Chapter 12: Cleanup in Blood
The gasoline smelled like cheap perfume and ruin. Joanna watched as Riley emptied the last jerrycan over the tightly-wrapped bundle on the warehouse floor. The plastic sheeting glistened under the beam of their lone flashlight, a grotesque, shapeless cocoon. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. She stuffed them into the pockets of Riley’s borrowed coat, the rough canvas scraping her knuckles.
“He came at you with a broken bottle,” Riley said, her voice low and flat in the cavernous space. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement, rehearsed, a line for an audience that would never exist. She said it again, louder, as if testing the echo. “He came at you with a broken bottle.”
Joanna just stared at the bundle. She could still feel the jarring impact traveling up her arm, the terrible, soft resistance giving way. She hadn’t seen a bottle. She’d seen Marcus’s hands, empty and grasping. She swallowed the metallic taste in her mouth. “Did he?”
Riley’s head snapped up, her eyes catching the dim light like chips of flint. “Yes,” she stated, absolute and cold. “He did. Remember it that way.” She dropped the empty container with a plastic clatter that echoed in the hollow dark. She pulled a book of matches from her back pocket, the cover a garish bar logo.
The scratch of the match was deafening. A small, furious sun bloomed at Riley’s fingertips. She held it for a moment, her face a mask of stark planes and shadows, her eyes on Joanna. The flame reflected twice in Joanna’s dilated pupils. “Our secret,” Riley whispered, and dropped it.
The fire didn’t whoosh; it gulped. A blue-tinged wave raced across the plastic, followed by a thick, orange roar. The heat hit Joanna’s face, a sudden wall that made her flinch back. The smell shifted from gasoline to something infinitely worse—acrid plastic, burning hair, a sweet, meaty undertone that coiled in the back of her throat.
Riley stood statue-still, watching. The flames climbed, painting the rusted iron beams overhead in flickering, hellish tones. The shadow of the thing writhed on the stained concrete, growing and shrinking.
Joanna turned away, her stomach heaving. She bent over, hands on her knees, and dry-screamed into the grime. Nothing came up. Her body was hollowed out, a clean, scorched shell.
A hand settled between her shoulder blades, heavy and warm. Riley. She didn’t say it was okay. She just stood there, her touch an anchor as the fire crackled and popped behind them. After a minute, Riley guided her away from the intensifying heat, toward a stack of rotting wooden pallets in a darker corner.
They sat. The firelight danced on the distant walls, making the shadows of dead machinery seem to twitch and loom. The air grew thick with the sickly-sweet smoke. Riley pulled a flask from her inner coat pocket, unscrewed it, and handed it to Joanna.
The whiskey was cheap, burning a path of false warmth down her frozen insides. She coughed, handed it back. Riley took a long swallow, her throat working. They passed it back and forth in silence until it was empty.
“We have to go,” Riley said finally, her voice raspy from the smoke. “Far. They’ll look for him. They’ll find the house. The safe.”
“The tapes are ash,” Joanna said dully.
“Not just the tapes.” Riley looked at her, the fire mirrored in her exhausted eyes. “Us. They’ll look for us. His business partners. Cops. Everyone he owed. Everyone who owed him.” She leaned her head back against the splintered wood. “Fuck.”
The enormity of it, which had been a buzzing, distant thing, suddenly crystallized, sharp and lethal. Running. Hiding. Forever. Joanna looked at Riley’s profile, the strong line of her nose, the set of her jaw. “You didn’t have to do this. Any of it.”
Riley barked a laugh, short and harsh. “Yeah. I did.” She turned her head, her gaze sweeping over Joanna, not with desire, but with a brutal, unvarnished assessment. “From the moment I opened that door and saw you standing there. I was already in it.”
The confession hung in the toxic air. It wasn’t about love. It was about fate, a terrible, shared gravity that had pulled them into this pit.
Joanna reached for her. It wasn’t a gentle motion. It was a grab, fingers clutching at Riley’s shirt, pulling her close. Their mouths met in a clash of teeth and shared despair. The taste of whiskey and smoke was overwhelming. It was a kiss of ownership, of mutual damnation.
Riley responded with equal ferocity, her hands coming up to frame Joanna’s face, holding her still as she plundered her mouth. There was no tenderness, only a frantic, devouring need to be consumed by something other than fear.
