Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Huxley

“ONE MORE,” I groan as Glory and I roll my stepfather’s lifeless body in the tarp.

Three rotations and he’s as well wrapped as the two of us can get him on our own. We both rise, panting from exertion, but our exhaustion tonight has yet to reach a peak.

“You should shower and change,” I tell her. “Wash all the blood off you and bring me your clothes. We’ll burn them in the fireplace.”

She nods, her face almost impassive as she blindly takes my direction. Even in this shitshow of a situation, my chest rises with pride to know how I have her trust. I should have her trust. I’ve worked hard enough for it over the years. Glory was never easy to love with all the trouble she got into as a teenager, but I loved her all the same.

I loved her more than I should have.

That was one reason I knew I had to leave for college when I was eighteen, though I hated leaving her behind to clean up her own messes. Somehow, she’d managed to get through the last three years without me before leaving for college herself this fall.

Still, there was always a voice nagging in the back of my head telling me I shouldn’t have left her alone. It told me that something wasn’t quite right here between Glory and her father. I liked Beau well enough when my mother had first married him, but something just felt off about him. It’s why I called and checked on Glory so often. It’s why I called her tonight, because it just didn’t feel right to me that she came home for winter break, knowing that no one else would be here.

My mother was doing a sales pitch for Tolliver’s Treats at a new major distributor and she won’t be back until tomorrow at the earliest. And I’d already told Glory I wasn’t coming home, so I couldn’t wrap my head around why she’d want to come home alone to her father. Maybe that would seem okay to other people, but it didn’t feel right to me. I should’ve trusted my instincts all along. Maybe then I would’ve seen it and I could’ve done something about it.

She’d always cringed at his touch.

She flinched at his words.

She faked smiles and resisted hugs.

And she obeyed his every command, as if she were afraid of the consequences of not obeying him.

Fuck.

All the signs were there, and I ignored them in favor of being her savior, her rescuer, the one who came to help her when things got really bad.

But I didn’t know how bad they were until tonight. I only realized it when we were rolling the tarp…when I noticed his pants were unbuckled.

I hope the conclusion I’m drawing is wrong, but the nausea in my gut tells me I’m right.

If we lived in a perfect world, she’d get off with a hand slap for killing a man who would do something so vile to his own daughter. But our world is far from perfect. I’m trying to find a way to justify self-defense in my mind, but fuck, what she’s done to him…I can’t begin to guess how many times she stabbed him. The scene is gruesome, and they’re going to prosecute her for this overkill.

They’ll dig into her past and try to convict her based on all the trouble she’s been in, not to mention her mental health issues. And it won’t do her a damn bit of good that he was Beau fucking Tolliver. He owned this small town and the whole world knows who he was. I’m not convinced in the least that she won’t go down hard for this, and come hell or high water, I’m not letting that happen to her.

She’s stronger than she gives herself credit for, but I don’t think she would survive prison.

Glory uses her toes to kick off the heels of her once perfectly white tennis shoes, then removes her socks and places them on the tile floor. It’s a smart move. She won’t track the blood farther through the house this way. She grips the hem of her fitted black T-shirt and peels it up over her head.

I pinch my eyes shut and turn my back on her, as if modesty is required in our current predicament where she’s covered in her dead father’s blood. I couldn’t say when she became so comfortable around me that it doesn’t bother her to strip naked in my presence, and though she’s done it a hundred times, it still catches me off-guard and I have to force myself not to look.

She may be comfortable with it, but I’m not. It pushes a boundary I know I can’t cross, because if I do, I’ll never come back from it. I have my Ivy League reputation to maintain, and I don’t think an affair with my stepsister will be a good extracurricular activity to add to my law school applications.

I hear the items of clothing drop to the floor as she strips behind my back, and I swallow my rising curiosity. I clench my fists at my sides and take in a breath that shudders through me, causing an ache in my balls that I can’t relieve.

“I’ll go take a shower,” she whispers, and I wait until I hear her gentle footsteps pad across the tile floor before I turn around.

Her bloody clothes are folded neatly and placed on top of her soiled tennis shoes. The neatness and care with which she placed her ruined clothing almost makes me feel bad that I have to destroy them. Glory is a beautiful mess and an organized disaster. The enigma of her personality keeps my heart in a vice, squeezed so tightly that it can’t beat for anyone but her.

It’s painful to want her knowing I can never have her. She doesn’t need me that way. She needs me to be her stepbrother, the guy who always made sure she was safe, taken care of; the guy who always put the pieces back together after her wreckage. She needs me to take care of her, to make sure she’s protected and safe.

If she ever let me in as more than that, I wouldn’t be able to protect her from myself.

But I will protect her from going down for this.

I head outside while Glory showers, walking around the fence that encloses the in-ground pool. I trudge through snow to the shed at the far back of the yard, near the forest tree line. Inside, I find an old, wooden sled and drag it out, hoping it will hold up well enough to move Beau’s body. I pull it closer to the house—as close as I can get to the patio by the sliding glass door—and head back inside.

