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In memoriam
You’re invited to the celebration of life and interment of Evelyn Jessica Taylor.
The date was one week from today with a time and address.
My head whipped to Evelyn, and she was white as the card she was holding, back in the shell she’d been in when she’d arrived. This was an invitation to a funeral for her. A death threat.
Not a threat. A promise.
“What’s at this address?” I asked.
Harlan shrugged. “Nothing. Or at least there’s not supposed to be anything there. It’s the side of an old road outside of town. We were waiting for you before checking it out.”
“I’m going with you,” I said before approaching Evelyn. She didn’t move as I held her. Stiff. Lifeless. She was trembling. “This will not happen,” I told her softly. “He cannot have you. He does not own you. I will not let him take your life, do you understand?”
She didn’t move or speak, just leaned a little closer. The only acknowledgment that she’d heard me.
“I think you should stay here,” I said then. “You won’t be alone. But we don’t know what might be there.”
“No.”
“Evelyn.”
Her face snapped up to mine. “No. Nathan is coming after me. I’m going to see what the hell this is.”
Every instinct in me screamed to hide her away. To keep her safe. To not expose her to the danger. But she was right—this was her life, and she deserved to know. “Okay. Will you let us sweep it first to make sure there’s nothing waiting for you?”
She nodded once.
My breath eased a tiny bit at that. “All right,” I said then, looking at the others. “Let’s go.”
We left Grant and Noah at the ranch to watch things, and the rest of us piled into cars. The address wasn’t far, less than twenty minutes from the ranch, but away from town. Isolated. I couldn’t think of a time I’d been out on these particular roads in the past couple of years.
I didn’t take my hands off Evelyn the entire time, and she didn’t bother to pull away. She was practically in my lap, and I couldn’t stop moving my hands over her to convince both her and myself that she was real and here and safe. Dangerous emotions—panic, anger, and determination—compressed into something sharp: cold as ice and hard as steel.
It was developing in my friends as well. This kind of onslaught was on a whole different level, and though they didn’t know Evelyn as well as I did, they knew she didn’t deserve this. No one did. And this made it more than personal.
We pulled up to the address, and Harlan was correct. It was no more than a dirt drive and some trees on the side of the road. Liam stayed with Evelyn and me while the others went ahead. It was only minutes before they returned, but as soon as I saw their faces and their body language, I knew it wasn’t good.
Harlan just looked at me as he opened the door for us, eyes hard, warning me.
I didn’t let go of Evelyn’s hand as we walked past the cluster of pine trees that blocked whatever they’d found.
It was a graveyard, a wrought-iron fence surrounding a plot with neat rows of identical gravestones. I’d never known there was a graveyard here, and I suppose this was an apt place to send someone for a fake funeral.
We walked closer to the stones, and the markers weren’t normal ones. They weren’t decorative at all, and they were all identical in style. Names, with a specific birth date and death date. The first couple that we passed I noticed weren’t far apart. Like whoever was buried there was a child.
It took me a second to realize that Evelyn was no longer moving. She stood stock still in front of that first marker, her hand nearly crushing mine. Her face was so pale and stricken I worried that she was about to faint, and moved closer. “Evelyn?”
“No.” The word was so small and anguished, I didn’t understand.
Then she was moving too quickly. To the next stone and the next, her breathing growing too fast, eyes wild with panic. What was I missing here? What did she see that I didn’t?
I looked around the small yard as she tore away from me, counting the stones. Three neat rows of five, and two in the middle were empty. Thirteen graves. Thirteen. The same number of false identities that Evelyn had been forced to make.
Fuck.
I looked at the first stone again. Four years ago was the birth, and not long after, the death. It was an effort not to run over to the last one in the sequence, but I knew what I would see. The death date was barely a month ago. Evelyn’s previous identity—the one she had burned in order to come here.