Joanna pushed her back, until Riley’s shoulders hit the cold concrete floor. She straddled her hips, looking down at the woman lying amidst the filth and decay. In the erratic firelight, Riley looked like a fallen angel, her short hair mussed, her lips swollen from the kiss.
“I need to forget,” Joanna hissed, yanking at the buckle of Riley’s belt. “Make me forget.”
“Then fuck me,” Riley growled back, her voice raw. “Fuck me until we both stop seeing him.”
Joanna got the belt open, the button, the zipper. She pulled Riley’s jeans and briefs down just enough, freeing her cock, already thickening under the brutal urgency. She didn’t prep, didn’t wait. She spat into her own hand, slicking Riley’s length with a crude, hurried stroke. The wet sound was obscene in the whispering warehouse.
She shoved her own sweatpants down, just past her hips. Positioning herself, she guided Riley’s head to her entrance, still loose and slick from their earlier frantic coupling. She sank down in one brutal, impaling motion.
They both cried out—a sharp, pained sound from Joanna, a guttural groan from Riley. The stretch was immense, almost too much, a bright, cleansing agony. Joanna braced her hands on Riley’s chest, her head thrown back, her breath coming in ragged gasps as her body adjusted to the fierce invasion.
“Move,” Riley gritted out, her hands clamping on Joanna’s thighs, fingers digging into the muscle. “Ride it out of us.”
Joanna began to move. It wasn’t lovemaking. It was exorcism. She rose and fell with a punishing rhythm, each downward slam stealing her breath, each upward drag a shuddering torment. The filthy concrete, the distant, crackling pyre, the smell of burning and their own sweat—it all swirled into a single, overwhelming point of sensation.
Riley met her thrust for thrust, bucking her hips off the cold floor, driving deeper. “That’s it,” she snarled, her composure shattered. “Take it all. Use me. Fucking ruin me.”
Joanna’s own cock, hard and bouncing against her stomach, ached with every jarring impact. She leaned forward, changing the angle, and Riley hissed, her eyes squeezing shut. “Look at me,” Joanna demanded, her voice a hoarse command.
Riley’s eyes flew open, blazing with a defiant, shattered light. Joanna held that gaze as she fucked herself harder, faster, using Riley’s body like a tool to scour her own soul. The slapping of skin mingled with the pop of the fire.
“I’m close,” Riley warned, her nails breaking the skin of Joanna’s thighs.
“No,” Joanna panted, slowing, grinding down in deep, circular motions. “Not yet.” She wanted to feel every second, to burn this sensation so deep it overwrote the memory of the knife sinking in. She reached between her own legs, wrapping her fingers around Riley’s balls, squeezing just shy of pain.
Riley jolted, a broken sound tearing from her throat. “Fuck! Do it.”
Joanna tightened her grip and resumed her punishing pace. The coil in her own gut was a white-hot wire, tightening with every desperate plunge. The world narrowed to the place where they were joined, a hot, wet, frantic union.
“Come inside me,” Joanna ordered, her rhythm becoming erratic, uncontrollable. “Mark me with it.”
It was the final permission Riley needed. With a raw, shredded cry that echoed off the high ceiling, she surged up, locking her arms around Joanna’s back, holding her impossibly close as she pulsed deep within her. The feel of it, the hot, claiming flood, triggered Joanna’s own climax. It ripped through her silently, a violent, seismic shudder that made her vision whiten at the edges. Her release spilled over Riley’s stomach, hot stripes in the cold air.
She collapsed forward, her face buried in Riley’s neck, their sweat-slick bodies sticking together. Riley’s arms tightened around her, a vise of spent muscle. The only sounds were their ragged, gulping breaths and the hungry consume of the fire.
Slowly, the world seeped back. The concrete was cold and hard beneath Riley. The air was still tainted. The bundle was a dwindling, blackened mound.
Riley’s hand came up, her fingers threading through Joanna’s hair, not a caress, but a hold. A tether.
“We leave tonight,” Riley murmured into her ear, her voice drained of everything but resolve. “I know a place up north. Mountains. Isolated.”
Joanna didn’t ask questions. She simply nodded against Riley’s skin. The decision was made in the fuck, in the fire. There was no other path.
They helped each other up, moving stiffly, their clothes damp and stained. They dressed in silence, not looking at the diminishing glow of the pyre. Riley kicked dust over the wet spot on the floor.
