Dangerous Lovers

by Becca Vincenza

  I didn’t have time to think about it anyway. I had an office to search.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Addict - to occupy (oneself) with or involve (oneself) in something habitually or compulsively.”

  Frankie

  I had come to the conclusion that I was an addict. It didn’t matter how many times I told myself to stop thinking about him, I couldn’t. My emotions were wide open, ranging from flat-out wanting to kick him all the way to daydreaming about the way he kissed.

  I went from scheming up ways to get out of the situation I found myself in, which was between him and Rosalyn, to lecturing myself about getting involved in the first place, and then it seemed I always circled back to the way it felt to be in his arms.

  Up until last night, I was determined to stay away from him. I made up my mind. He was no good for me and he was driving me insane. But then he showed up on my doorstep, looking wounded. His pathetic attempt at talking was… well, it was pathetic.

  Yet also endearing.

  Endearing because he’d been genuinely shaken and that seemed to confuse him. It’s like he had no idea what to do or where to go and somehow he ended up at my door. I could see him try—try to express what he was thinking, what was going on, but he couldn’t.

  Just like I couldn’t come clean to Rosalyn at lunch.

  It’s like he and I were stuck on a carousel—destined to go round and round but never actually getting anywhere.

  I could vow to myself that I wouldn’t see him again, that I was just going to wash my hands of the situation. But I wasn’t going to do that. Because I wasn’t a liar and if I said that, I would be lying to myself.

  I blew out a breath. I needed a break. A brain break. I needed to stop thinking and stop worrying. I needed my best friend.

  I was likely in hot water with her too. Because like any good addict would tell you, addicts pushed away the people who cared about them. Addicts isolated themselves so they only had one thing in their life and that was whatever they were addicted to.

  I needed a twelve-step program.

  No. That was too much work.

  I settled for Chinese food instead. There wasn’t anything some good Chinese food couldn’t fix.

  I called and placed an order for too much, making sure I got plenty of the vegetable lo mein Piper liked so much. I knew she would be home. It was Sunday night and the diner she worked at closed early.

  When I knocked on her door with food and movies in hand, I actually felt a little nervous. I wondered if she would be upset with me for the way I’d been acting. I wasn’t being a very good friend. I practically fell off the face of the earth and ignored a lot of her texts and calls. When I did answer, the replies were short and not at all the way they used to be.

  She seemed a little surprised when she opened the door, but she smiled. “I’m starving!” she said, eyeing the bag in my arms.

  “I got your favorite,” I sang, going inside.

  “I’ll get some plates!” She dashed into the kitchen and rattled around and returned in record time with everything we needed to stuff our faces.

  “You must really be hungry.”

  “I really am,” she said, reaching into the bag. “But I also want to hang with you. Long time no see.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Work’s been busy.” It wasn’t a lie. Work’s always busy. It just wasn’t the reason I hadn’t been around.

  “Oh? I thought maybe there was a new man in your life.”

  I choked on the soda she’d given me when she came out of the kitchen. “A man?” I croaked.

  She nodded, dumping a pile of lo mein onto her plate. Then she reached into the bag and pulled out the crab rangoon and added a few of those onto her plate as well.

  “Nope, no man in my life worth talking about.” Again, that wasn’t really a lie. Charming wasn’t worth talking about. I was trying to have a break from thinking about him anyway.

  “Are you sure?” Piper said, pinning me with a stare. “Is everything okay with you?”

  “Yep. Everything’s fine. I just figured we were overdue for some girl time.”

  She didn’t really seem convinced, but she let it go.

  “So I brought us a movie.” I put down my plate and reached into my bag. “It’s about zombies.”

  “Warm Bodies?”

  I nodded. “Any movie that combines brain eating with romance is a must see.”

  She laughed. “That’s gross.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Piper,” I said seriously, “but if I was a zombie, I would totally eat your brains.”

  “Of course you would. My brains are delicious.”

  “So what do you think? Should we watch and see how a zombie falls in love?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  We popped in the movie and settled back to watch it, chowing down on our food. I felt a little guilty because I had ulterior motives for choosing this movie. I wasn’t interested so much in how a zombie fell in love but rather how a girl could fall in love with a zombie. Zombies were killers.

  Like Charming.

  Except Charming didn’t eat brains (thank God).

  Charming told me he wasn’t really living. Zombies were dead.

  Maybe if I could somehow see how a girl could love a zombie, I would be able to figure out why I couldn’t get Charming out of my mind. I could understand why I didn’t run screaming in the other direction.

  Because really, the only direction I seemed to be going was toward him.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Booby trap - an explosive device designed to be triggered when an unsuspecting victim touches or disturbs a seemingly harmless object.”

  Charming

  The tricky thing about searching someone’s personal space was making it appear it hadn’t been searched at all. Just the slightest disturbance of something that seemed like it would go unnoticed is the one thing that could cause everything to blow up in my face.

  “Look over there,” I said in hushed tones, pointing to the bookcases across the room from the desk.

