Billionaire Romance Boxed Set 1(129)

“Ready to go?” Eliot asked.

“No—what’s that?” Brynn clambered over to where the jackrabbit had kicked up loose snow.

“What’s what?” Eliot followed just behind Brynn, aware that his body had gone alert and ready, his hands clenched into loose open fists. He bent his legs slightly at the knee, anticipating an impact that didn’t come.#p#分页标题#e#

“It’s a deer, it’s—oh!” Brynn started backward, her arms outspread in flight, into the steady embrace of Eliot, who caught her around the waist.

“It’s alright,” Eliot said, helping her find her balance. His eyes had taken in the dead fawn, the eye sockets writhing with maggots. The top half of the fawn was not yet frozen; the flesh torn ragged, tattered remnants of sinew and muscle iced over like the darkest of rubies. A rind of fat had been gnawed to gristled shreds and left to the side of the carcass.

The fawn’s gnawed flesh reminded him of one of the poems he had had to read for school, a poem by Dante. In one of the last stanzas, a man gnaws on the nape of another man’s skull. Traitors, maybe. They were in one of the lowest reaches of hell, of course. Traitors against benefactors were the worst of the worst, the ones so bad that Satan himself ripped their flesh from their bones in an eternal meal. For a wicked deed is the one which most opposes love, and to do wrong a person who has done you right is the wickedest of deeds, for theirs is the love most like God’s in its purity.

This—this was a wicked act. He reached out to examine the ragged flesh. Brynn grabbed the sleeve of his jacket and jerked his arm back violently.

“Brynn—” he said. He did not have anything to say after that; the familiarity of the gesture had startled him.

“Don’t touch it,” she said. “I don’t want to see it anymore.” She shut her eyes and turned away from the fawn, her distaste for death so overwhelmingly apparent on her face that Eliot thought she might burst into tears.

“It’s okay. It’s alright.” Eliot hugged her as she nestled in the crook of his arm, her body pressed against his hip for one moment before she realized her position and awkwardly shifted back.

“I saw his, his fur…” She swallowed back a cough, and he could see her skin turn paler against the backdrop of the snow.

“Let’s just go home, shall we?” He wanted to fix this, to take it back, to undo it all so that there was no death. But here, always, everywhere, there were signs of death, more death. He couldn’t breathe, it stifled so.

“It was poachers.”

“Yes.” The bullet in the skull, splinters of bone, another dark eye just above the eye that was no longer there, just an eye socket.

“Why would they kill it and not take it?”

“It was too close to the house. They didn’t want to risk being caught for such a small deer.” He could not take his eyes off of the body. Was this what Clare looked like now? Worms and decay, the hair still untouched. He shook the thought to get it out of his head, but it lingered, hovering over his conscious thoughts like a dark messenger he couldn’t ignore.

“Then why would they kill it?”

“For fun.”

Brynn looked back once at the dead fawn, and for the first time Eliot saw hatred on her face, knotting her features sharply in a grimacing frown. She pulled away from Eliot and stood alone. A small shudder ran through her limbs, and she pressed her lips tightly together.

“I don’t…I don’t understand people sometimes,” she said.

Eliot wanted to reach out and take her into his arms, but he could not. Impotent to assuage her, he waited until she turned and then helped her down the snowbank. They walked silently back to the house, and Eliot closed the door behind them, locking out the snow.





The next morning I woke earlier than Eliot and dressed in my new warm clothes. Venturing outside, I stayed well within the immediate grounds, hoping to avoid repeating the shock of yesterday’s discovery. My dreams had tossed me through the night in fitful starts, filled with images of death—deer skulls and rotting corpses, and a man hooded in black.

To my surprise, Eliot emerged only a few minutes after me. His breath left white puffs in the air as he trampled through the snow-beaten trails to where I stood among the low garden hedges.

“I brought bread,” he said. He held out a fist of crumpled crust, and I must have looked at him like he was crazy, because he burst out laughing.

“Not for you,” he said. “For the birds.”

“What birds?” I looked around. Earlier I’d heard chirping from the hedges, but now the grounds were silent. In the middle of the gardens, scattered in places, were large stone bird baths, but there were no birds in sight.