Page 44 of Cellar Door

Luke moves behind me, and my defenses go on alert. My shoulders tense.

“That feeling right there,” he says, wrapping his arm around me to reach the handle. “Use that.”

; He places his hand over mine, and my skin crawls. He helps me lift the tool, and I sense his aim. We swing the hammer down. The reverberating crunch of bone beneath the hammer travels through the tarp, all the way up the handle.

This is how he makes the rib cage of his enemies disappear, ground down to dust.

He steps away as I lift the hammer again. “You think you can go back.”

I drop the hammer. The resounding slam against the slab echos through the chamber.

“Once you make your case,” he continues. “Give forensics Hudson’s remains. Drag my corpse to the department. Put me on display. Hand over a detailed, elaborate report. You think you can get your life back.”

I smash the sack of bones again. “It’s the only life I know.”

The most truthful confession I’ve admitted down here. Hudson became my partner shortly after I entered the force, not long after my mother took her last trip into her other world. I was young, and I had no home. I hadn’t had a real one…ever. But I found one there. With him. With the Seattle PD.

I swing the hammer down, and my muscles strain from the effort. But the burn feels tolerable, good even. I try not to think about what’s inside the plastic bag.

“What were you doing parked at the ravine that night?”

His question stalls my hands. I stand over the bag, gaze fixed on the glass orbs encased in the cellar. There are gaps. Missing moments. But I don’t need them to complete the story.

I swing the hammer down with a hard thwack. “It was our place.”

Luke fills in the blanks. “On the clock. Off the clock. That’s where you went to be together.”

I’m breathing heavy now, blood pumping, my body taxed, not used to working certain muscles. But I drop the hammer anyway. The bones are crunching less. Being decimated into powder. “Yes.”

“There was storm that night,” he says. “How long had you been investigating Laura at that point. Six months?”

I nod.

“And Hudson had been trying to impede that investigation, hadn’t he? Talk you into dropping it, but you couldn’t. He took you to your place that night, when the sky tore open and, under the cover of sheeting rain and the dark, he set you up.”

Tool banked on my shoulder, I turn to face him. “You’re mad. Don’t try to fit your warped world inside mine.”

Luke’s eyes are like ice down here. They’re so cold…but the ethereal blue of his gaze holds me captive. It’s the clarity I see there; everything else feels distorted, wrong, except his eyes that see right through me.

“I’ve been thinking about it for the past few days,” he says. “Why you’re here, the fact that you don’t remember part of what happened.”

A mock laugh springs free. “Some insane vigilante hit me over the head. My spotty memory might have a little to do with that.”

He makes no apologies. “Or it’s selective.” He moves to stand in front of me, forcing my head back in order to see his face. “Think hard, Makenna. What were you doing there? What happened before you were thrown down the embankment?”

Anger bites my nerves. It’s infuriating, having someone—the wrong someone—remember pieces of your life that you can’t. “I was fucking my boyfriend.” I say it with every bit of disdain that I feel toward him.

Luke doesn’t waver, he doesn’t back down. There’s more…when I think back, but it’s like trying to look through a snowstorm. There’s a tunnel around the memory, and I can only see the center. The edges are dark and obscure. I blink rapidly, flashing between segments.

“He fucked you before he tried to kill you.”

His words pull me from the tunnel, and shock seizes my lungs. I breathe through the panic. “Fuck you.”

“The watchdog had a job to do. He had tried to protect you up until that point, trying to get you to drop the case. That’s why I hadn’t heard your name. He was trying to protect you, but after six months, he knew that it had to end. It was either you or him.”

“Shut the hell up.” I grip the handle tighter; imagine planting the solid girth of the hammer in his temple. I blink hard, driving the image away. And the ravine is there again, rain cloaking my vision.