Chapter Twenty
When Grif arrived home, Kit was on the patio, asleep on a lounger meant for daylight and drinks. The air still held a hint of warmth from the day, and sweat sat on her brow, but she looked comfortable enough on the patio, the blue-green glow from the kidney pool reflecting faintly on her face. Her vintage sundress would have been fashionable in Grif’s first lifetime, and given the surroundings—if Grif allowed it—he could even pretend he was back in the fifties, home late from work, ready to kick up his feet and listen to ol’ Jimmy Durante on the box, or noodle a bit over the $64,000 question.
But Grif kept his mind on the present, studying Kit a bit longer, hoping that the longer she slept the further she’d drift from her concern about Evie. Then maybe they could start over again.
“Why are you staring at me?” Kit suddenly asked, without opening her eyes.
Grif jolted. He’d entered the home without setting off the alarm, and she’d had the patio door ajar, so he hadn’t made a sound. “Why are you sleeping outside?” he asked instead of answering.
Her eyelids lifted slowly, and she looked around like she was viewing a dream rather than waking from one. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Even in June the desert night can just whisk away the summer heat so that it all seems so far away. The temperature is exactly the same as the human body. I love that.”
Grif tilted his head as she sighed. The light from the kitchen only revealed half her face, and her eyes—those clear windows to her emotions—had again fallen shut. There was a tumbler at her side, but it was still two fingers full, so he wondered if it was her first. She generally only drank for pleasure, but who knew after today? Maybe, like her eyes, she was using it to close her emotions off to him. Grif’s heart bumped at the thought.
Kit had opened her eyes as the silence dragged on, and tracked his gaze to the drink. “I was hoping it would help me sleep. I’m overtired, but restless. Fatigue keeps dragging me under. Then it pulls me right back out again. But I can’t bring myself to drink it.”
“You’re thinking too much.” Not that he blamed her.
She nodded. “Yes. About Scratch, about Marin. You,” she added, without heat. “And, still, about those desperate kids who add fuel to their veins just so they can feel anything good at all.”
Grif edged closer, and she focused on him. “I saw Scratch.”
Grif dropped to the foot of her lounger, and she scooted over, then put her head in his lap and hugged him tight.
“When?” he asked. “How?”
He held her as she told him about her bedside vigil, and how Scratch had used the drug-induced sleep to both possess Marin and reach out to terrorize Kit. Her voice remained steady, but he could imagine how scared she’d been. And Jeap Yang had been right. The fallen angel would’ve circled back for her even before she tricked it into divulging information about Bella and her case. Nothing Kit did, or didn’t do, would’ve stopped that.
“Jesus, Kit.” Grif ran a hand over her head, because what he was really thinking was, I should have been there.
Kit nodded. “You were right to warn me about my darker feelings. Scratch said that’s how it would come for me now that it has my tears. It’s . . . waiting.” She said it matter-of-factly, but the tremor was there, between the words.
“I’m sorry, Kit. I’ll talk to Sarge. See if there’s anything we can do.”
Drawing up her knees, Kit lifted her hands and held them beneath her chin as if in prayer. “There’s more. I think it knows something about my father’s death. In fact, I think Marin does, and she isn’t telling me.”
Grif jerked his head. “I told you. Its intent is to create chaos wherever it goes. It wants to confuse you.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not true, though.” Kit pushed herself into a sitting position. “Someone took my father’s life, Grif. Someone took him from me. And nobody has ever discovered who the killer really is. Don’t you think that’s a strange lack of concern for a cop killing? Especially an officer who was the brother-in-law to the nosiest, most dogged newspaper editor in the valley?”
He took her hands. “Don’t let Scratch’s words place a wedge between you and your aunt, Kit. You know that’s what it’s trying to do.”
“If Marin knows something about my father’s death that she’s not sharing with me, then she’s the one placing a wedge between us.” Kit shook her head before he could speak. “You never knew my dad, Grif, but I wish you could have.”
“Me, too,” he finally said, and gave her hands a squeeze.
“Tell me about the Russians, did you find them?” She picked up the drink and took a sip.
“I had a little chat with that Russian mobster’s wife.”
Kit tilted her head. “And?”
He shrugged. “She liked the hat you gave me.”
Raising a slim eyebrow, she waited for more.
“She spotted the navigation switch. I think she thought it was a weapon or recorder or something.”
Pointing the glass at his head, she said, “So she took it?”
Because she sounded amused, Grif said, “After propositioning me in the back of her limo. With her little rat-dog watching.”
Kit made a face. “Those pocket puppies are the worst.”
“Right.”
“That’s all?”
“About it.”
They stayed quiet for a moment and he said, “But it all got me thinking. The krokodil . . . what’s the hardest ingredient to get a hold of?”
Kit squinted as she thought. “Lighter fluid is easy, so is iodine and paint thinner. But codeine. That’s not so easy.”
“Yeah, so I think we need to follow the codeine.”
“Find the codeine, find the dealers,” Kit said, nodding. “That’s smart, Grif. You must be a P.I. after all.”
“Thanks.”
