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"You seem pretty prepared," I grunt, breaking the stillness between us as I drop the body to begin our morbid task. "Like you already had this spot picked out."
Alexandra stands silhouetted against the waking day, her eyes distant yet sharp as daggers.
"I did," she says, her voice hollow. "It was supposed to be your grave."
I dig in silence, the hole in the ground growing in front of me. It is a sobering thing to dig what would have been your grave. I look at the gaping maw in the earth with a sense of wistful regret and something else — compassion and pity. Alexandra was someone else, someone happier, before I took her brother from her. And that she changed into the person she is now, a person bent on revenge who would go to the lengths to pick out a desert grave for a stranger, is just another grievous crime to go on the list of crimes I’ve committed.
"This isn’t my first funeral in the desert,” she says.
I keep digging. The hole grows larger.
“It was right after things went wrong when you ambushed Lucas. The people that died, the bodies. My dad said it was evidence that would make the cops ask the sort of questions that could lead to everyone even associated with the Crimson Fury going to prison. Me included. He and a few others, they had to protect the club and protect what was left of the family, so they went there, and they… cleaned it up.”
The shovel slides into the dirt, and the grave continues to grow.
Alexandra draws a shaky breath, then continues.
“They took the bodies east, out of town toward the mountains. There are spots out there that feel like the middle of nowhere. Dry, barren desert, kind of like this, and they just put Lucas in this hole in the ground. My dad didn’t even want me to be there. I wasn’t supposed to know about it, but I overheard the church meeting, when my dad was scrambling to put together the cover-up, and I followed them. If I hadn’t been there, I don’t even think they would’ve said some words before they put him into the earth. It was all so… thoughtless. The last memory I have of my brother is seeing him with a jagged hole in his head as my dad chucked his body into a pit. After they filled the hole in, I said my goodbyes, and then I came back later and planted a Joshua tree there to remember him by. He always liked the desert. I would visit it all the time… But someone cut it down a few months ago.”
Her sobbing begins and my digging ends; I throw the shovel to the ground and the body into the pit.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur, the words rough and heavy against the silence of the dawn. My hands, calloused and stained with earth, hang limply by my sides. I want to put them around her, to hug her, maybe, but it doesn’t feel right — she hates me, I hate her, and I still believe that these are the hands that killed her brother.
Alexandra wipes away the tears on her sleeve; her face is a mask I can't decipher.
"Sorry doesn't bring the dead back, Dixon."
I know that. More than anyone else, I know the weight of lives taken can't be balanced with words. But seeing her there, vulnerable and haunted by ghosts only she can see, ghosts that I made, something shifts inside me. We're enemies, but under the vast expanse of a sky soft with the light of daybreak, we're just two people with regrets heavier than the earth we stand upon.
I look away from her pain, unable to bear it.
There's nothing beautiful about this, nothing romantic in the tragedy that has bound us together. Yet here we are — standing over a freshly dug grave, bound not just by hatred and vengeance, but by shared loss and aching emptiness that comes from living in a world steeped in violence while people better than us lie rotting in the ground.
"We should cover him up," I say.
I dig while she softly sobs.
Shovel into the earth, earth into the pit, until the earth consumes the corpse.
“I really wanted things to turn out different, Alexandra.”
“Why should I care about words from a murderer like you?”
“You’d have every right not to. But the truth is, when your brother died, my life went to a dark place. I got mixed up in some bad shit, I was not myself, I hurt people I love, and the only reason I even lived as long as I did is because of the love of my sister, my best friend’s sister, and the support of my family in the MC. But even with all that, there’s still a part of me that believes I should be in this grave.” I pause, look at the half-hole that contains our would-be murderer, then look back to Alexandra’s teary eyes. I’ve decided. “But I’m not going to die just yet. Because I owe your brother and I owe you. Owe it to you both to be more than the asshole that I’ve been, to give you the fucking truth and justice you both deserve.”
She looks at me long and hard. “You mean that?”
"Yes. I mean it."
For a moment, the desert is silent except for the wind whispering through the sand. She wipes her face one last time before squaring her shoulders.
"Fine," she says. "But I'm not doing this for you. I'm doing it for Lucas."
"I know," I reply. The weight of her brother's name sinks heavy in my chest. “For Lucas.”
There's a tension as fragile as spider silk between us, a mutual understanding that's as terrifying as it is unexpected.
“You look tired. Let me take over the digging for a while.”
