Free The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love by Erin Quinn

lessened its impact.
    Again, he didn’t understand, but the human within him—that part of Santo that had wrapped around the reaper—understood the succor Roxanne offered. Understood and grasped at it like a dying man would his last breath of air, even as the part that wasn’t human, that would never be human, fought it.
    “What was her name?”
    “Marisella,” he said.
    The name resonated inside him, calling up memories of dark, laughing eyes and warm, welcoming arms.
    “Marisella,” Roxanne repeated.
    He nodded, wanting to be done with it. Roxanne knew what she needed to know, and they didn’t have time for this. He didn’t have the desire to rehash Santo’s failures. “I was on the job when it happened. I should have been taking care of my family.”
    He turned his face away, unsettled. Confounded by the power of the emotion. How did humans deal with this hour after hour?
    Roxanne reached out to touch his bare arm. Her hands were cold against his heat but the gentle brush of her fingertips soothed, healing the lesion that bled inside him. “You can’t blame yourself for not knowing what was going to happen. For not thinking clearly.Death—it doesn’t just kill the one we lose. It kills a piece of us, too. The ones who live.”
    He stared at her in shock, her statement such a blatant contradiction to the truth that it left him speechless. No one knew death the way he— a reaper —did. He took life in a clean sweep. No stray pieces of their human loved ones got shuttled along. Yet, he could feel the gaping craters inside. Feel that somehow Roxanne was right. Those missing chunks in Santo Castillo had been stolen with his wife’s life.
    “Who have you lost that made you want to splatter your brains on the wall just so you didn’t have to face yourself in the mirror?” he asked gruffly.
    “My mother died when I was born. I know that doesn’t compare, but I miss her—miss that I didn’t get to know her. Then I lost my dad when I was a teenager.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said, because it seemed to be the words humans spoke at times like this.
    She lifted a shoulder. “I’m sorry about your wife.”
    A strange stinging irritated his eyes and blurred his vision. Tears, he thought, surprise chasing them back.
    He stood, pulled on his shirt, and crossed stiffly to the window, then braced his hands against the window frame and rested his head against the glass. The morass of emotions had brought him to a place he needed to escape. He couldn’t think clearly when so many thingschurned inside of him and he still needed to deal with Roxanne.
    She wouldn’t like what he had to say next. She’d feel betrayed when she fully realized their circumstances. He knew she hadn’t put it all together yet. But she would. She would.
    “We need to move,” he said, not turning around. “It will only be a matter of time before they run my credit cards and track them here.”
    “They?” she asked, confused.
    He gave her a cool glance over his shoulder, relieved to have tempered the roiling confessions, breaking free of the sticky tentacles of Santo’s feelings. Roxanne watched him with those stormy eyes, wanting to understand and yet innately circumventing the obvious. She did that, when confronted with something she didn’t want to handle.
    She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear in a gesture he’d seen her make before. It had a defensive quality, the way she let her fingertips brush her cheek, as if checking to see that her disguise was in place. Inside him, he could hear the echo of her words.
    How can I ever have a normal life?
    And here he was to tell her to give up that dream because she’d never be normal by her standards. The longer he spent in her company, the more convinced he became of that.
    “The police are looking for us, Roxanne,” he clarified grudgingly. “We need to be gone before they find us.”
    “The police?” she repeated. “But I thought . . .”
    Suddenly, everything the