The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love Read Free Page A

and foul. Rotten eggs in a steamy soup.
    The blackness began to drip, and Roxanne fought down another scream.
    “Reece! Reece, get out here!” she shouted instead, just as a loud crash came from the kitchen.
    “ Reece! ”
    Santo turned, his gaze unerringly finding hers. The look he gave her spoke volumes, but she couldn’t understand what it meant. She couldn’t understand what was happening. The bugs had completely obscured thewindows, the live ones crawling over the splattered remains, trying to get in. She felt the blood drain from her face. Could they? Would they find a way?
    It felt obscene and, at the same time, somehow biblical in a very not-okay way. Reece still hadn’t appeared, but a cry came from the kitchen, followed by a loud bang.
    “That’s a gun,” Sal said, jumping.
    A gun?
    Roxanne shoved her fear aside and raced to the swinging door, calling out her brother’s name as she ran. She burst into the kitchen, aware of Santo a few steps behind.
    What she saw brought her to a skidding stop. Santo took her hand and tried to pull her back, but when she refused to budge, he gave up and angled his body in front of hers. Even a man his size couldn’t block out the horror, though.
    The oily tide coated the ceiling and lapped against the walls in the kitchen, stark against the stainless steel and new paint.
    The back door stood wide open to the October night. The same back door that Reece and their older brother, Ryan, fought about constantly. Ryan insisted that it remain locked after five. Reece complained that Ryan was a control freak who needed to get a life. “What the fuck does he care if the back door is open? For Christ sake, let the slaves have some fresh air.”
    The shelving that held pots and pans had beenknocked over, its contents scattered all around it. The dishwasher was sprawled beside the sink. She could only see his legs and feet, but she recognized the rolled-up jeans, bright yellow sneakers, and hem of his too-big Iron Man T-shirt bunched around his thighs. The black ooze splattered his inert form.
    Flash, flash, flash. The images bombarded her so fast that she could barely focus on one before moving to another.
    Reece stood in the doorway to the small office that was tucked between the walk-in refrigerator and the far wall, facing away from her. Through the big window that allowed an unobstructed view from the desk into the kitchen, she saw a man in front of the opened safe.
    “You shot him. You fucking shot Manny,” Reece shouted.
    The man glanced over his shoulder at Reece, and Roxanne felt all the air leave her lungs. He wore a ski mask pulled down to hide his features, with black paint rimming his eyes. Only the whites and the pale blue irises could be seen. He’d sewn the mouth-hole closed with fat, ugly stitches so that not even his lips showed. He glanced past Reece to where Roxanne and the others now stood. Reece turned, too, and in the dread she saw on his face, Roxanne read so much more.
    Reece knew this masked man. More than that, her brother had let him in.
    Disbelief pierced her as the man spoke. His wordscame disembodied from behind the stitched mask and all the more terrifying for those frigid eyes in their obsidian setting.
    “Trust me, Reece.”
    He shot her twin brother before she could grasp what he meant to do. Roxanne screamed again, but fear had closed her throat and all that emerged was a strangled cry. The echo of the gunfire reverberated through the kitchen, and her brother fell to the hard, tiled floor, his blood spilling from a wound in his chest. Then the man with the ghastly mask spun and she looked into the pale eyes and knew that what lurked behind that frozen blue was not human.
    Not human by any measure.
    As if invited by the blood spurting from her brother’s chest and the black gunk pooling on the floor, others began to pour in through the back door like roaches from a drain. Others. Not people but . . . She stared numbly, trying and failing to