They walked out of the warehouse through a side door, leaving the door ajar for the draft to finish the work. The cold night air was a shocking balm. They didn’t look back.
The truck was a ghost in the alley. They got in. Riley started the engine, the sound impossibly loud. She pulled out, the headlights cutting through the mist that had begun to rise from the river.
Joanna stared out the window at the sleeping city, the lit windows of apartments where lives were being lived in simple, ordinary peace. She placed her hand on the seat between them, palm up.
After a moment, Riley’s hand slid over hers, their fingers interlacing, gritty with dirt and soot. The grip was tight, desperate, final.
They drove toward the onUsing two hands to respondramp, toward the highway, toward the dark spine of mountains that hunched against the starless sky. Behind them, in the belly of the skeletal beast, the last of the secrets turned to ash and whispered away on the wind. Ahead, there was only the road, and the two of them on it, bound now by something deeper than love, something forged in blood and fire and the raw, fucking truth of survival.
Ahead, there was only the road, and the two of them on it, bound now by something deeper than love, something forged in blood and fire and the raw, fucking truth of survival. The yellow lines blurred into a continuous seam, a path stitching the dark countryside together. Joanna watched them, hypnotized, until her eyes burned and she had to close them.
She dreamed of plastic sheeting, of a grip growing slick. She jolted awake, a gasp strangled in her throat. Riley’s hand was on her knee, warm and solid. “I’m here,” Riley said, her voice gravelly from silence and smoke. “You’re here.”
“I know,” Joanna whispered. She put her hand over Riley’s, holding it there.
They drove for hours, speaking only for gas and piss breaks at desolate, over-lit stations. They paid with cash from a thick roll Riley produced, their movements quick and their eyes avoiding the cameras. The mountains rose around them, great black humps against a slightly less black sky. Just before dawn, Riley pulled off the main highway onto a rutted track that snaked upwards into dense pine. The truck bounced violently, its headlights catching nothing but trunks and ferns.
“Where is this?” Joanna asked, her voice thin.
“A place,” Riley said, her focus absolute on the treacherous path.
It was a cabin, or had been. Now it was a squat, dark shape slumped against the hillside, one window boarded up. Riley killed the engine. The silence was total, a thick blanket of pine needles and rot. “It’s not much,” she said, unbuckling her belt. “But it’s off any map. A friend of a friend. Gone now.”
The key was under a mossy rock. The door groaned inward on rusted hinges, releasing a puff of stale, cold air. Riley flicked a switch; a single bare bulb buzzed to life in the main room, revealing sagging furniture, a rusty woodstove, dust so thick it softened every edge. “Home sweet home,” Riley muttered, dropping the duffel bag with a thud.
They moved on instinct, no discussion needed. Riley checked the perimeter, the locks, the boarded window. Joanna found broom and started sweeping, the violent swishes cutting through the dust layers. Action was a dam against thought. They worked until sweat glued their clothes to their skin, until the single room was breathable, the woodstove crackling with a precarious heat. The duffel yielded two sleeping bags, a box of granola bars, a pistol.
Riley placed the pistol on the rough-hewn table between them. “Just in case,” she said.
Joanna looked at it, then at Riley’s hands, still stained with grime no amount of washing at a gas station sink could remove. Her own hands were clean. They ached. The tremors had finally stopped, leaving behind a hollow, resonant thrumming. “I can still feel it,” she said, not looking up. “The knife. Going in.”
Riley was across the small space in two strides. She didn’t embrace her. She grabbed Joanna’s face, forcing her eyes up. “Listen to me. You stopped a threat. That’s the only shape it has. The only shape it ever gets.” Her thumbs stroked Joanna’s cheekbones, a jarring contrast to her fierce grip. “We own this. We don’t let it own us.”
The words were a command. Joanna’s breath hitched. A violent need surged up from that hollow place, a need to be filled, to be overwritten, to be so completely claimed by the living woman in front of her that the dead man faded to a ghost. She saw the same desperate imperative mirrored in Riley’s eyes.
Joanna kissed her. It was less a kiss than an act of consumption, a messy clashing of teeth and tongue and shared, sour breath. Riley answered with equal ferocity, her hands dropping to claw at Joanna’s shirt, yanking it over her head. The cold cabin air pebbled Joanna’s skin, but Riley’s palms were furnace-hot, branding her ribs, her back.
