Page 112 of Grim Tidings

She drifts past me, stopping only to brush a quick kiss against my cheek. “Thank you,” she whispers.

She slips through the door without another word. She leaves me just like that. Standing in the middle of the empty bar, staring at the place she should be.

I close the bar in a daze. I wipe down the counters and stack the chairs. I pick up the sticky menus and stack them in a half-hearted pile. I flip the lock on the door and turn off the neon light, watching the orange glow fade from the street.

I drag myself up the stairs and into my empty apartment, the silence so loud it feels like the air around me is vibrating. Darcy left a mug of tea on the coffee table. A stack of books right next to it with beaten up spines and dog-eared pages. One of her scarves is draped over an armchair and there’s a pallet of blankets in front of my radiator for where her damned dog likes to sleep.

She’s everywhere. Bits and pieces of her left like breadcrumbs to my goddamned obsession. I fist my hands around my keys and close my eyes tight, trying to get control of this rumbling, roiling storm in the middle of my chest.

I try to be rational.

She’s right. There is no future for us. We have always been an impossibility, at best. If she leaves now, she might outrun Gideon. It was easy enough for that Ferryman to find her. Rafael, too.

The department is taking note.

She should go.

“It’s better,” I tell myself. I say it out loud, hoping it sticks. “It’s better this way.”

But it feels like a lie.

And I’ve always been a shit liar.

“Fuck that,” I mutter instead. I stomp across the room, grab my jacket, and wrench open the door.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Darcy

Don’t look at me like that,” I tell Tater Tot, sitting with my knees tucked to my chest on the top step of the porch. I swiped Gabriel’s pack of cigarettes when I left the bar, and I’m indulging in a little pity smoke. I take another long pull, letting the taste fill my useless lungs before I blow it out with a gusting breath. “I did what I had to do.”

Tater Tot gives me a withering look, huffs, then pitter-patters his way down the crooked stairs of the porch to inspect the bushes in the front yard.

Gideon is here, and he says I owe him a life. I won’t have Gabriel be collateral damage for the choices I’ve made.

So I decided to put an end to it. I put an end to it to protect him.

“I was always going to have to say goodbye,” I rationalize, trying to convince myself. “Best to end it now.”

“Yeah, see. I’m not so sure about that.”

My head snaps up. Gabriel is leaning on the front gate that’s still broken, his elbows draped over the iron posts. Tater Tot trots happily over, pressing his face between the metal bars to nose at Gabriel’s thigh. Gabriel gives him a rough pat, then lifts his eyes to mine. There’s a fire there. A carefully controlled fury that bleeds into determination.

I feel it like a baseball bat to the sternum.

“What are you doing here?”

“Where else would I be?” He glances at the cigarette in my hand. “You stealing my cigarettes again?”

I stare at him, trying to figure out what he wants. Why he’s here. He knows the score as well as I do. He’s torturing us both.

“Parting gift,” I offer, testing the waters.

He laughs and pushes off the fence, yanking the gate open with one rough pull. “Yeah, sweetheart. You’re gonna have to do better than that.”

I watch him as he approaches, sitting perfectly still on my top step, my arms around my legs. He takes his time about it, his hands shoved in the pockets of his jacket, his collar turned up against the autumn chill, his hair windswept and gorgeous and his face so, so serious.

He stops at the very edge of the porch, a perfect three feet of distance between us, then squats down so our eyes are level. I can’t look anywhere except right at him, this angel at my feet.