Cinder Road (Scorch Series Romance Thriller Book 2) Read online

  Cinder Road

  Dolf

  Toby Neal

  Emily Kimelman

  Contents

  Launch Bonus

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Two Months Later

  Emily’s FREE Bonus

  Toby’s FREE Bonus

  Acknowledgments

  Smoke Road

  Stay in Touch

  Limited Time Bonus

  Copyright Notice

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  © Neal/Kimelman 2016

  [email protected]

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.

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  Chapter One

  Dolf

  Adolfo Luciano lifted one end of the long, white-wrapped bundle that held the body of his twin brother, Nando. Opposite him, their brother JT lifted the other side.

  Dolf’s back strained with the effort to swing the fabric-encased form into the deep hole they’d dug in their mother’s back yard.

  The sound of weeping surrounded Dolf: the ugly, raw crying of his sister Lucy, never one to show restraint in her emotions, joined with the soft whimpering of his mother. They stood together, leaning on each other. Stoic JT’s eyes streamed, and his chest heaved with sobs. JT’s traveling companion, Elizabeth, a scientist who looked about the same age as Lucy, knelt on the grass and he could see the shine of tears on her pale cheeks.

  A stranger wept for his twin, but Dolf couldn’t.

  He was split like a tree cleft by lightning, halved and destroyed, but still standing. Nando, now nothing but a series of lumpy shapes in a white sheet, had been the heart of the two of them.

  Dolf was the brain. His family even called him “Tin Man.” He didn’t feel much for many people. And now his heart had died.

  Dolf and JT lowered the body into the grave. Dolf coughed, choking on the dirt rising up and surrounding Nando’s corpse, as if he too were in the hole. He itched, grains of soil adhered to the sweat coating his skin from digging in the sweltering humidity of August in Philadelphia.

  “I wish I were there instead of him,” Dolf said. Only JT seemed to hear him, shooting Dolf a sharp glance from perceptive hazel eyes.

  Avital picked up the first handful from the pile of loose soil and tossed it on the white-wrapped bundle in the grave. A stray beam of sunset caught in her deep red hair, and Dolf’s chest squeezed with a strangled tightness.

  God, he loved her. He always had. Just his bad luck that Nando met her first. He could have won her if he’d met her before his twin, he just knew it. What Dolf wanted, he got—but never at the expense of his brother. When she chose Nando, that was the end of that.

  The whole thing was screwed up.

  Nando knew, like he knew everything about Dolf, and he’d been sad for his brother’s emptiness for years. “Take care of her,” he’d rasped yesterday, the phlegm in his lungs strangling his final words.

  “I’ll take care of her forever. She will want for nothing,” Dolf had sworn, holding Nando’s hand, a hand that matched his own, but transformed by the Scorch Flu. He’d felt his brother’s protruding bones. Those bones would be exposed soon, the flesh eaten away by worms and insects. They would do their job, and transform Nando’s body into something useful, but Dolf clenched his fists. He wanted to crush them all, to protect his twin from decomposition the way he’d tried to protect him from everything else.

  Dolf had failed. Nando was gone, his body at the mercy of the earth—and still, he could not cry.

  Avital’s hands, soft and white from being covered by surgical gloves, were folded tightly in the skirt of an ill-fitting black dress as she held a single bold sunflower. Dolf recognized the bloom from the back yard at her and Nando’s little fixer-upper house a few blocks away. It eased him somehow that she wasn’t crying either.

  He wasn’t alone. Both of them had lost the most, and showed it least.

  Lucy and Mama both took their turns, tossing a handful of soil into the grave as Father Dominic, his robes hanging loose since the plague broke out, read from the book of Psalms. He made the sign of the cross over Nando’s body. “May he rest in peace. I’m sorry, my children. I must go. There are more who need me.” The priest swished off across the rich grass Pops had taken such pride in when he was alive, now long and untrimmed.

  They all had a lot more to worry about than keeping the grass mowed.

  If only the rest of his brothers were here, maybe Dolf could release the trapped emotion he knew was locked inside. They’d always been a happy, demonstrative family. Perhaps with all of his brothers present, Dolf could have given Nando the honor he deserved.

  But Luca was serving as a National Guard trainer in Texas, and Dante was in California doing computer wizardry, while Cash was fighting summer fires in Colorado. Nando was the best of them, a selfless legal aid lawyer who did nothing but serve his city.

  Dolf dug his shovel into the pile of soil and tossed it onto the body. JT did the same. Self-hatred was bile in Dolf’s throat as he filled in the hole, moving like a machine.

  Like a robot.

  Like a tin man.

  The exertion felt good and it was over too soon. Dolf tamped the soil down with the back of his spade. Any job worth doing was worth doing well. Nando had always thought so, too.

  Lucy and Mama set bundles of flowers on the grave, their tears and murmuring voices like a stream in the woods, a background to his surreal state.

