Lights Out: Chapter 17

If someone had told me two weeks ago that I would end up driving a car with a body in the trunk, I would have…I don’t know. Laughed? Told them they had lost it? And yet, here I was, driving back toward the city with a queasy killer and the corpse he’d created.

I glanced at Josh, slumped sideways in his seat with his forehead resting against the window. “You doing okay?”

He craned his head sideways, slowly, like he couldn’t believe I was even asking him that because he was obviously not okay. “I’m great. Definitely not in the middle of an existential crisis. You?”

“Disappointed.”

He sat up a little, frowning. “What?”

I shrugged and refocused on the road. It was pitch black outside, and with the night I was having, it would have been just my luck that a deer would jump in front of us. “Brad’s death was too anticlimactic.”

“Anticlimactic,” Josh repeated.

“Yeah. I mean, a piece of shit like him? His demise should have been more violent and, ideally, included getting lit on fire at the end.”

That surprised a snort out of him. “Bonfire o’ Brad.”

“Barbecue o’ Bluhm,” I said, grinning.

Josh groaned. “We’re going straight to hell.”

“Good. Maybe we can get another shot at him down there.” I glanced over my shoulder toward the trunk. “I’m lowkey considering pulling over so I can stab him a few times and make myself feel better.”

“Haha,” Josh said humorlessly.

I gave him a blank look.

His eyes flashed wide. “Jesus Christ, Aly.”

I winked to let him know I was kidding – kind of – and faced the road again.

He shifted beside me, sitting fully upright in his seat. “I can’t believe I just murdered someone.”

I held up a finger. “Technically, I think what you did classifies as involuntary manslaughter.”

“Oh, good. That makes me feel much better.”

“It should,” I said.

“Why’s that?”

I shot him a wink. “Less jail time.”

“How are you so calm about all this?” he asked.

“Because death is nothing new to me,” I said. “I see it on a weekly basis. Mostly, it’s good people who pass way before their time due to illness or injury. So much of the loss I witness is senseless and tragic, leaving far too many heartbroken family members in its wake. It’s nice to see someone like Brad get what they deserve for once. I doubt even his parents will mourn him.”

Josh was quiet in response, and I glanced over to see him staring out at the passing snowscape as he processed my words.

God, the man was beautiful. His profile in the dashboard light was a thing to behold. It made me wonder why he’d ever want to cover his face with a mask.

I’d seen shitty people in his comments say things about how men like him were all butterfaces, and that’s why they wore masks, but that wasn’t true of Josh, and I’d watched enough face-reveal videos from other creators to know those commenters were wrong. So what drove the masktokers to it? Was it the anonymity? The opportunity to don an alter-ego like a second skin and become someone else entirely?

That felt oddly fitting for Josh. He was like a soft dom – sweet in the streets and mean in the sheets. But, like, mean in the best way. Bossy and demanding and relentless, and oh, no, I was getting turned on within five feet of a fresh corpse.

I jerked my gaze back to the road. That cemented it. I’d officially become so numb that not even the body of a dead rapist affected me like it should.

I snuck one last glance at the passenger seat. Or maybe Josh was so handsome that the laws of morality broke in his presence.

“The worst part about it is that I don’t even feel bad,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m freaked out that I killed someone, but beneath that, I don’t have any guilt over it. I’m more fucked up over not being fucked up if that makes sense.”

“It does,” I said as we approached a four-way stop. My map helpfully told me to turn right, so I threw my blinker on and followed the directions as I mulled over a more detailed response. “I think most people would feel the same way in your shoes. Death in and of itself is terrifying. The first time I watched someone pass, I stepped into the hall afterward and puked all over the floor. I’ve watched other new nurses pass out. Your response is pretty normal. As for not feeling bad, why would you?”

He turned toward me. “Because I took a human life.”

I shook my head. “That’s societal pressure. You’ve been taught that killing is wrong and only monsters do it, but that’s not right. People kill for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, it’s in the heat of the moment, and they spend the rest of their lives regretting what they’ve done. Other times, it’s out of desperation, like a woman killing her abuser because she knows that if she doesn’t, she’ll end up dead instead. And then there are accidents like what happened tonight. I’m honestly relieved we did it ourselves. Part of me was panicking over the thought of those people calling the cops instead of taking care of Brad on their own.”

