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Chapter 34

Theo Heron

My shovel strikes brick beneath the false grave. The impact runs through the handle and into my arms. I stop digging. Mud slides from the blade and drops into the narrow trench around my boots.

Though the afternoon cleared the worst of the storm, rain needles the back of my neck, steady and cold. It started when we lifted the seventh marker and hasn’t eased since.

Wes crouches on the opposite side of the opening. “Again?”

I push the shovel into the wet earth beside the spot and scrape carefully. Brick emerges beneath the mud instead of a coffin. Pepper drops to her knees at the edge of the grave before I can tell her the ground is too soft.

“The map was right.” Her gloved fingers clear mud from one corner of the exposed brickwork. Rain has flattened her curls against her cheeks and soaked through the shoulders of her jacket. “It’s a compartment.”

“Back up.”

“No.”

“Ground could cave.”

“Then tell me where it’s safest.”

She doesn’t move until I point at the firmer edge near the marker base. That is the deal we’ve made without naming it.

Ezra stands near the foot of the false grave, close enough to the cemetery channel that I can hear water moving behind the reeds. Rain shines in his brown hair and darkens his white shirt against his shoulders.

He’s so solid it looks strange. Every line of Ezra is sharp enough to hurt. The old bite beneath my collar throbs in time with his pulse. A deep ache moves through the bond, dragging behind it every memory I have of him thin, scared, and trying not to take up room.

Fifteen years old in a borrowed shirt. Sixteen and waiting outside the director’s office because I had blood on my hands after someone put theirs on him. Seventeen and promising he would follow wherever I went. I bit him. Selfishly, I called it protection because protection was the only kind of love I trusted myself to give. It feels as if someone has opened my chest and started digging there too.

The cemetery bell tolls. One low note rolls through the rain. None of us look toward it. It has been ringing since the first shovel entered the ground.

Wes helps me clear the last of the soil. Together we expose a brick-lined cavity no longer than my forearm. A flat stone lid seals the top, its edges packed with wax and old clay.

Pepper leans over it, breathing hard. “Wait.” She wipes her face with the back of her glove and leaves a streak of mud across her cheek. “Photographs first.”

Wes takes out his phone. Pepper documents the bricks, lid, marker position, and carved swamp lily on the headstone we moved. She talks while she works, her words coming faster as her fear climbs.

“The construction looks twentieth century. The brick is machine-made. The sealant may be newer than the original grave row. “Josephine or someone else preserving the route records could have added it during the flood restoration.”

Ezra steps closer. “Can you tell when?”

“Not while it’s full of mud and raining on my head.”

“You usually enjoy impossible questions.”

“I’m having a difficult evening.”

Her perfume slips through wet earth and rain. Rosemary, sharp with fear. Peppermint bitter enough to catch at the back of my throat. Vanilla keeps trying to rise beneath both, her omega pushing comfort toward us even while she’s shaking.

My alpha answers before I can stop it. A purr breaks from my chest. Pepper’s eyes close for half a second. Ezra’s shoulders lower.

The bond gives one hard pull. I nearly reach for him. My hand closes around the shovel instead.

Wes looks from me to Ezra and says nothing. He understands enough to keep quiet.

We lift the lid, and rain strikes metal beneath it. A narrow steel case fills most of the compartment. Waxed cloth has been tucked around the sides with three sealed glass jars and a wrapped bundle.

A grave built to protect memory.