  We searched in silence, not wanting to alert any of the staff that might be in the house. It was amazing to me that the Grim Reaper was able to employ so many people and never get caught. If I were him, I would want all the privacy I could get. Hell, I wasn’t him and I still wanted that.

  I started with his desk. I looked through the neat stack of papers that lay in the center, but it was all just stupid paperwork. Utility bills, invitations to events, and some spreadsheets and invoices for the legitimate business that he owned, which was luxury car sales. He had dealerships in Anchorage, Los Angeles, and New York.

  I restacked the papers and moved on, looking over the surface of the desk. There wasn’t anything else to search. My eyes settled briefly on the bowl of stones that sat on the corner and then moved away. I wasn’t going to touch those things. His stones were his calling card, the only thing he left in place of a life he took. My luck, I would pick up one and alarms everywhere would start wailing.

  I went through the contents of his desk drawers, looked through his calendar, his pens, and the roster of names that I knew were Death Escorts. The business was growing. He had more Escorts than I realized. Maybe that was one of the reasons he thought I was expendable. He thought he could replace me. I smirked. I wasn’t replaceable.

  “There’s nothing here,” Storm complained about ten minutes into the search.

  I glanced up. “Did you look in those books?”

  “All one hundred of them?” He moaned. “Yeah. Nothing but a bunch of words.”

  “Keep looking.”

  “I’m telling you, you aren’t going to find anything.”

  I reached under the desk and pressed a button. All the closet doors containing his collection of bodies opened soundlessly. They all hung there in perfect, neat rows. Not a hair was out of place on any of them.

  G.R. was definitely a neat freak, which made searching a pain for many reasons. One, I h
ad to be sure everything was back exactly the way I found it. And two, everything was so decluttered that I was starting to think Storm was right, that there wasn’t anything to find.

  “We’re going to have to search his bedroom after this.”

  “You wanna do what?” Storm said, disbelief crowding his tone.

  I began looking through the bodies, sliding them back and forth on the rods. “I’m not leaving here until I have something I can use against him.”

  Storm came over beside me, stopping and I would assume staring at me, but I ignored him. I got down and searched under the bodies’ feet, looking for anything that might be of use. But all the bottoms of the closets were completely empty. There wasn’t even a speck of dust.

  I stood up and looked up, above the racks, thinking there might be shelves with boxes for storage. Nope. The only thing in these closets were bodies. Lots of them, all hanging single file.

  “Which one of these is yours?” I asked Storm, looking through one of the bodies pant pockets.

  Storm was quiet a moment, moving all the way down to the last closet on the wall, and hovered near the center. “This one.”

  I reached out, pulled the hanger off the rack, and held up the body. He looked to be in his early twenties. He had skin the color of coffee mixed with cream, a smooth complexion, and all its hair was buzzed off. Storm had been a fairly tall guy, probably reaching at least six feet because when I held the body up, his feet about reached mine.

  “I don’t understand why he dresses all the bodies like we’re students at prep school. Does anyone even wear khakis anymore? Where the hell are the jeans?”

  I grinned. “I guess death doesn’t come with fashion sense.”

  “Which one’s yours?” Storm asked.

  “It’s not here.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen it since I died.”

  “You mean he’s never let you use it?”

  “I don’t even think he has it.” The only thing I could think of was that it was too damaged to save.

  “That man has everyone’s body. It isn’t right that yours isn’t here.”

  I shrugged, like it didn’t bother me. It really never had before. But now… now I kind of wondered where it was. I kind of wondered what it would be like to see it again. Would it feel familiar to me? Would it feel like home?

  I pushed away those thoughts. They were stupid. “Want to take yours for a spin?” I asked, holding his body out to him. Even to me it seemed weird that I was offering someone a chance to use their own body.

  “Hell no. If he noticed that body missing, the first place he would look was for me.”

  “Well, then, take your pick,” I said, hanging Storm’s body back in the closet and making sure it was equally spaced between the others.

  “You want me to take a body?”

  “Why the hell not? He’s got so many he won’t even notice. I’ve been listening to you whine about wanting one since we met.”

  He was quiet a long time. I knew he was tempted. I know I would have been.

  Finally, he said, “No, I’ll just stick with borrowing.”

  “Why borrow someone else’s body and deal with their spirit when you could have your own.”

  “Because if I took one of these bodies, I would barely get to use it. I would have a black cloud around me that would point to me like a beacon. If one Escort saw me, they would know I shouldn’t have it.”

  “So tell them you’re on vacation.”

  “It’s too risky. A borrowed body covers up my spirit.”

  “How?”

  “Best I can figure is that their spirit cancels mine out.”

  “How did you figure that out?”

  “Like everything else. Practice.”

  “And you’re the only Ghost Escort that can do that?”

  “As far as I know.”

  I finished searching through the length of closets, patting down pockets and peering under feet, looking for anything I could use.

  But I found absolutely nothing.

