Secret Obsession: Chapter 5

We stare down at the dead man.

People are so fascinating as they die. Kind of horrific, too. The blood spurting out of his neck, the artery flowing to his brain severed, eventually slowed to a gurgle when his heart stopped. It took minutes. Not seconds, like in the movies.

I didn’t mind.

Now he’s lifeless on the area rug, his eyes still open, his body at a weird angle, and I have to force myself to tune in to the conversation around me.

“…no one will know he was here. So why does some blood matter?”

“Because blood always fucking matters. Haven’t you ever seen a single episode of CSI?”

“If they trace him back here—”

“Oh, look, five hundred witnesses who all say they saw him dancing with Willow, then leave the club shortly after? Not suspicious at all.”

“She wasn’t buying her own drinks, they probably don’t have her name—”

“Prime scans IDs at the door, dipshit. Bet they keep video footage, too, just in case.”

“Which means Miles would be seen carrying her out, cementing her alibi. If he even wants to be dragged into this, which I’d highly doubt.”

I tear my gaze away from the would-be rapist. “Of course I’m her alibi.”

My friends go silent.

Jacob was the first to arrive. He stepped in with plastic booties on over his shoes and a ball cap tugged low over his face. And then he made me put on the plastic booties, too. Said if we accidentally stepped in blood…

And then he looked at me and grimaced at what he saw. The blood coating me. It sprayed rather violently, and I didn’t flinch away when I pulled the knife. I was too busy focusing on Willow’s reaction.

Greyson got here next. He’s been rather silent thus far, like me. Plastic fucking booties on his feet, his hands tucked into his pockets. Unlike me, he doesn’t want so much as a fingerprint linking him here. I understand that. If there was evidence of him here, he’d have to loop in Violet. Make her complicit, too—something he would never do.

My brother and Steele came together. Knox’s brows were pinched, and he’s talked the most. Unsurprisingly. Really, the majority of the argument has been between Steele and Knox, who seem to be in the same boat as the rest of us.

Totally fucking clueless about dead bodies.

Why would they know anything? It’s not like we go around murdering people. Usually, it’s more of a beat up, seriously injure, or maim energy.

“We need to get the body out of here,” Jacob says. “Unless you want to call the cops right now and tell them you found it. But that would mean a mess for Willow.”

I grunt. I want to do the torturing. Not some whiny detective in a windowless room.

“Why the fuck would you kill him?” Knox snaps at me.

Again.

He’s been periodically asking me that. Well, I think the question just flies out of his mouth. He seems more concerned than angry. Because at the end of the day, I’m the one who did it. I’m the one with blood on my hands. Literally and metaphorically. I just can’t seem to give a shit.

I’ve bitten my tongue until this moment, but they all deserve answers.

“He drugged her,” I finally answer. “At the club, he put something in her drink. Or more than one drink, I don’t know. I carried her here, he followed. Confronted me outside. Came at me—”

“Self-defense,” Jacob inserts.

“I stabbed him in the gut. I could’ve left him on the sidewalk or just punched him instead of pulling my knife. I could’ve called nine-one-one as soon as it happened. But look at him. He’s huge.”

“And instead of leaving him on the sidewalk…”

“I wanted to turn it into a lesson.” My mood plummets because I don’t think Willow learned her lesson in the slightest. “So I brought him up here and kept him alive until she woke up this morning.”

Greyson checks his phone, then tucks it away. “Vi picked Willow up from the Point. Said she had blood on her…”

I bite the inside of my cheek. Before they arrived, I watched her dot move toward the Point. But then Jacob walked in, and I shut it down. A little embarrassed to be caught watching her movements so closely? I should get used to it. They’re all just as fucked up as me.

I open the tracking app now and frown. It’s blinking in the restaurant parking lot close to the jump spot. “Where is she?”

“Dude’s obsessed,” Knox snorts.

I glower at him.

“My house,” Greyson says. “She’s fine. Focus.”

Great.

She left her freaking phone. What am I supposed to do when she does that? Put a tracker under her skin?

I glance at Steele. He did that to Aspen. And, to my knowledge, she still doesn’t know about it. Maybe that’s just one of those things that he’ll take to his grave, or it’ll blow up in his face four years from now.

“I want to be able to use this,” I say suddenly. “To control her. Which means I need access to the body.”

Jacob’s nodding along. Greyson and Steele, too. Knox is the only one staring at me like I’ve lost my damn mind. He just doesn’t get it—he played with Willow for a fucking year for a bet and didn’t catch feelings for her. I know, because I threatened him over winter break with a knife to his throat after a rogue comment.

All the fucker did was grin at me.

And since he’s been freed, he’s had at least three girls in his bed each week. Without even trying. Like the puck bunnies of CPU were all waiting for him to drop Willow for their shot at him.

“We photograph the place, then move the body. We need to roll him up in the area rug.” Jacob squats and lifts a corner of it, then grins at me. “You put… is that plastic wrap?”

I shrug. “Yeah, well. She had a shit ton of those rolls for some reason.”

“Okay, great. That makes this slightly easier.” He points at Greyson. “We need more plastic. Preferably something a little heftier than this grocery store shit. And get a camera. One with a digital memory card.”

“On it,” Greyson answers. “Be back soon.”

He moves past us to the door, shoving the chair out of the way to open it. They all stared at me like I was nuts when they discovered the broken latch, and I didn’t have it in me to tell the full story.

Knox secures it behind him, then rubs his eyes. “This is fifty shades of wrong.”

“You owe me,” I growl.

My brother whirls around, fire filling his expression. “I’m sorry, I owe you? If you had manned up sooner, I wouldn’t have had any chance to hit on Willow. You just needed some encouragement. And now you’ve gone and killed someone in her apartment.”

