Page 34 of A Love Most Fatal

The fire alarm keeps up its beeping, but my bedroom window is wide open, most of the smoke left in the air flowing out of it. I never leave my window open without the screen because this is how bugs get inside. It’s the window with the fire escape which is horrifying to me.

I hate that someone could be out there right now watching me, waiting to shoot me and Ranger through each of our heads.

My closet is empty, and my room is otherwise unoccupied. My shelf looks untouched, the frames on my wall not even off kilter. I don’t see anything immediately off as my eyes scan the room, just the window, the foam in the trash can still making its crunching noise as it falls to liquid.

Vanessa is shouting something through my phone’s speaker on the ground and I pick it up and press it to my ear.

“I’m fine, it’s fine,” I say. “Someone started a fire in my trash can.”

I climb onto my bed and hold down the button on my fire alarm until it stops beeping. Ranger is still barking, though; howling and growling at my bathroom door like the old piece of painted wood is the one that started the fire.

Vanessa is speaking something in my ear, but the gut churning foreboding feeling in my stomach is back as I step down and approach my closed bathroom door.

I shouldn’t open it.

I very much shouldnotopen it.

“What’s happening?” Vanessa demands, then yells to someone on her side of the line, “Go faster!”

Now that I’ve joined Ranger on the ground, his barking has quieted to a growl, and despite the ongoing internal conflict regarding whether I should open the door, I twist the handle, cold in my slick hand, and push into the bathroom.

The lights are off, but I smell it first: a thick scent, sweet and coppery, and accompanied by a steady dripping sound into my tub. I cannot hear Vanessa through my phone, just the dripping in the tub. I cannot feel anything except for dread in my spine, it holds me hostage and I don’t want to move, but I can’t not, I have to turn my head, I have to make sure someone isn’t there waiting to shoot me. It feels like I am moving slowly, my arm lifting to flick on the light before my sight is filled with red.

Redeverywhere.

It’s so, violently red. That’s what surprises me most at first, the fact that it looks like corn syrup and food dye splattered against my mirror and the walls and all over the floor.

My eyes find the source, a man hung up in my shower, his arms suspending him in the air, one tied to my shower head, the other strung up to the curtain bar.

His neck, his torso are both?—

I fall back onto my ass and Ranger starts barking again, loud howls at the man whose stomach was sliced open, his insides on my tile.Tony.

“Nate,” I hear through the phone, loud and insistent. “Nate?—”

“Get here,” I say, before promptly losing the entirety of my breakfast.

12

VANESSA

Nate remainssilent for the whole ride to my house, and I’m not sure if that’s because he’s angry and traumatized or because he’s trying not to heave all over my leather back seat. When I peer at him through the rearview, he’s just petting the ugly little dog’s head as we drive, a numb look in the near distance.

Leo got him to change from his work outfit that was stained with what looked like coffee and throw up into a mismatched hoodie and sweatpants—but his face is ghostly. I’d think he was sick with the flu if I didn’t know better.

He’s a mess.

I’m a mess. Shaken. Leo knows it too, though he’s wise enough not to mention it. He didn’t question me when I rushed into the car, or when I sped across the city weaving through many a bus lane to get to Nate. I’ve always loved this about Leo; when it counts, he listens. So, when I told him to help Nate pack a bag and get him to the car, he didn’t question that either. Lockdown or not, the math teacher was coming with us.

I surveyed the grisly scene in the bathroom while they packed. I allowed myself to cry a total of four tears before I squared my shoulders and took a closer look at the work done toTony. Sweet, loyal Tony, who was exceptional at chess and who loved his family deeply.

It was a butcher job, fast and hideous, someone had slashed through Tony’s artery first before the work on his torso. There was no obvious calling card as to who did this, no “X” on his neck, no slashes to the face, no note, just the nightmare of one of our best guys cut to ribbons in defense of someone who isn’t even part of the family.

This is how his parents will see it, at least.

I have an intense urge to flee the country at the fact that I’ll have to pay his parents a visit this afternoon to break the news. I don’t have time to think about what I’ll say yet, not when I still don’t know what the hell to do with the shivering man and sleeping dog in my back seat.

My eyes gravitate toward him through the mirror again, and when his gaze clashes with mine, I nearly jump.