Page 50 of The Villains of Winter

Thank you didn’t feel sufficient enough and Elliott didn’t know if it ever would be. Even if he thanked him a million times over.

Meanwhile, James stared at the frozen landscape where the wind soughed through the pinelands of northern Connecticut. “Thank me when we escape Connecticut.”

Elliott buried his face in the extravagantly lush towel as he dried his face. “I’m terrified that I’ve ruined you.”

“You could never ruin me, Elliott.” James lowered his voice beneath his breath. “You’re the only reason I’m not more ruined than I already am.”

“But I–”

“If anything, Elliott, I ruined you.” James left the compartment for a handful of minutes. Elliott didn’t know what he meant by that, but he didn’t have time to contemplate the words.

Elliott couldn’t help but think of Kitty. Was she alright? Would she be willing to ever see him again? Could he ever tell her what they’d done that morning in the woods?

At any moment, law enforcement could interrogate her. Elliott shook his head. It was best she knew nothing. Elliott would be lost without Kitty. How could he survive the time apart without her?

Not to mention, what if there was a witness in the mountains–a hiker, a camper, a lumberman–someone who might’ve seen them and reported them by now?

He couldn’t think of that either as James returned with Christmas drinks and dinner. Elliott finished the entire hot chocolate cup in five short swallows. James ran a hand through Elliott’s hair. “Do you feel better?”

Elliott collapsed in bed. “Yeah.” His rabid heartbeat finally settled in his chest. His mind wandered to a different subject. “I think…I think a few people believe you and I are in love with each other.”

Elliott only realized he said the words out loud when James’s eyes widened next to him.

“Don’t tell me Lucien was telling everyone we’re in love with each other?” James reached for the train’s locked cabinet of brandy, as if he would need a harder drink to listen to anything else that serpent had to say about them. How long had Lucien and Elliott spoken for before James arrived? What else did Lucien believe he knew about James’s dark history of anatomization?

“Lucien was convinced our feelings for each other are…” Elliott grasped for words with a bit of surprised laughter. “…romantic, I guess.”

“Romantic how?”

“That we fuck each other.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth. Not the truth about the rapids.” They lived in a small town with even smaller minds about certain things. It was better they were thought of as intimate than murderers of an innocent man who had three kindergartners at home. “We’ve become extremely attached to one another and I think that sort of familiarity is reserved strictly for lovers in their mind.”

James chuckled and swallowed his shot glass of brandy. “I’ve killed someone for you. His organs are in about eighty different pieces. If people didn’t think we were inseparably in love before, they will now.”

“I don’t mind that our friendship is passionate. Does our passion bother you?” Elliott felt the weight heavy on every breath.

James poured the brandy into Elliott’s hot chocolate Kingshead mug to expedite the rest he needed. “If our passion bothered me, I wouldn’t be passionate. Here, drink and head to sleep. We’ll be in Arkansas by Christmas Eve.”

James held back the rest of his words out loud, but he expressed it in his gaze. I am not worth being passionate about, Elliott. No one should be passionate about me.

In the end, Elliott simply drank his holiday concoction, swirls of creamy chocolate in his throat. “I don’t want our friendship to change because we’re afraid of what people might think.” Elliott spoke the words like a prayer.

James promised, “None of their repression matters. Our friendship won’t change.”

However, Elliott didn’t know how long it would be before they were torn apart by fate.

Even though there were two full-sized beds, James climbed in beside him, not bothering to shower from the hail, grit, and ice from the Eisenhower Woods. James was exhausted, a depth of fatigue that Elliott couldn’t understand. He’d plunged his knife into Lucien with more strength, force, and power than necessary, even by cabal practices, because he needed to be certain that Lucien would never survive it.

Elliott knew little of the entire coordination of James’s premeditated murder of Lucien. James was merely glad that it was over.

Beside him in bed, James roughened Elliott’s hair. “Merry Christmas, Elliott.”

Elliott smiled in return. “Happy holidays, James.”

Elliott could feel James’s kinetic pulse against the skin of his throat. The brandy was sinking them towards the slumber, and their eyes shut against the steady engine of the train. Neither of them knew it at that moment, but there was another body soon to be deceased. By now the police had discovered the first body.