I reached out and gripped Josh’s knee. “Just keep reminding yourself that it was an accident, and making one mistake doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Especially when the result is removing a rapist and potential murderer from this earth. Between his family money and his obvious escalation, he would have gone on to target someone else if we didn’t stop him. Who knows how many lives we might have saved by taking his?”

Josh shifted, his leg flexing beneath my palm. “You keep saying we, but I was the one who did it.”

“Yeah, but I’m just as complicit,” I said. “Maybe I didn’t put the duct tape over Brad’s mouth, but I went into this planning for him to end up dead, one way or another.”

Josh slipped his hand beneath mine and threaded our fingers together. “Thank you for saying all that. It helps.”

“You’re welcome. And I hope you know I’m not blowing smoke up your ass. I truly believe we made the world better by removing Brad from it. I know vigilante justice is problematic as fuck, but sometimes I think it’s necessary, especially when the system put in place to deal with men like Brad fails because it’s susceptible to loopholes.”

“Don’t forget bribery,” Josh said. “Brad gave off plenty of warning signs that went ignored, including peeping through windows, animal cruelty, and sexual harassment. All as a teenager. I read a quote from a judge who let him off without so much as probation after he got drunk his senior year of high school and drove his car into the house of a classmate who’d turned him down. It was, “He’s a bright young man with his whole future ahead of him. It’d be terrible to ruin it over something like this.” The judge was a golf buddy of Brad’s father.”

I pulled my hand from Josh’s before I broke one of his fingers from squeezing too hard. “That right there is why I won’t ever feel bad about this.”

Josh let out a low, angry sound. “It barely scratches the surface of what Brad got away with.”

I glared at the road ahead of me. “I keep getting stuck on how it went on for so long. That one judge? I get. Not that I understand, just that there are corrupt shitheads in every profession. But years and years of Brad getting away with his crimes? That no one will ever be able to explain to me in a way I’ll understand, even if they give me a detailed bullet list of every misstep along the way.”

“Maybe it all led up to tonight,” Josh said. “Maybe I was meant to kill him.”

I frowned. “Like fate?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe I was always meant to be a killer, and it would have happened one way or another.”

What the fuck? How could Josh possibly think something like that? Him? Destined to be a killer? I couldn’t accept it. He was too good, too kind, and yes, he’d broken into my house and stalked me, but I’d asked him to commit the B&E, and I’d never told him to stop watching me. I had a feeling that if I had, he would have listened and never bothered me again. His actions might be similar to Brad’s when examined through a wide lens, but when you zoomed in, the two men couldn’t be more different, and I refused to let Josh compare himself to such a garbage human being.

“No,” I said. “I reject the idea that this was your fate. It’s too fucked up when you take into account the pain and suffering of Brad’s victims. There’s no way they were put on this earth to fall prey to him.”

Josh ran a hand over his face and released a heavy sigh. “I sound full of myself when you put it like that.”

“Not full of yourself, just conflicted and confused after a traumatic event.”

A glance at him revealed the worry on his face, brows drawn together, full lips flattened into a hard line.

I needed to drive my point home, and what better way than using his logic against him? “You asked me if I would ever blame another teenager for killing their parent, so let me turn that around on you. If it was me who’d accidentally killed Brad, would you be wondering if I was always meant to be a killer?”

“Never,” Josh said. “But it’s not the same.”

“It is, though,” I argued.

“It’s not. This is something I’ve worried about since I was a child.”

My blood ran cold. Who had thoughts like that as a kid? “What do you mean?”

“Uh-uh,” he said. “We’re not doing this now. If there was ever a worst time to have the Josh’s Tragic Backstory conversation, it’s right after I killed someone.”

“No fair. I spilled my guts to you about mine.”

He let out an exasperated sound. “Aly, my backstory is the stuff of people’s nightmares.”

I glanced over at him, starting to worry. “Have you ever killed before?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Have you ever hurt anyone?”

“Not outside a martial arts studio, and even then, only accidentally, and never seriously.”