“On the table,” Riley growled against her mouth, sweeping the pistol and its box of bullets to the floor with a clatter.
The rough wood was cold and unforgiving against Joanna’s bare back. Riley shoved her down onto it, the edge digging into her spine. There was no romance here, none of the earlier, shattered tenderness from the loft. This was blunt and surgical. Riley made quick work of her own clothes, then Joanna’s jeans, tearing them down her legs with a impatient snarl.
She pushed Joanna’s thighs apart, her gaze a hot, focused brand between them. “Look at you,” she breathed, not with admiration, but with a kind of ravenous awe. “So fucking perfect and mine.” She spat into her palm, a crude, wet sound, and slicked her cock with two rough strokes. “All mine.”
She didn’t wait. She drove in, one brutal, complete thrust that stole the air from Joanna’s lungs and made the old table legs scrape against the floorboards. Joanna cried out, a raw sound that echoed in the bare cabin, her fingers scrambling for purchase on the splintered wood. The stretch was immense, a brilliant, blinding pain that carved a clean channel through the murk in her head.
“Yes,” Riley hissed, her own face a mask of strained ecstasy. She held there, buried to the hilt, letting Joanna’s body clench and flutter around her. “Take it. Take all of it.”
Then she moved. Her hips pistoned with a ruthless, driving rhythm, each thrust jarring Joanna’s body, making the table creak in protest. The sound of their joining was obscenely loud, a wet, rhythmic slap that filled the silent cabin. Joanna’s own cock, trapped between her stomach and Riley’s, throbbed with each impact, a neglected, leaking ache.
“You feel that?” Riley grunted, her hands pinning Joanna’s hips hard to the wood. “You feel me in your guts? That’s real. That’s now. That’s us.”
Joanna could only nod, her head thrown back, her vision swimming. The physical violence of it was a purging fire. She wrapped her legs around Riley’s waist, heels digging into the small of her back, pulling her deeper, accepting every punishing inch.
“Touch yourself,” Riley commanded, her pace relentless. “I want to see you come while I’m fucking you. I want to feel you spill all over yourself.”
Joanna obeyed, her hand sliding between their sweat-slick bodies, fingers wrapping around her own hard length. The touch was electric, a direct circuit to the base of her spine. She stroked in time with Riley’s thrusts, the dual sensation pushing her rapidly toward an edge that felt like oblivion.
Riley’s rhythm fractured, grew frantic. “Gonna come,” she warned, her voice a broken scrape. “Gonna fill you up. Mark you from the inside.”
“Do it,” Joanna begged, her own strokes becoming frantic, rough. “Fucking do it, Riley. Now.”
With a guttural roar that was half rage, half surrender, Riley slammed home and held, her body bowing as she pulsed deep inside. The hot, urgent flood triggered Joanna’s own climax. It ripped through her without sound, a silent, convulsive eruption that painted stripes across her abdomen and chest. She shook with the force of it, her inner muscles milking Riley through the last of her own release.
Riley collapsed forward, her weight pressing Joanna into the hard table. They stayed like that, joined, panting, the only sound their ragged breath and the pop of the fire in the stove. Slowly, Riley softened and slipped out. A hot trickle traced its way down Joanna’s inner thigh.
Riley lifted her head. She looked spent, emptied, her eyes clear for the first time since the warehouse. She licked a stripe of Joanna’s come from her stomach, her gaze locked on Joanna’s. “Ours,” she said, simply.
They cleaned up with a threadbare towel from the duffel. They zipped the sleeping bags together on the floor near the stove’s warmth. Naked and entwined, the world shrank to the circle of heat and the sound of each other’s breathing. The pistol glinted dully on the floor by their makeshift bed.
“Tomorrow,” Riley murmured into Joanna’s hair, her arm a solid bar across her ribs. “We need to figure out tomorrow.”
Joanna listened to the wind testing the edges of the cabin. Somewhere far off, an animal cried out. She traced the line of Riley’s jaw, the curve of her ear. The ghosts were still there, in the corners, in the shadows thrown by the stove’s dying light. But here, in this fragile, heated space between their bodies, they held a temporary line. Outside, the mountains were vast and dark and silent. Inside, for now, they breathed.