  After rechecking that all the bodies were hung exactly as they had been, I pressed the button and closed the doors. I sat down in G.R.’s leather desk chair and let out a sigh.

  “There’s nothing here. Let’s go to his room.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  I wasn’t crazy, but I was starting to feel a little desperate. Both my hands gripped the seat of the chair, my fingers curling underneath it and squeezing the leather. I was so sure that I would find something. So sure he would be hiding some sort of secret.

  I went to push myself up, but when I dragged my hand along the bottom of the chair, I felt something. Some sort of small round knob on the bottom of the seat. I ran my finger over it several times. It felt like a button. I pressed it.

  There was a soft sound across the room. Both Storm and I whipped around, thinking we were somehow caught. But we weren’t. The sound came from a secret door. A secret sliding door in the bookcase. It opened, the doorway wide enough for a man to fit through.

  Excitement pounded through me. Got you, I thought.

  I glanced at Storm. “I thought you searched over there.”

  “Shit, you expected me to find some kind of secret door? It’s probably a booby trap that’s going to suck us into the depths of hell.”

  “I’ll say hello to the devil for you,” I said, returning G.R’s chair to the exact place it had been in and going over to the entrance and peering inside.

  “Well?” Storm asked from close behind.

  “No trips to hell today. It’s just more closets.” Three doors all in a row.

  “What could he possibly keep in there?”

  I wasn’t about to wait to find out. When I stepped into the narrow hallway, I half expected an alarm to go off, but nothing happened so I took another small step and then another.

  My heart was pounding in my ears, drowning out the quiet and making me more nervous. I told myself to calm down, that it was stupid to get this nervous. I mean, I didn’t even act like this when I killed people. Guess my body was more afraid of the Reaper than my brain realized.

  But fear of the Reaper was why I had to keep going. Being scared of him was unacceptable. I stopped in front of the first door I came to, staring at its cherry finish.

  I was surprised when I opened the door.

  I don’t know what I was expecting. Something sinister and twisted.

  I was a little let down when all I saw was more bodies. “It’s just bodies,” I said, irritation lining my tone.

  Storm finally got over his fear this was a portal to hell and came inside. “What’s so special about these bodies?”

  What, indeed?

  I looked closer, having to squint a little because the lighting in here was so dim. My eyes first went to a contrast in the dark. A body with blond hair. Overly long, messy blond hair.

  I grabbed the body, gripping its shoulder and yanking it out so I could see it.

  Like a freight train, recognition slammed into me.

  It was me.

  Memories of looking in the mirror when I was alive crashed over me. Wave after wave of broken clips of memories… of me brushing my teeth, combing my hair, studying a black eye or a busted lip.

  This was the body I was born in. The body that carried me through my life. The body that used to laugh and eat cookies. The body that used to hug… them.

  “Uh, Charming?”

  I shook myself but still kept hold of my body. Of my past. “It’s me,” I said, then cleared my throat. “This is my body.”

  He let out a low whistle. “Why’s it in here?”

  I shook my head and carefully put it back where it was. Then I looked at the one beside it. It was a man I’d never seen before. He had dark hair parted on the side and combed over. It was an old hairstyle from a very long time ago. There wasn’t anything remarkable or special about him so I moved on to the next body.

  It was a woman.

/>   I reached out and pulled her out for Storm to see. “Check her out.”

  She was wearing a long gown made of rich woven fabric. I couldn’t tell exactly, but her hair looked like it was a shade of red and it was done up in a style of many curls all piled on her head. She had pale skin and what appeared to be freckles splattered across her cheeks. She was pretty attractive, if you liked redheads.

  “When’s the last time you saw a girl in G.R.’s closet?” I asked Storm, not taking my eyes off her.

  “Um, never?”

  “Exactly. He doesn’t use women as Escorts. He thinks they’re too soft to kill.”

  “Well, he hasn’t met my ex,” Storm quipped.

  It was something I didn’t agree with the Reaper about, though I never said anything. Who he chose to make an Escort wasn’t something I cared about. I wasn’t going to make friends with them and I worked alone so it didn’t matter in terms of my job either. But if you asked me, a woman had the potential to be the perfect Escort. Because of a woman’s softness, their girly-like qualities, they were often underestimated. They were too often thought of as innocent. Many Targets wouldn’t see their death coming until it was already delivered.

  “What’s in the next one?” Storm asked.

  It took me a second to close the door of the closet I was standing in front of. It was surprisingly hard to shut away the body I’d just found.

  But I did. Because I knew I wasn’t going to leave it there.

  I pulled open the next door.

  There was a single body.

  I sucked in a breath.

  It was her. My sister.

  Sadness overcame me. Sadness for her… about a life cut way too short. A life lost that was all my fault. And now there she was, hanging in a secret, dark closet like she was someone’s shirt. Like she wasn’t once brimming with life with her own set of dreams and wants. She had been a person… a beautiful and innocent person. And now she was here. Held hostage by a man who shouldn’t even have her. I should have known she was here. I should have done something.