“Are you a criminal?”

“I’m a hacker, so technically, yes. I’ve broken countless laws, but the worst thing I’ve ever done was break into your house and stalk you.”

I lifted a brow at him and then sent a pointed look over my shoulder toward the trunk. “Really? That’s the worst thing?”

He shot me a grin. “I said what I said. Weren’t you just telling me we did the world a favor by killing Brad?”

I smiled. Yeah, I had, and it was nice to see some of Josh’s sass returning. “Then that’s all I need to know. I trust my gut that you’re not a bad person. Anything you have to tell me can wait until you’re ready. No rush.”

He leaned over the center console and pressed a kiss to my cheek. “You are the best girlfriend a guy could ask for.”

My eyebrows flew up so fast it felt like they were trying to jump off my forehead. “Uh, what was that?”

“Too soon?” he said. “I mean, I know we haven’t had the official conversation yet, but we share a child, and I feel like disposing of a body is a boyfriend-girlfriend activity and not something you do with a casual hookup.”

I schooled my face. “Are you saying that the couple who commits homicide together, stays together?”

He snorted. “Too wordy. I prefer the couple who slays together, stays together.”

I choked out a laugh. Yup. Straight to hell. The both of us.

“Where are we going, by the way?” he asked. “I feel like you were about to tell me right before the last time I had you pull over so I could dry heave some more.”

My humor evaporated. I’d been working up the courage for this conversation for the past half hour and still hadn’t figured out a good way to explain my plan B. “How much did you look into my family?”

“I stopped with your parents,” Josh said. “Digging any deeper felt too intrusive.”

I looked over at him. “Really? That’s where you drew the line?”

One big shoulder lifted in a shrug. “What? It had to be somewhere. Would you prefer that I’d dug deeper?”

“I honestly would have because it would save me from having to tell you some uncomfortable things about my family.”

I turned back toward the road. We were entering the suburbs, and I couldn’t keep looking at him whenever I felt like it – which was approximately every 1.2 seconds. He was too good-looking, and it was a goddamn distraction.

His hand landed on my thigh, and I must have been beyond redemption because even such a comforting, innocuous touch made me want to squirm in my seat. If he’d just inch it a little higher…

“Aly, nothing you could say about your family would ever drive me away.”

“Okay then. My uncle Nico is in the mob.”

Josh turned toward his door. “Pull over. We’re breaking up.” He jiggled the handle like he was trying to open it. “Let me out.”

I slapped at him. “Stop that. I’m serious.”

He swiveled back to me. “I thought you didn’t have any other family. There’s no mention of them anywhere on your social media profiles or other digital records.”

Was it weird that confessions like that didn’t even phase me anymore?

“That’s because I’ve been ignoring their existence,” I said. “Nico is my mom’s younger brother. He fell in with a bad crowd when he was a teenager, and the family pretty much disowned him. My grandparents fled here from Sicily because of the mob, and to have a son join their ranks was anathema after everything they’d been through. The last time I saw Uncle Nico was at my mom’s funeral. I thought that was the final time I’d ever hear from him, but he reached out a few months ago and coerced me into getting my youngest cousin, Greg, a janitorial job at the hospital.”

“Random,” Josh said.

I shook my head. “I wish. Let’s just say that there’s a coroner’s assistant whose last name ends in a vowel, and I’m pretty sure the real reason Greg got hired has something to do with how certain bodies get handled. I’ve only seen Greg a handful of times at work, and we’ve come to an unspoken understanding about pretending we don’t know each other, which, I mean, isn’t hard because we only met at Mom’s funeral. And no, I don’t want to get to know him now. He’s following in his dad’s footsteps like all my other cousins, and my job is too important for me to risk losing it over whatever shady mob shit he’s involved in.”

“So why are we involving them now?” Josh asked.

I sighed. “Because before my dad died, he told me that if I ever got into serious trouble, I should go to my uncle. Nico might be a soulless bastard, but family still matters to him, and apparently, he never stopped trying to reconcile with my mom and grandparents before they passed.”

“When you put it like that, I almost feel bad for the guy,” Josh said.

