Harper is not so quick to move. She’s still got the head clutched in her grasp, and rather than try to get rid of it, she presses the face to her chest
and folds her arms around it.
“Hi, Maya,” Harper squeaks out.
Maya glances up, her obsidian eyes narrowing behind gold-rimmed glasses as they dart down to the head and back up to Harper’s face. “You’re entering the gravity races this year?”
“Ha … yeah. I guess so.” Harper’s smile is too bright. Too forced. Her eyes move too quickly when she looks down at the head she clutches to her chest before refocusing on her unexpected guest. “Thought I’d … you know”—she pats the top of the head—“throw my hat in the ring.”
She cringes at her own terrible joke, and Maya tilts her head as though she’s trying to work Harper out. But Harper Starling is dangerous. Perhaps more dangerous than I could have imagined that night when I lay on the road, struggling to stay conscious as she drove away from the lives she’d forever ruined. She could kill this woman easily, if she wanted to. Maya is diminutive, her frame nearly frail, long black braids trailing down her back all the way to her hips, the scent of orange and hibiscus a sweet halo around her.
But another realization seems to scuttle through my brain like an unwelcome intruder. As much as I need to protect Maya from Harper, I need to protect Harper from harm too, no matter how much of a danger she might be. I can’t let her be taken from me before I’ve gotten what I came all this way and waited so long for. And that thought is the one that forces me a step closer.
“Good thing the fake blood is water soluble,” I say. Maya turns to face me and I withdraw the severed hands from behind my back, brandishing them with nonchalance. “I’m Nolan. I’d shake your hand, but this stuff makes a bit of a mess. Hopefully it’ll be worth it for the style points at the race. I’m not sure my soapbox race car–building skills are really up to snuff, you know?”
Maya looks down at the hands and pushes her glasses up her nose with the end of her pen. “Did you get the blood from Craft-A-Corpse?”
“Sure did.”
She tilts her chin up and, for a moment, I wonder if I’ve caught myself in a lie. When I refocus on Harper, she doesn’t give me any clues. She paints a ridiculous picture, with a decapitated head clutched to her chest and her full lips pressed into a tense line and her eyes wide with alarm. She’s obviously a terrible person and completely unhinged. And I one hundred percent do not find her in any way adorable. Absolutely not.
“The Craft-A-Corpse blood can still stain,” Maya says, snapping me out of my efforts to kill any intrusive thoughts of Harper Starling’s attractiveness. I’m grateful for the distraction, and I make every effort to pin all my attention to the woman standing between me and my sworn enemy. I try to ignore that it feels a lot harder to do than it should. “I make a stain
remover that’ll get it out. You can buy it from my shop on Main Street.
Maya’s Magical Mixtures. And I sell better-quality fake blood too. It’s even edible—you can put it on cake, in drinks. Strawberry and raspberry flavors available. Drizzle it on the whipped cream in A Shipwrecked Bean’s chili hot chocolate and it’ll change your life.”
Maya pulls a business card from between the last pages of her book and walks forward to slide it into my shirt pocket, giving my chest a pat before she turns back to Harper. “Speaking of which, I need some strawberries.
Got any?”
“Umm.” Harper clears her throat and tries to force a smile, but it ends up being more of a grimace, the tension climbing into her cheeks to keep the light from reaching her eyes. “Sure, help yourself.”
“Thanks.” With a nod to each of us, Maya pulls a cloth bag from her shoulder and walks away toward the gate along the garden’s back wall before disappearing into the vegetable garden.
Harper stares at me. I glare back. And then, to my surprise, she marches right up to me, not stopping until she’s inches from my face, the scents of death and citrus and aromatic herbs drifting from her skin.
“Leave,” she snarls.
“I’m not done building a corpse.”
“Go reconstruct it elsewhere. And take this with you.” She shoves the head into my chest, but I don’t pull it from her grasp.
“Hang on to it,” I say, pushing it back toward her with Jake’s severed hands. “Consider it a gift.”
“A parting gift? As in, you’re fucking off out of here, never to return?”
A smile creeps onto my lips, one Harper watches as it lights with a deadly vow. I feel her, like a current. A hum. A tingle in my flesh. My fingers tense around the wrists still clutched in my grip, leaving imprints on the cool skin. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I expect the threat to spook her. I want to sense the terror in her. To see it in the way her pupils narrow to a pinprick, or to catch it on a scent. But it isn’t there. I only hear defiance when she says, “Neither am I.”
“Good. Don’t waste your energy. Because you could leave Cape Carnage, but you’ll never escape me.”
“Harper?” Maya calls from the other side of the wall. “Do you have any of the Sweet Kiss strawberries this year?”
“Sure do. I’ll come give you a hand.”
I think I catch the slightest whisper of fear flicker across Harper’s face.
But just as quickly as it appears, she buries it, hiding it behind a vicious smirk. She knows I won’t make a move with Maya here. But what she doesn’t know is that this is only the beginning. And I’m not here to rush my
plans along.
I’m here to savor them.
“No matter where you go. No matter how long it takes,” I whisper. I lean a little closer. There’s only an inch or two of space between us. My glare fuses with hers and doesn’t let go. And Harper stares me down in reply. “If you run, I will find you. You can hide in the farthest reaches of the deepest hell, and I will still drag you out. Even the devil can’t save you from me.”
I drop the severed hands on the ground between us.
And then I turn and walk away.
