I glowered. "She has an overactive imagination; don't get a big fucking ego about it."
"If you say so. I'll let you sleep." He bent down and placed a kiss against my hair, just like he used to... but hadn't done in over five years.
We both froze, then he started to retreat.
I grabbed his wrist. "Stay with me for a bit?" I asked, cringing inwardly at how weak I sounded.
I held my breath, half expecting him to refuse. But he just kicked his shoes off and lay down beside me with his arm draped over my waist and his face against my hair.
"Sweet dreams, Darling," he whispered.
We slept like the dead, not waking up until well after Seph was gone for school. Then we decided it’d be better to wait until after the cemetery closed before digging up a grave.
Admittedly, we could have paid someone to do it for us. We could have just paid the groundskeepers to look the other way while we did it during daylight. But neither one of us wanted to risk breathing a word of our plan to anyone else.
If—if—Chase had somehow survived, then we were in bigger shit than either of us were comfortable discussing. So we kept our mouths shut and waited it out. The second the gates to the cemetery closed at dusk, Zed and I got out of our car and popped the trunk to grab our supplies.
"Uh, where's the other one?" I asked when Zed plucked the one and only shovel out and handed me two flashlights.
He shrugged. "Oops. Must have forgotten it." The sarcasm was so thick I could have gotten stuck in it. Bastard.
I glared at him. "Seriously?"
He just closed the trunk and gave me an unapologetic look. "Sorry, boss. Guess only I can dig. You're cool to hold the light, though?"
"Zed..." I growled, but he was already scaling the decorative wrought iron fence of the cemetery. Before leaving my place, he and I had argued whether I was physically capable of digging up a grave, considering how bad my bruising was over almost my whole body. But I thought I'd overruled him.
Apparently not.
Grumbling, I followed him over the fence and gritted my teeth against how much it hurt to move my body like that. Sure, maybe he had a point. But I despised being treated as fragile.
"You sure about doing this?" he asked in a quiet voice as we made our way through the picturesquely creepy grounds in search of Chase Lockhart's burial plot.
"Fuck no," I muttered back. "But what other options are there? At least this way, if he's in there—or his remains are—then we can look further afield."
Zed just nodded, leading the way through the narrow pathways until we reached the extensive Lockhart plot. The whole family had all died the same night, so they'd all been buried together with a huge monument marking the family name. Thankfully, each space was individually marked and we didn't have to dig up the entire family to find Chase.
"There he is," Zed grunted, stomping a boot on a patch of grass. The little plaque at the head simply stated Chase’s name, year of birth, and year of death, nothing more. No "loving son" or "beloved fiancé of Hayden" because he was neither of those things. Not when he’d died, anyway.
I let out a long breath, placed the flashlight down, and folded my arms to hide the way my hands were shaking. "I thought he was in our past, Zed. I thought this was over."
Zed stabbed his shovel into the dirt and left it standing upright as he moved closer and wrapped his arms around me in a tight hug. "He is dead, Dare. I'm sure of it. But if this is what it takes to make you sure, then this is what we do." His big hand rubbed my back in soothing circles, and my anxious shaking eased. "I mean, just think of this as a management bonding experience. I bet Archer's crew never dug up a grave together."
I snorted a laugh and pushed him away. "You're ridiculous. Come on, let's get this over with. I'm nervous about leaving Seph alone at the moment."
She'd still been at school when Zed and I’d left to drive over to where Chase was buried, but I hoped to be back before she went to bed. It was Friday night, so hopefully she'd be up late.
"You've got Cass watching the apartment, though?" Zed asked, quirking a brow at me as he started to dig. I nodded, having called in yet another favor from the big sexy bastard earlier in the day. "He's fast becoming the best babysitter in Shadow Grove," Zed joked. "She'll be fine until we get back."
I blew out a long breath and sat down on Chase's plaque. "Yeah, I know. I just... worry."
Chuckling, he tossed dirt aside into a pile on top of the next grave over. I didn't look to see whose it was because I didn't want to know. Chase hadn’t been the only evil, twisted son of a bitch in the Lockhart family, not by a long shot, and I had no interest in reliving any painful memories of his other relatives.
"Pretty sure that comes part and parcel with loving someone, boss." Zed gave a lopsided smile, continuing with his digging.
For a while, neither of us spoke and the only sound was from the thump and scrape of his shovel moving earth from Chase's grave. When he paused for a break an hour into the task, I tried to take over digging. He clung to the shovel with a snarl like it was his favorite chew toy, though, and I rolled my eyes.
I didn't push the issue that hard, either, because I was hurting. I'd taken a couple of nonprescription painkillers on the drive over but hadn't wanted to impair my reaction time with my prescribed ones in case we ran into trouble. The result, though, was that it'd barely even taken the edge off my pain.
"This isn't working," I announced after another thirty minutes or so. "We need machinery, or we'll be here all damn night." I scanned the cemetery, thinking. Surely there would be some kind of backhoe to dig new graves.
"What are you thinking?" Zed asked, swiping sweat and dirt off his face with the hem of his T-shirt.
"Let's find some help," I told him, pushing to my feet with a groan. "Can you hot-wire heavy machinery, by any chance?"
He grimaced. "No. But I'm sure we can work something out."
It took us another ten minutes to find the storage shed for the cemetery caretaker’s equipment. Sure enough, there was a little mechanical digger parked inside, and I gave Zed a wide grin.
He used his shovel to break the padlock on the big double doors and quickly swept the interior with his gun in hand before nodding to me that it was clear.
Before we started messing around with amateur hot-wiring of heavy machinery, I figured there was merit in searching for keys first. A caretaker shed in a cemetery didn't seem like the kind of place that went overkill on security or, really, even tried at all. The keys to the digger were hanging on a hook beside an assortment of garden equipment and were even labeled with a tag that read "digger" in case it wasn't easy enough.
"We're in luck," I told Zed as I held the key up.
He gave a small whoop of excitement and held his hand up for me to toss them over. He caught them easily, then slid into the driver's seat of the backhoe and fired it up. The heavy, semi-ancient machine chugged and groaned, but fuck it, it worked.
"Hop up," he said, holding a hand out to me. "Let's get this shit done."
I took his offer, but as there was only one seat in the machine, I ended up perched on his lap as he drove the old digger back along the path to the Lockhart plot.