“You really shouldn’t. He’s not a good person. Maybe not as bad as Brad, but close. Unfortunately, I think he’s a necessary evil right now. From what Dad told me, Nico’s not high up in the organization, but because of what he does for them, he’s our best bet at getting out of our current situation without getting caught.”

“What does he do?” Josh asked.

I grimaced. “He’s a cleaner.”

“Money laundering?”

I shook my head. “More like sanitizing crime scenes.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re sure this is how you want to handle our current trunk situation?” he asked.

I glanced over at him. “I guess that depends. How do you feel about slicing off Brad’s fingerprints, ripping all the teeth from his mouth, hacking him into pieces, setting those pieces on fire, and then dumping them all into a river or lake?”

Josh blanched. “Like I might be sick again.”

I nodded. “Same. Death, I’m okay with; dismemberment, I’m not so sure. And because we’re amateurs, the risk of getting caught somewhere along the way is too high for me to stomach. I’d much rather let the professionals handle it.”

“Consider me team mob then,” Josh said.

“It’s going to come at a cost,” I warned him.

He gripped my shoulder, and the urge to turn and nuzzle my cheek into his hand was too strong to resist.

He stroked his thumb up my neck. “Do you know what the cost will be? Are we talking money or, like, favors?”

“Probably favors. Just because I’m family doesn’t mean I’m exempt from blackmail and coercion. I’ll probably have to convince the hospital to hire another mobster or something.” I sent him an apologetic look. “I can only imagine what they’ll ask someone with your hacking skills to do.”

He squeezed my shoulder. “If it means staying out of jail and the media, I’ll do whatever they want.”

I frowned as I took a left turn. He was concerned about the media? The thought of winding up on the news hadn’t even occurred to me. I was still too worried about getting caught driving with a dead guy in the car to think much past that, but maybe I should have. Brad did come from a lot of money, after all. Rich white boys were always considered newsworthy by the media. It made me even more convinced that going to Nico was the right choice, despite whatever fallout might come from it.

“You never gave me an answer,” Josh said, snapping me out of my dark thoughts.

“About what?”

“Whether or not you’re my girlfriend.”

My pulse ratcheted up, and there went my stomach, going aflutter. “Are you asking me to be your girlfriend?” I said, sneaking a glance over at him.

He flashed a wolfish smile at me, and honestly? I forgot about the body in the trunk. Hell, it felt like the sight of those dimples was realtering my brain chemistry so that all my future thoughts would revolve around this man.

My body’s response to his was bad enough, but I was doomed now that I had a face to go along with it. Doomed, I tell you. Whatever self-preservation remained went out the window. This was what I wanted – he was what I wanted – to hell with the consequences. And yes, it was all happening faster than was probably normal, but with him, I didn’t need months to make up my mind. These past few weeks had been enough for me to decide what my answer would be.

He made me feel alive. He’d dragged me out of the gray world I’d been living in and taught me how to see colors again. In a sea of men who barely put in any effort, this man stood out for going above and beyond. He was the definition of “If he wanted to, he would.” Because he’d done for me what no one else ever had: he not only met but exceeded my needs, both physically and emotionally. He kept me on my toes, never knowing what he would do next. And he did it all while making me blush and laugh, often at the same time.

Of course, I wanted to be his girlfriend. Hell, if I had it my way, every free moment I wasn’t working would be spent in his company from now on. I hoped he understood what he was getting himself into because while his obsession had started relatively recently, mine had been going on for months, and once I got my claws in him, I didn’t plan to let go.

He shifted forward, crowding into my space in a way that made my breath hitch and my nerves spark. “Aly? Do you want to be my girlfriend? The position comes with snacks and orgasms and maybe a little light stalking.”

I grinned. “Yes.”

He swooped in and kissed my cheek, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been so happy. Even with a dead body not five feet from me. Even on my way to ask the last person I wanted to for help. Josh distracted me from all the awful bullshit and made me feel good instead. Maybe this relationship had started out on questionable footing, and maybe we still had a lot to learn about each other outside of our mutual stalking, but saying yes to being Josh’s girlfriend felt like the easiest decision I’d made in a long time, and no matter what was to come, or what secrets Josh still held, I doubted anything would ever make me regret it.