Page 1 of The Hangman's Rope
Prologue
Reaper…
She was dead. On my slab in the mortuary, and naked as the day she was born, but she made one good looking corpse. There was something, I don’t know, ethereally beautiful about her eternal slumber, and I think that was it… she didn’tlookdead. She looked asleep. Probably one of the most lifelike-looking corpses I’d ever had to date…
It was a shame, really. She looked soyoung, her face free of makeup, for the most part. Someone had tried to clean her up – at the hospital, more than likely. That’s where she’d been picked up from.
I couldn’t fathom how someone so young and vibrant could die of cardiac arrest, which was the listed cause of death to be put on her death certificate, but it was undeniably a thing that happened.
I’d had a seventeen-year-old boy on my slab just last year whose undetected heart condition had done him in during one of his high school sporting events.
His ashen pallor flashed through my mind and I cocked my head, considering the nude woman on my embalming table.
She didn’t lookdead…she lookedasleep… and I felt my cock stir in my slacks.
I pressed gloved fingers to the side of her delicate throat, her auburn hair fanning around her lovely, Fae-like face. Her skin was pale, her hair auburn, and the curtain matched the drapes. It was natural, the color something most women paid a mint for at a salon. Her eyebrows winged perfectly over large, wide set eyes that were almost too large to be real. Her lips slightly parted, I couldalmostfool myself into believing she drew breath, but there was no pulse beneath the cool latex enveloping my fingers.
She was remarkable.
Her skin so smooth to the eye, that you could believe her to be porcelain, and I couldn’t help it. Even though my heart squeezed at her young life cut so short, the blood flowed from it straight to my fucking dick.
She was sobeautiful…
I stood for countless minutes, transfixed by her still features. She was so lovely. I didn’t think I’d ever had anyone on my table who looked so lifelike in death. A couple had come close, sure, but this woman…
Fuck…
The primal urge to rut surged through me, and I stood there, still as the grave myself, and split the fucking difference. I went to the front of my slacks beneath my mortician’s apron and lowered my zipper. Rigor had come and gone and so she was in no more than a heavy sleep, deep and probably dreamless, as though sank to the bottom of a pool of obsidian night itself.
Her hand was cold, but pliable in mine, as I wrapped her fingers around my cock and closed my eyes, my hand wrapped around hers andstroked.
Oh, shit… yeah…
It was just the kind of contact I needed. Heat surged into my cheeks as I worked her hand in mine, around my shaft, squeezing at the head, precum lubricating things and making me slick against her still palm.
She felt so alive, cold, but real. Like her soul maybe still lingered and hadn’t left. Something about having this kind of control over the nameless woman intensified things for me.
I felt my breath hitch. I was getting close, so close. I bowed my head and just as my balls tightened and surged, her eyes flew open and I came as her hand clenched and her mouth dropped open in a horrified shriek.
Oh, shit…
Chapter One
Hangman…
I went in the employee entrance to the mortuary up the street from Bonaventure and dropped into the chair on the other side of Grim’s desk. I wasn’t just in charge of Bonaventure, although I was her main caretaker, I cared for a few other cemeteries nearby, too. Bonaventure didn’t have too many burials these days, so I handled the heavy machinery and grave digging for a few others in contract with Grim and Reaper’s mortuary.
“Well, what’ve you got?” I asked, but Grim was focused on reading something on his computer monitor and hadn’t deigned to acknowledge my presence. Not yet at least.
“Hello… Earth to Grim. I ain’t got all day.”
“What?” He snapped out of whatever thought pattern he’d been thoroughly engrossed in.
“What’d you call me over here for, man?”
“Oh, sorry, busy week around here. Got four, two of them fall under your purview.”
“Lucky me,” I muttered and held my hand out for the two manila file folders in his hands. I sighed and leaned back, about to flip the top one open, when a loud crash and mixed screaming started. This unholy mix of masculine and feminine, both tormented, one a howl of pain, the other high-pitched and shrill with pure terror.
