Read Iron & Bone (Lock & Key #3) for Free Online Page B

smiling face encouraging me, her swollen lips teasing me.
    My grip tightening on her soft full hair, the silky strands sliding through my fingers, over my chest, as she moved down my body.
    “Jill—” I choked out.
    Those grayish-blue eyes were on me, pleading for my touch, pleading for more. For me.
    I came, my lungs contracting.
    Fuck, she was going to be the end of me.
    No, the end of me began a long, long time ago.
    I cleaned up and grabbed myself another beer and drank, staring out the window over the sink. The late afternoon sun was burning over the grass, a final blazing hurrah before dusk. An ordinary afternoon, like every other. Ordinary like that horrible morning in Denver had been. It had started out bright and sun-filled like any other morning.
    Only, it hadn’t been.

    That morning I’d wanted to do something special for my mother. I’d woken up early for school, brushed my teeth, gotten dressed, packed my book bag, and even put matching socks on and tied my laces the right way for a change. I made her tea and toast with lots of butter the way we liked it, set our small table, and I waited for her to wake up. But all the time I sat in my chair, my eyes on her in the big bed, she didn’t move. The blanket and the sheets didn’t move. Her flannel nightgown didn’t move.
    I jumped up, knocking over the tea. “Mommy! Mami !”
    Two days later, at the funeral parlor, I bent over her casket and untangled the rosary from her rigid hands. I had to have it.
    I managed to unlace it from her fingers while all the adults spoke loudly, away from the coffin. Only my cousin , Inès watched me, her eyes growing wider by the second.
    My mother’s fingers were as cold and hard as stone. I flinched, my heart slamming through me. I glanced up at her face even though I’d promised myself I wouldn’t. It was pulled tight, her mouth drawn. This wasn’t the soft prettiness of my mother.
    This was what lifeless meant.
    “ Tu mamá está durmiendo ahora, está mirándote desde el Cielo.”
    All the adults spouted some variation of that line at me over and over again.
    What baloney.
    She wasn’t sleeping or watching me from heaven. She was dead. And it didn’t make me feel any better that she was somewhere else. I wanted her here with me—now. But she wasn’t and never would be again.
    This, this , was dead—her and me both.
    I held back the tears stinging the backs of my eyes, but it was no use. Drops spilled down my face onto her stony fingers.
    Two massive hands gripped my shoulders and hauled me back. The rosary snapped in my grip, the cross catching in Mommy’s laced fingers.
    “Oh, don’t cry. Boys don’t cry,” said Uncle Johnny. “Enough. Leave her be. Come, take Inès’s hand, and we’ll go home now.”
    I was going to live with my mother’s brother, Uncle Juan. Although, now that he was Americanized, he called himself Johnny.
    I shoved the rosary in my pocket and took my cousin’s hand while two fingers of her other hand were firmly planted in her mouth. She was nine, a year younger than me, but she still sucked on her fingers whenever she got anxious, which was a lot of the time.
    I stole a last look back at my mother. She was just a thing now, a thing in a box. But something stabbed at me, spilling my insides on the floor of that dark ornate parlor room.
    Good-bye, Mommy. I love you forever, my heart whispered to her.
    My breath caught at the sight of the silver cross glinting at me from her rigidly folded hands. The shadows fell over her pale statue-like face, and the wooden top thudded into place.
    Inès shuffled beside me. I took my hand from my pocket and peeked at my fist, the long chain of dark red beads hanging from it. The two free ends swung at my side. I’d broken her precious rosario . I’d ruined it. It was now just a chain of stones of dried blood, not beautiful any longer, its supernatural powers destroyed.
    A moan escaped the back of my throat, and my lips quivered as a wave of