  Avital knelt to set the large yellow bloom she held atop the other flowers—but then she tipped forward, falling onto the piled dirt. She lay there on the grave and buried her face in the lilies and roses. Her shoulders shook. Her white hands clenched the black dirt. If she sobbed, no one could hear it but the crushed blooms beneath her.

  Dolf would fulfill his promise. His season of watching over his twin’s widow had begun. He stood beside her, his head bent, as everyone else trickled back into the row house his mother had raised her children in.

  Six brothers and one sister were now five brothers and one sister. How many more would they lose before this plague ended?

  Time passed.

  The sunset lit the sky in flagrant, rude beauty and slowly extinguished into darkness. A few fireflies came out, dancing like will-o’-the-wisps in the steamy night. Light fell through the window in the back door, making a bright square on the grass.<
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  Inside the house, he could hear talking. Someone was playing the old upright piano—probably Lucy. Music soothed her.

  Dolf knelt beside Avital and put his hand on her shoulder. He seldom touched her, never trusting himself to not give something away. “Avi. Let me get you home.”

  She moved a little and he lifted her off of the grave and hooked her arm around his shoulder to support her. She felt light as a child, and her five-foot frame sagged in his arms. He and Nando were the “short” Luciano brothers, at five eleven, which still dwarfed her. Avital stumbled in the long grass.

  He opened the side gate and she took her arm off his shoulder but hooked it through his elbow, her soil-covered hand a burning touch on his forearm. She looked up at him finally, her big, tilted brown eyes hard and dry.

  “I have to clean up the house and make sure it’s disinfected. Then I should get back to the hospital. My patients need me, even if Nando doesn’t anymore.”

  Dolf gave a single nod. He knew better than to argue with her. Avital was capable, strong, and stubborn. And so beautiful it made his teeth ache. They walked the few blocks to her and Nando’s house in silence.

  He followed Avital up the stoop and inside, where she washed her hands in the kitchen sink. Every fleck of the grave-digging dirt itched on Dolf’s skin. He had to get it off his body. “I’m taking a shower,” he told her hunched back.

  She nodded.

  He’d been staying in the spare room since he came down from New York two weeks ago, before things got so bad that the roads closed and trains stopped running. He’d been helping Avital nurse Nando, who’d had every possible advantage with his wife a doctor—and still the flu took him. They said this plague, called “Scorch Flu” by the media, fed off the young and strong. It was a filthy demon sucking the life and heart out of the country.

  Dolf scrubbed briskly with a washcloth. His body was the same as Nando’s, all the way down to the cellular level. Just hours before, he’d watched Avital wash Nando’s body, a white washcloth from the same linen closet sliding down his brother’s chest, along his abs, over his once-strong legs.

  He’d felt like she was washing him, too—preparing Dolf for burial as well.

  If only it were him in the ground instead.

  They weren’t the same, though.

  Dolf’s skin was darker than Nando’s, deeply browned by the California and Colorado sun where he took rock-climbing vacations. He was more in shape than his twin. He kept his body fit so he could chase a passion that filled his time when he wasn’t filling his metaphorical pockets—he’d done so well as a broker at a major financial firm that he’d gone independent a few years ago, and growing his own wealth was almost as satisfying as climbing a mountain.

  Social interactions consisted of business-related events, and a series of well-groomed, accomplished blondes on his arm and in his bed. Dolf spent his time making money and rock climbing, while Nando dedicated his life to charity work.

  Why had God taken his brother? It didn’t compute. People should get what they deserved, and Dolf knew the depths of his own selfishness.

  He’d forgotten to feed Slash.

  Animals were easier for him than people had ever been and his cat, Slash, travelled with him everywhere.

  Dolf finished his shower and wrapped a towel around his waist, padding rapidly down to the kitchen.

  Avital was on her hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor in rubber gloves, still wearing that awful dress.

  “What are you doing?” Dolf’s voice came out harsher than he meant it to.

  Avital looked up at him, and whatever she was going to say died on her lips. Belatedly, he remembered he was only wearing a towel. “Sorry about this.” He gestured to his naked torso. “I didn’t expect you down here. You should be in bed—you can take mine and I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  “And you should be dressed.” She went back to scrubbing, using a large bristled brush. Sudsy water sloshed from the bucket beside her onto the new tile floor. Dolf had paid for it, something Avital didn’t know because Nando said she had way too much pride. But Dolf’s help didn’t feel odd to the twins—they shared everything.

  “I just got done stripping the master bedroom. The linens from his sickbed are in the fireplace. If you want to make yourself useful, you can burn them.”

  Dolf frowned. “We don’t have to do this right now.”

  “Yes, we do. You want to be next in a hole in the back yard?” Avital scrubbed harder at the floor.

  “Let me feed Slash. Then I’ll do whatever you want.” He crossed the kitchen, careful with the wet floor, and opened the fridge, taking out a can of Tasty Vittles.