“So I’ll see what I can stir up tomorrow on that. But first, got something for you.” Kit jerked her head at the side table.
Glancing down, Grif spotted what he’d initially taken for a coaster. It was a slip of paper, he saw now, and he stared at the line scribbled across its center. “An address?”
“Mary Margaret DiMartino’s address.”
Grif nearly lunged for the paper. “How’d you get this?”
Smiling at his reaction, Kit pointed at herself. “Reporter, remember?”
Though every instinct was telling Grif to run for the door and this address right now, he managed to stay seated. But he felt like his whole body was vibrating, as if there were bees inside of him. As if he were an active hive.
Shrugging, Kit waved with the glass. “I needed something constructive to do after leaving the hospital. I didn’t feel like being . . .” She was going to say “alone,” Grif saw the word forming, but she changed it up and saved them both embarrassment. “Home. So I went by the club to talk to Ray DiMartino.”
“Kit!”
“Oh, don’t scold me out of some old-fashioned, misguided, and impossibly sweet notion of a woman’s place.”
Grif’s mouth snapped shut.
“Besides, it turns out he really doesn’t know where Mary Margaret lives, but he did know her last place of residence.”
“And he told you, but not me?”
Kit batted her lashes. “Perhaps I’m more persuasive.”
“How persuasive?”
“That’s between Ray and me and the center-stage pole,” she said, giving a little shimmy in her lounger.
Grif’s eyes narrowed into slits.
“Oh, please.” She waved a hand, dismissing it. “Anyway, it turns out that Mary Margaret’s former landlord keeps all the forwarding addresses of her onetime residences, less out of altruism, I think, than nosiness.”
“So you got the address from the landlord, and went to Mary Margaret’s new place?”
“Yes. Well, her old-new place.” Kit shrugged. “She’s moved again. Luckily, the lonely bachelor next door was extremely friendly. I told him I was her niece. He said he’d been waiting for her to send someone by as he was collecting her mail, and could I please take it off his hands.”
“And of course you were happy to oblige.”
“It’s not my fault if people like to give me things. Look, I’m going to help you find the answers to yours and Evie’s deaths. Trust me. I understand how a lost love can haunt you.”
“Which I suppose means you’re going to confront Marin about your father when she’s better?” he said, still suspicious.
“Yes.”
But how could he argue? He understood her need to know, too. “You know, Sarge said I might have something in common with the Lost—”
“No way. You’re not Lost, Grif—”
“But maybe I am. Maybe after living and dying, but never really moving on, maybe there’s a part of me that won’t ever be found again.” He frowned, not liking that, then shook himself free from the thought. “But here’s the thing. I always know where my feet are on this mudflat when you’re by my side. I know which way is up when you’re anchored above me, and I can locate myself when I touch you below. You ground me on this old mudflat, Kit. And I’m at peace when you’re near.”
Kit stared, and after a moment she let out a long exhale. “Jeez, Grif. The things you say.”
But Grif wasn’t done. He slipped his hand around the back of her head, fingers twining in her hair. He steadied her there. “Please. Don’t give up on me. Not yet.”
Because Grif didn’t care what Sarge said. He had found a place to settle. And he was looking right at her.
In response, Kit rose. “Come with me.”
“Where?” he asked, as she began backing up, his hand firmly clenched in hers.
She smiled. “To the bedroom, Mr. Shaw.”
His own smile began to grow. “And why would that be, Ms. Craig?”
“Because I need comforting.” Her seriousness was feigned, as was her drawn brow. “I need you to go on and on about how everything’s going to be all right and . . . ,” she said, unable to keep the smile away any longer, “if I recall correctly, the only time you really talk is in the bedroom.”
He snorted. “And if I recall right, it’s the only time you don’t.”
“Well,” she said, tugging him into the house. “No reason why we can’t both get what we want. We’re partners, after all.”
But as his suspenders fell away, and his shirt followed, he reached for Kit thinking he didn’t want to talk at all. He wanted to disappear in this moment, drawing it out so that it was expansive and still, and let the past and future lie where they would.
Maybe it was their time apart, more than any since they’d first come together. Or maybe it was the sense of danger hedging them in on every side. Whatever it was, Kit’s need to disappear alone with Grif was fierce. She wanted to go someplace only the two of them could go, not take him or be led, but make their way together. Like a pilgrimage, she thought. A hand-in-hand journey to commemorate the miracle that they were together at all.
The thought gave Kit pause, and she drew back to look at Grif. “I wish I could see it all the way you do.”
“See what?” His gaze slipped over her face without finding purchase. He was looming over her in bed, but having trouble keeping his eyes focused.
“You know. God, heaven—”
“No one sees God.” Shifting, he pulled, and Kit rolled onto his chest so that they were eye-to-eye. Using his wide, warm palms, he stroked her hair from her face. “And you’d be in trouble if you could see it like me.”
“You mean dead, right?”
“I mean murdered,” he said, and sighed into her hair. “Besides, I’m glad you can’t. I don’t want you broken.”
“Oh, Grif.” Kit slid a hand through his hair, thumb playing lightly atop his cheek. “You’re not broken. You simply care, which is healthy. If anything, you care too much.”
