Bane (Sinners of Saint #4)(77)

She opened the door, her eyes and nose red, the rest of her face the palest I’d ever seen. Her hair was a mess, and her eyes lacked that mischievous zing that made my dick hard. I immediately forgot my long, elaborate speech and took a step in, jerking her into my arms.

“You okay?”

“Shadow died.”

“Fuck,” I breathed, clutching her harder, my nose buried in her hair. “When?”

“This morning. Pam found him, but didn’t call me. He had cancer. She’s known for…a while.”

Jesse delivered the news with the kind of detachment that showed me that she was still in shock. Now was not the time to drop another bomb on her ass, and definitely not the time to drag her into my war with Darren. At the same time, I was aware that he was about to arrive home sometime soon, and I needed her out of there. I pulled back, running my fingers over her eyes, hair, cheeks, lips. Doing inventory, making sure everything was intact. That my Jesse was still mine. She was. For now.

“Where is he now?”

She looked up to the belly of her stairway. “I carried him up to my room. I didn’t know what to do. I need to bury him. But, Roman…”

She burst into tears again, and I held her for a few minutes, feeling the blood roar in my ears, before marching in and going up the stairs. Pam was coming down as I was going up. Her face told me she no longer wanted to fuck me, or if she did, it was with a broomstick up my ass. I flipped her the finger and continued to Jesse’s room, picked Shadow up, wrapped him up in a sheet, and carried him downstairs.

“Where are you taking the dog?” Pam barked from the kitchen, fixing herself a drink. I didn’t answer. I wanted to kill her, her husband, and Dr. Wiese, who’d taken the shortcut and dropped the C-bomb on Pam, just because he’d known it would be easier, that Jesse was fragile and sensitive when it came to her dog.

“Come on, Snowflake.”

I hoisted Shadow to the trunk and climbed into the Rover. Jesse followed in silence. I drove to the reservoir on the outskirts of town, knowing there’d be plenty of land for me to bury him there. Snowflake sniffed and looked out the window. I didn’t want to force a conversation, knowing how many things were going through her head. Sometimes she held my hand. I wanted so bad to squeeze hard and tell her there was more. That she needed to be strong for me, because shit was about to get real complicated, real fast.

“Jesse.”

“Mrs. B is dying. Her kids don’t want to come to California to say goodbye,” she said flatly, staring out the window, flicking the glass with her thumb and forefinger.

I bit down on a string of curses. “Is that so?”

“Yeah. They said I should stop contacting them. I wanted them to come here while she was still lucid, but that’s not going to happen. Know what else is not going to happen? My going back to living with Pam. I’ve had enough of her bullshit. The only thing I really cared about in that house was Shadow, and he is gone now.”

I knew I was cooking up a disaster, considering the shit I was keeping from her, but couldn’t stop myself, anyway. “You’ll stay with me.” It wasn’t a question.

“I was thinking of asking Gail. She needs a roommate.”

“She needs better taste in music,” I quipped. “If I hear My Chemical Romance blasting from her phone one more time, I swear someone will get decapitated.”

I expected a snort, a laugh, anything. But nothing ever came. I reached to touch her thigh. “Hey. It will be okay.”

“No, it won’t. My dad’s dead. My dog’s dead. My best friend is dying. The only person I have left is you. Well, and Darren and Mayra, I guess, but they only care because they have to. One is paid, and the other is just embarrassed by his sorry excuse for a wife.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t think Darren cared for her. If he had, he wouldn’t have pulled this type of shit. But hey, what the fuck did I know about love? A lot, apparently. For starters, I knew that it hurt like a motherfucker.

I parked her vehicle a few feet away from an old sycamore. The earth beneath it was loose and damp, easy to dig. I took out a shovel I’d picked up from the gardener’s shed from the trunk, flung my shirt to the driver’s seat and started digging. She watched my back all the while. I carried Shadow into his burial spot and covered him in dark soil, then grabbed a pointy branch and wrote down his name in the sand. Shadow Dog Carter.

“Let’s give him a eulogy.” I tugged her to my side, wrapping my arm around her shoulders and dropping a kiss on the crown of her head. “He was a good dog. He deserves it.”

She stared at the fresh pile of mud mounded under the sycamore, her chin shaking. I wanted to suck her agony into my own body until she felt better, even if it killed me. And the worst part, was, I knew I was wronging her by not telling her about my meeting with Darren this afternoon. About Artem. And still, I couldn’t see her hurting more.

“Once upon a time there was a little girl,” she started, crouching down and burying her palm inside the soil. “The girl was scared of the dark and loved Kit Kats. There were four fingers on every Kit Kat. One for her. One for her father. One for her mother, and one…” She paused. I knew she was smiling, even though she was looking down. “The girl wanted a companion, so her daddy gave her a puppy for Christmas. The girl named the dog Shadow, because he followed her everywhere. In the pouring rain and the blistering heat. He was there for her when her daddy died. He was there for her when her mother reinvented herself and decided that the girl no longer fit into the picture. He was there for her when they took her soul and all that was left behind was her scarred body. He was there for her, even though she wasn’t there for him. The girl was too scared to face the real world. To take him to the vet. To save him.”