  As if to confirm he was on the right track, Slash emitted a grumpy yowl from the top of the stairs.

  Slash was a one-eared, grizzled tabby with a crooked tail. He was one of the ugliest cats Dolf had ever seen, headed for euthanasia at the animal shelter when Dolf adopted him two years ago. The old tomcat provided all the company needed for a driven workaholic suffering from unrequited love.

  Dolf hurried up the narrow stairs and Slash led the way into the guest room.

  “Hey buddy.” Dolf set the can on the floor and Slash, whipping his crooked tail in irritation at his master’s tardiness, minced over and squatted to eat, making muffled sounds of appreciation.

  Dolf dressed quickly in his usual outfit when he wasn’t in a suit: boxers, T-shirt, and jeans, all black. He gave his short hair a rub with the towel and tossed it over a chair.

  He needed to get Avital out of scrubbing mode, make her eat something, and then get her into bed for some rest. She must be exhausted. She’d left Nando for him to care for when she was on shift at the hospital, then nursed him every other minute until his death this morning.

  Nando had slipped away quietly with no drama, while the two of them were talking about who was covering what, standing outside the bedroom door, whispering, their heads so close that the smell of Avital’s shampoo had made his nostrils flare.

  When Dolf walked back in, his brother was gone.

  That simply.

  That completely.

  Nando lay waxy and still as a sculpture in Madame Tussauds. Dolf hadn’t needed to check for a pulse. Avital had anyway, touching his throat with a gloved hand and turning to Dolf with a set, pale face. “He’s gone.”

  Dolf’s belly clenched with a wave of nausea at the memory.

  He returned to the living room, where the fire in the gas fireplace was obscured by a mass of bundled white sheeting.

  “Don’t touch the sheets with bare hands,” Avital said from behind him, making Dolf jump. “Here.” She handed him a pair of latex surgical gloves. “We think the virus can be contracted by touching contaminated materials. It’s only viable airborne for a short time after leaving the host’s body, but it seems able to live for days on surfaces.”

  She spun and walked out with the lithe quickness that was so much more characteristic of her than the limp daze at Nando’s graveside. For a few minutes, she’d had to lean on Dolf, if reluctantly. In spite of everything, he treasured that moment.

  Dolf gloved up and lit the gas fireplace he’d given them a few years ago for Christmas. He fed the sheets in carefully. The chimney vented most of the strange-smelling smoke, but some of it swirled back in despite Dolf’s efforts.

  Avital reappeared with a bucket of sudsy water and began scrubbing the bricks around the fireplace. “The sheets touched this part.”

  “Avi. Please. Stop. You need to eat something, rest.” Dolf stripped off his gloves, tossed them in the fire, and set a hand on her black-clad shoulder. God, that dress was hideous. “Let me fix you something.”

  “Whatever,” she said, still scrubbing.

  He took that as permission and went back to the kitchen. Neighbors had been sending casseroles, as they were apt to do in this neighborhood. He cut two slabs of lasagna, set them on plates and heated them in the microwave oven. He could almost hear Nando scolding that the
noodles would get over cooked, but Dolf didn’t have time to use the oven.

  Avital was just finishing, wiping the water up with a soaked bath towel when Dolf carried the plate into the room. “I should run these towels through the washer.”

  “We can do that later.” Dolf made his tone hard and brisk. “Sit. Eat.” He put her plate on the coffee table with a knife and fork. “You’ll make yourself sick if you keep this up, and then what good will you be to your patients?”

  She pulled off her gloves and sat, picked up her fork, and took a bite.

  That was the right note to strike when he wanted her to do something—she moved when people needed her.

  Relieved, Dolf sat on his end of the couch and downed his portion, hardly tasting it.

  He got up and fetched them each a glass of wine. Avital finished her portion and set down her fork, sipping the red wine. Dolf felt as triumphant about getting her to eat as when he’d shorted Apple right before their first quarterly loss in a decade—making a cool million in one afternoon.

  A little color had come back into Avital’s cheeks. “Lots of onion in that lasagna.”

  “I noticed that, too.”

  “You know how Nando was about onions.”

  Dolf wrinkled his nose. “I never understood it.”

  “I didn’t either. It was pathological. God, the amount of onions we cooked in this house.” She turned to him, smiling, and then he watched the memory hit her: Nando was dead. Her luminous eyes dulled, the newly gained color drained from her cheeks. She folded in on herself. “Oh, God. Dolf. I feel sick. Oh, this hurts so much!”

  “Shhh. No. You need to rest, to be strong for those who still need you.” He’d found a chord she heard and he’d keep playing it. He scooted close and drew her rigid body into his arms. “It’s okay to eat, to live. Nando would understand. He loved you so much.”

  She’d begun to weep, tears sliding down her cheeks in that silent way she had. He tucked her sleek red head beneath his chin and stroked her braid, petting her back.