Grif huffed.
“You do. That’s why you hung on to memories of Evie and of your life together through five whole decades. It’s why you’re still searching for her killer. And it’s why you saved my life, a total stranger from another time and place, when you could have just let me die.”
“Coulda, but here you are,” he said, running his hand along her arm, eyes suddenly dark with different memories.
“Yes, and so are you, and that’s no mistake.” No matter what had gone on with him and another woman in the past, no matter what memories were stirred by finding Mary Margaret and questioning Ray DiMartino about the past, she truly believed Grif and she were meant to be together, here. Now.
Lifting one naked shoulder, she put on a wide-eyed expression. “Fact is, I’m so blown away by the miracle of us, together, that I don’t even mind how tortured and stubborn and conflicted you are.”
“Stop,” he said drily. “You’re exciting me.”
She slipped a hand behind his neck. “Because you’re also powerful and complicated and honest and good. That’s not broken. That’s human. That’s . . . hot.”
His gaze clouded again. “It is?”
A corner of Kit’s mouth lifted as heat moved in her belly. Sliding atop him, she brought their faces closer. “Super-hot. My man has wings. And a nice, big . . .” She dropped a kiss to his lips, and whispered, “Halo.”
Grif flipped her suddenly, his physical power flaring with his own need, and stoking Kit’s. The heat in her belly rose into her chest, and her nipples tightened as Grif’s irises grew wide. “You got it all wrong, cupcake. You make me sound like a saint, and I ain’t no saint.”
Slowly, Kit slid her tongue along her teeth. “Prove it.”
His gaze fixed on her wide bottom lip. “I did. Lost my place in the Everlast for you. Got booted back down to this forsaken mudflat, still on the celestial time clock but with the limitations of the flesh.”
Kit dismissed those epic sacrifices with a nonchalant shrug. “So prove it again.”
So he drove himself into her in one smooth, warm thrust. Kit cried out with surprise even as she opened to him—she always opened to him and even so it was still never enough. Somewhere above her, Grif chuckled and muttered a belated reminder not to take anyone’s name in vain, but then her legs were fastened around his waist, and he was the one who forgot to watch his language.
Kit could almost see the moment it happened, the dropping away of fifty years’ worth of regret and worry. His shoulders dropped, his palms grew firmer. His mouth pressed harder and his eyes narrowed—on her, like he didn’t want to miss a thing—but remained open. Kit smiled against his lips and lifted her knees, opening more. They rolled and breathed into each other’s mouths and sweated and strained because they were here and alone, and they were alive.
Glorious, Kit thought, watching as he rose above her again, palms braced on each side of her head.
Yet glory meant something different to someone who was both angelic and human. He had the flesh and mind of a mortal man, but he was still a celestial creature and when he was exultant, when he gave thanks and paid reverence and took pleasure in something, it showed.
Kit remained fused to him, but momentarily put her own pleasure aside, knowing it would happen, waiting for it, watching. She slid her hands to his back, wanting to know the very moment he let go. She splayed her fingertips over the slight protrusions she felt there, and a shudder quaked through his body. Then, without warning, he arched.
“Let me see,” she begged. “I want to see.”
And so he lowered his head and kissed her so that the stark sizzle of ozone and iron flooded her mouth, and the entire cosmos flashed behind her eyelids. He shuddered again, causing an even deeper thrust, and though Kit cried out, he kept his mouth molded atop hers. The four seasons blew through her, starting with the crisp kiss of spring, and by the time autumn swept through her blood, she saw them: billowing black feathers raining over his back in two muscled arcs.
It was only in her mind’s corner, a brief mental flash, but the soaring wings dripped with the dew of the Everlast, black as ebony and sharp as spears, the feathers overtaking Kit’s vision before she was forced to breathe. Yet in that brief moment, Kit saw Grif as he really was, his mortal and angelic natures entwined like knotted roots, both at the forefront, both subsumed, and both, together, awesome.
Then her lungs filled, and the wings disappeared, but Kit didn’t care. She held to the image in her mind, embellished it even, because this man, whole and healthy—not broken—belonged solely to her.
Grif’s movements altered, growing liquid and smooth, like he was both melting her and shaping her anew. She felt golden inside, warm and divine, and she silently gave thanks for everything that’d allowed them to find each other, both good and bad. Because of Grif, and the raw miracle of him in her life, Kit was closer to God.
He set a new pace, both faster and more intense. That stray lock of hair she loved fell over his forehead, just above his closed eyes, and he stretched above her as he disappeared into the ritual of his thrust. Kit gripped him low, held tight, and timed it so that her release came at the same time as his. They had their lovers’ rhythm. They would forever know what it was to be one.
“That must be what paradise is like, right?” she whispered minutes later, breath still ragged.
Grif, who’d dropped atop her in a heady tumble of dead weight, lifted himself to his elbows and cupped her head in one hand. Tucked in close, his chin stubble scratching at her cheek, he shook his head. “I don’t know anything this good, Kit. Not in any world.”
And then, still together, they slept.