I cross my arms.

Steele eyes us. “I would’ve done the same,” he admits. “Come close to it anyway. Both of you know that.”

“See?”

“And now you want to… control her with this?”

“I want the body somewhere accessible. If she gets out of hand.” I shrug and look down at it. Not a him, not anymore. Just an empty vessel.

“Okay, so we need to store the body. It’s not like we can bury it…” Jacob’s brows furrow. “Meat freezer seems cliché, but I kind of like it.”

“My dad has one of those,” Steele says. “They’re in New York City for the next few months for work, but he took the whole family. So we can store it there ’til the ground thaws, then, fuck, bury it? Does that give you enough time to manipulate the situation?”

“Probably. Thanks, man.”

It would turn into a nightmare if Steele’s dad returned and discovered it—or worse, one of the girls. Aspen would probably murder me if I traumatized her sisters like that. So it’s a temporary solution, but a good one. Getting it out of Crown Point seems smart, too.

“Okay, so we load it up into the truck and drive it down to Steele’s pop’s house, secure it, and head back like nothing’s happened.” Jacob circles the area rug, careful not to step in any blood. “But first, we need to make sure that this place is spotless.”

Steele heads for the door, his keys dangling from his fingertips. “I’ll get supplies.”

We wait for Greyson and Steele to return. There’s not much else we can do—Willow has some organic cleaning stuff that definitely won’t get rid of blood the way we need.

When they get back, we jump into work: taking photos of Willow’s entire apartment, rolling up the body in the carpet and plastic wrapping, then taping the whole thing. It feels vaguely ridiculous, like at any moment the police are going to burst in the door and arrest us.

But nothing happens.

The street is quiet, the whole house eerily silent. Knox goes searching and finds that the first-floor apartment lady’s car isn’t in the driveway, giving us a modicum of relief that we won’t be immediately discovered.

Then the frenzy of cleaning. The smell of bleach embeds itself in my nostrils, and we go through countless paper towels scrubbing and erasing every speck of blood.

Willow’s apartment probably hasn’t been this thoroughly sanitized since before she moved in.

“If police come looking, they won’t find anything obvious here.” Jacob ties off another stuffed trash bag.

I loathe the idea of police scouring Willow’s apartment. And truthfully, I’d do everything in my power to stop that from happening. But the fear that Willow might have of them doing that to her… that’s worth it.

When we finish, we’re all crabby. It takes three of us to lift the man-rug and walk him down the flight of stairs, sliding him onto the waiting tarp in the bed of Greyson’s truck. The other two haul out our trash and toss it in alongside the body. We secure the cover over the bed, slam the tailgate closed, and pile in.

Steele gets the front seat for once, since he has to navigate. Knox, Jacob, and I are stuck squashed together in the back, Jacob between Knox and me. Which is good because prolonged contact with my brother never ends well.

Our parents used to build a wall of pillows between us on longer road trips. They thought that if we couldn’t see each other, we wouldn’t fight. Of course, all it really meant was that we couldn’t see what we were hitting when we struck blindly through the barrier.

An hour passes, and we pull up to Steele’s driveway. There’s a fucking gate and everything.

I forgot that his dad was rich-rich. And Steele, too, I guess. Our parents are upper middle class. Not fancy, but well enough off. But they worked hard for their money, and they made Knox and I learn that same lesson. We had jobs from the age of fifteen onward, every summer between school. We squirreled away money and bought the hockey house my freshman year, sparing me from living in the dorms like Knox.

The rent from the other guys is mostly passive income, but it also pays the mortgage. Dad keeps saying he wants us to buy another property—but he doesn’t hear us when we say the hockey house would be considerably worse off if neither of us lived there. At least we half give a shit, and we’re renovating this summer. Upgrading some stuff, like the kitchen and bathrooms, electrical. We’ve got this year and next with the house, and then it’s going on the market. After that, hopefully we’ll both be playing professional hockey and far away from Crown Point.

That’s the dream anyway.

The gate swings open, allowing Greyson to pull his truck through, and we drive another two minutes before the house even comes into view.

I lean forward, frowning. “How come you’ve never taken us here?”

Steele grimaces. “Because I avoid this place as much as possible.”

That’s fair enough.

But it doesn’t stop us from springing out of the truck in the garage and immediately going to explore the house. It’s huge. And so wildly un-Steele-like, I can see why he wouldn’t be comfortable here. Or maybe it’s the wife. All traces of his mom are gone, replaced with photos of Aspen’s mother and sisters.

A big, happy family. Shiny and new.

Gross.

“Okay, okay,” Steele finally sighs. “Are you guys done?”

Knox hooks his arm around my neck, dragging me through the kitchen and back to where Steele waits. “Ready.”

“Ready,” Greyson echoes, Jacob close behind him.

We heave the body out and carry it out of the car garage, which is apparently one of two garages. It’s connected by a short hallway to a second one, which seems to be a man-cave toolshed sort of place. Steele empties out the few remaining pieces of meat from the freezer while the rest of us cut open the rug.

The body looks even worse than it did before. But we shove him into the long, low freezer, forcing his limbs to fold, and slam it shut. It closes. The guy fits. Miracle upon miracle, because he was huge and heavy. Sure, his legs are at a weird angle, and I think we broke something to get him jammed in there, but it works.

Steele has a padlock in his hand, which he loops through a hook at the front. It secures the lid to the base. Once it’s clicked shut, he hands the key to me.

I pocket it with a small nod.

“We burn the rug, then we’re done,” Jacob says quietly.

The rest of them turn away, hurrying to get this job finished.

I pull out my phone and take a picture of the sealed freezer, smiling to myself.