By the time I’ve rolled duct tape around the tarp, locking his body inside, Glory has finished her shower. She comes into the kitchen with nothing but a T-shirt and her underwear, and my heart stops at the sight of her.

She pauses as our eyes lock, tucking a strand of wet hair behind her ear. “I’ll get dressed after I help you clean up.”

“You don’t have to help me clean up.”

She walks toward me. “Yes, I do. This is my mess.” She opens the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink behind me. “Do you need me to help you move him outside?”

“No, let me handle that.”

She straightens, putting a spray bottle of cleaner onto the counter as I bend, grabbing hold of the looped handle I made out of duct tape that wraps all the way around the body. I use it to drag him, watching the end of the wrapped tarp where his feet are tucked inside to make sure I’m not dragging a trail of blood behind us. We must have done a good enough job of getting him on the tarp without making too much of a mess on the outside of it because he drags cleanly.

Through a struggle, I manage to get Beau outside and onto the sled. Then, I go back in to help Glory. We scrub the kitchen clean, following every possible path she might have walked while covered in his blood, and wipe it all down with harsh chemicals.

We go over it again and again, making sure everything looks exactly as it had when she’d first come home, then I send her upstairs to put on some warm clothes.

She comes back down wearing jeans that hug her in ways I shouldn’t notice, pulling an oversized, cream-colored cable-knit sweater on over her fitted, soft pink T-shirt. She slips on some fuzzy boots that look warm, but impractical for a wilderness walk with the oversized foot and flat sole. She throws on a heavy, hunter-green parka with a fur-lined hood, and I feel satisfied that will keep her warm, at least.

I zip up my bomber jacket, noting the small, dark stain on the sleeve. I’ll need to throw this jacket on the fire later and burn it like I burned her bloody clothes—but for now, I need it for warmth. I pull my gloves from my pockets and slip them on before grabbing the rope attached to the sled. It’s heavy now, adorned with the bright blue, crinkled tarp filled with Beau Tolliver’s remains.

We stop at the shed again so I can retrieve a shovel from inside, and I hand it to Glory. She takes one hand from her pocket and grips the handle, though she looks odd holding it.

She’s not the princess everyone thinks she is, but it’s true that she’s never done a day’s worth of manual labor in her life. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen her break a sweat outside of a planned workout, and those usually took place in her matching sports bras and leggings with her make-up and hair done.

She’s not pretentious or spoiled, but she looks the part—which is why her little outbursts that get her into trouble get blown out of proportion. She simply loses control of herself sometimes.

We all do.

“You ready?”

She nods. “How far out do we go?”

“As far as we can. We need time to dig a hole and we need to make it difficult for him to be found.”

“Okay,” she agrees.

“Brush away our footsteps with the shovel, and make sure all the bloody ones you made earlier are covered, too.”

I tug at the reins, dragging the sled behind me as I head for the tree line with Glory at my back. We enter the forest. Silence surrounds us except for the treads of the sled gliding over the rising snow. Moonlight peaks through the bare branches, allowing us enough light to see just in front of our steps, but as we march deeper into the forest and the trees become more densely packed, the light dims until it fades away, almost entirely.

“This is creepy,” Glory whispers. “How are we going to find our way back without our footsteps?”

Shit. I didn’t think of that.

I stop and turn my head to look around us, realizing how easy it would be to get lost in this labyrinth of trees. I drop the rope and pull out my cell phone, relieved to find that I still have service, though the signal is weak. I don’t know how far in I’ll lose that service, but we need to go a lot deeper into the forest than this.

I can only see a faint glow of the floodlights from the back of our house from this distance, so I think we’re far enough in that we don’t need to hide our footsteps until we make our way back.

“Stop covering our tracks,” I tell her. “We can follow them back to this spot on our way home.”

She nods and we trudge ahead, walking in silence for what must be a mile. Somehow, the snow falls quicker, heavier, though the path of trunks is denser and the bare branches above should block the path for it to reach us as it falls. I change our direction, knowing it would be foolish to take a straight path out from the house, and we walk another ten minutes or so before I finally decide we should stop.

“I think this should be far enough.”

Glory whirls around to look behind her. “Hux, we need to hurry. The snowfall is starting to cover our tracks.”

I look back to see she’s right, and I instantly feel stupid for somehow thinking that would be a reliable way to find our way back home. “Shit. Give me that.” I hold out my hand for the shovel, feeling new urgency to finish this.

I find a spot nestled between two trees—a spot wide enough that I know I shouldn’t run into too many roots there, though the bases are close enough to make for an inconspicuous burial site.

“We should’ve brought two shovels,” she says. “I could’ve helped you.”

“You don’t need to help me with this. I’ll take care of it.” I start by shoveling away the snow, working until I’ve exposed a rectangular, body-sized patch of earth beneath.

“You don’t have to do everything for me.”

“I know I don’t…I want to.”

It takes a full five minutes for me to pile away enough snow to see the earth beneath, and as soon as it’s clear, I slam the blade of the shovel down into the sod. I dig and dig and dig, and it doesn’t take long before exhaustion starts to set in.

This is going to be a long fucking night.