Neat (Becker Brothers, #2)(34)

Mallory laughed, tucking her feet closer and balancing her chin on her knees as she hummed along to the new song that had just come on. I eyed her from my peripheral, still flipping through the old training documents in the box I was working on, even though my attention was on her. I traced the black lines shaping her eyes, the long wisps of her lashes, the platinum strands of hair that had fallen from her ponytail and lined the edges of her jaw. I had the sudden urge to see her without makeup, to study the curves of her cheeks without them being covered with blush, or to look into her eyes without the tips of them being painted black, or to see the color of her nude lips, to feel them without smudging a line of lipstick…

To taste them.

That last thought zapped me out of my trance, and I cleared my throat, moving on to the next box in the stack. It was the one that had been buried on the bottom in the very back corner of the room, and it was extra dusty as I plopped it on the table in front of me.

I waved away the cloud, squinting. “Did it hurt?”

“When I fell from heaven?” Mallory snickered. “Come on, Logan. You’ve got better lines than that.”

I chuckled. “No, I meant that,” I said, motioning to the ring hanging from her nose. I pinched the septum of mine to illustrate. “I feel like that had to be painful.”

Mallory reached up, fingering the diamonds that lined the bottom of the ring and shaped her too-perfect nose. It was ridiculous, really, that I noticed her fucking nose — but I did. It was perfectly sized for her face, the tip of it rounded like a little button, and that ring she wore only called my attention to it more.

“A little,” she admitted. “But then again, I was eighteen and on a mission to piss off my parents. It could have felt like childbirth and I still wouldn’t have backed down.”

I cocked a brow. “You got that pierced to prove a point to your parents?”

“No, I did it because I liked it and I wanted to,” she said, but the corner of her mouth lifted. “Driving my father insane was just a perk.”

“I’m sure he loved the tattoos, too.”

“Oh, the one on my lower back is his favorite.”

I laughed, peeling the top off the dusty box. “Why were you so hell bent on pissing them off?”

A long sigh left her lips. “That’s a very long story, and one that would require libations. Maybe—” Her words died mid-sentence. “Logan? What’s wrong?”

I wanted to say nothing.

I wanted to shake my head, laugh it off, tell her to continue with her story.

I wanted to put the lid back on the box in front of me and pretend I’d never opened it and seen what was inside.

But I couldn’t.

All I could do was stand there, gaping at the charred remnants of the most horrible day in all my life.

The box had been unlabeled — and now that I saw what was inside it, I knew why. It was a box not meant to be found, one not meant to be dug through. Black soot lined the edges of it, and the items that filled it looked like someone had cleaned out their desk after being fired, ready to make the walk of shame through the halls to their car with everything that had decorated their office loaded into a box.

The photo frame that sat on top was busted — the glass broken, the silver frame mostly black now, and the photo seared and water damaged. Only one little inch of it remained clear enough to make out.

It was my oldest brother’s face — his smile, one sparked by the joke Dad had told us just before the photo was snapped.

I swallowed, gripping the edges of the folding table the box was on to keep myself from stumbling backward or passing out. All the blood drained from my face, from my neck, from every vein in my body.

“It’s my Dad’s stuff.”

The words were barely out of my mouth before Mallory scrambled up from where she was sitting on the floor, peering into the box with me. “What?!”

I nodded numbly. “That… that’s Jordan,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat as I pointed to what was left of the photo. “He had this picture on his desk. It was from our fishing trip the summer before he died.”

“Jesus…” she murmured, reaching inside the box to retrieve the frame. She held it as delicately as she could, but already, her fingers were covered in black. She pulled the frame close to her eyes, studying it, and I watched her eyes trace the photo before they found mine again. “Logan, wasn’t there an investigation done that day?”

I nodded, every movement slow and distant, like I was submerged under icy water just seconds from passing out.

“Wouldn’t this have been evidence?” she asked, pulling the next charred item out of the box. Bits of ashes fell off the once-gold paperweight, now mostly black. It was one my mom gave him for Christmas, engraved with his favorite Colin Powell quote.

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

I couldn’t speak. I just stared at the weight in her hands as Mallory stared at me.

“Logan?”

I blinked. “I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t think it was relevant.”

“Maybe,” she agreed, thumbing the small part of the quote that peeked through the grime. “But, if it wasn’t relevant to the fire department or the police… then why did someone keep it?”