Love In Death Read online

  Also by Elizabeth Stokes

  Novels

  FIVE NIGHTS IN VEGAS (2014)

  Love In Death

  by Elizabeth Stokes

  Love In Death

  Copyright © 2015 Elizabeth Stokes

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States of America

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “Death’s Embrace” copyright © 2014 Elizabeth Stokes

  “Death’s Beloved” copyright © 2014 Elizabeth Stokes

  “Death’s Unveiling” copyright © 2014 Elizabeth Stokes

  “Death’s Heartbreak” copyright © 2015 Elizabeth Stokes

  “Death’s Desire” copyright © 2015 Elizabeth Stokes

  “Death’s Passion” copyright © 2015 Elizabeth Stokes

  Table of Contents

  PREFACE

  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

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  PREFACE

  I may not be the greatest risk-taker, but I can certainly dabble in experimentation. The story behind Love In Death is one of experimentation. Not only is it the first long-form piece of erotic romance fiction I have written, but how I chose to release the book was an experiment in itself.

  Rather than writing a complete novel as you now see here, I decided to release Love In Death in a series of six installments over the course of several months.

  This isn’t exactly a unique delivery system. Novels have been serialized in periodicals for hundreds of years. In fact, in the early 1800s, Charles Dickens was instrumental in demonstrating that serialized fiction was a viable format. Also noteworthy, French author Alexandre Dumas was famous for serializing his classic novels The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Beyond publication in existing periodicals, short volumes of chapbooks were also quite popular, though their actual publication has all but disappeared.

  I tried to do my part in bringing back the chapbook, at least for the digital medium. Love In Death was published over the course of about nine months with a new volume becoming available approximately every six weeks. It was an interesting experiment in digital publishing with a certain degree of success.

  Now that the full story of Allison Pratt and Xander Reese has been told, I have collected all six chapbooks into one novel-length volume, which you hold in your hands. This overall story originally had only six long chapters with multiple scene breaks throughout. This explains some significant time passing for the characters from part to part. For the sake of readability, I have broken the novel into multiple chapters of a full novel.

  The text is essentially the same as the originally published volumes, aside from a few minor edits to improve the continuous flow between segments. So if you already have the previous published versions, you are in good shape. (Though they will soon be removed as individual items from the Kindle store.) However, if you still are missing a couple parts of the story, they are here available to you for an inclusive price.

  Either way, I thank you for your patronage, and I invite you to experience Allison and Xander’s love story.

  Elizabeth Stokes

  Mansfield, Ohio

  July 2015

  CHAPTER 1

  It was on the one-year anniversary of Xander’s death that Allison Pratt knew he was still alive.

  She hadn’t seen him. She hadn’t spoken to him. She hadn’t encountered anything in this physical world that would lead her to believe her dead lover was still alive. But she could feel it in her heart. And, if for nothing more than peace of mind, that was enough for Allison.

  Ever since Xander had been killed by the serial killer known as The Sieve, Allison had suspected that he was still alive, although she knew it was impossible. The police hadn’t let her see the body at the crime scene even though she had been his partner for three years, and secretly his lover for two of them. There had been so much blood. That was why her fellow officers refused to let her into the room. It was only hours later, after Xander’s body had been cleaned and examined in the morgue that Allison had a chance to see him. There was no mistaking the fact that he was dead. Gone forever. Lying motionless on that stainless steel table.

  But over the past few months, Allison suspected he was alive. It was no great revelation... just a hunch here and there. She would wake up in the middle of the night, and she could still smell him on her sheets. She could feel his touch when her eyes were closed and she was drifting off to sleep.

  On the night Allison became certain Xander was still alive, the weather was chilly for autumn in Cleveland. It was a perfect night to leave the window open and let in a cool breeze.

  Only she hadn’t left the window open... at least she didn’t think she had. But still, when she woke up, it was open, and the curtain was flapping softly against the pane, as if someone had just walked by. Were it not for the fact that she lived on the fifth floor, she wouldn’t have thought twice about it.

  But it wasn’t the open window or the scent of Xander on the sheets that convinced her. It was what he had said to her in her dream.

  “Let me go,” he had said.

  For the most part, this dream was nothing new. Xander had visited her many times in her sleep over the past year, which is why it was so hard for her to move on. Allison had been to grief counselors and support groups. She knew it wasn’t out of the ordinary to dream about a loved one who had recently died.

  But tonight was different. He had been there. She knew it.

  In her dream, Xander looked exactly as he had the day he died. His jet-black hair had been freshly cut, buzzed close in the back, just as she liked it. But he wasn’t freshly shaved, and that was the giveaway for Allison.

  The day Xander died, he had gotten his hair cut, but he had forgotten to shave. Never once had she dreamed him like this. Instead, she dreamed him like she had seen him most days, with a fresh shave and his hair a little too thick for her liking.

  But tonight... Tonight he was just as he was when he had left her.

  She saw him standing in front of her in an open field. The sun had just disappeared over the horizon, surrounding him in an warm glow. Allison had come up to him. Touched his face. He felt cool, but not cold, like the touch of a leather chair right when you first sit in it. It was soothing.

  Allison had run her fingers through his short hair, and she had looked up at him as he was a solid six inches taller than she. Xander had smiled when she did this, and he looked deep in her eyes.

  That’s what was different. The eyes. A deep blue in life, they had now glowed a crimson orange. It was a difference like this that convinced her this was not some grief dream dragging subconscious wishes to the surface.

>   Then Xander had kissed her, very softly. His lips, like his face, was cool to the touch. She felt his tongue, too real to be just a dream, dart across her teeth. She kissed back, but he pulled away.

  “Let me go,” he whispered softly in her ear.

  Allison wanted to yell. She wanted to scream, “No! I will not let you go!” But she couldn’t find her voice in her dream. She had closed her eyes in the dream, resisting the urge to let him go...

  And that was when she woke up, smelling Xander’s scent on the bed sheets and seeing the open window with the fluttering curtains.

  “I won’t,” she said softly, knowing that no one could hear her. “I refuse to let you go.”

  And as the sun peeked over the Cleveland skyline, Allison curled up in her bed, clutching the sheets that smelled so freshly of her dead lover, and she cried.

  CHAPTER 2

  Allison Pratt knew that there was very little in this world that a good cup of coffee couldn’t help. Even waking up to the depressing image of Xander Reese telling her to let him go, Allison felt comforted by her morning hazelnut blend.

  She showered and dressed, then thought about changing the sheets but decided not to. If Xander’s scent stayed on them until the evening, it would be soothing to fall asleep in their embrace when night fell.

  Allison didn’t go to work anymore. A year ago, she would have been at the precinct early, before any of the other detectives. At 32, Allison was on her way up as a detective. She and Xander had met on the job and began their relationship with a healthy respect for each other on a professional level. It wasn’t until after a late night after solving a big case, which was then topped off with drinks, that they confessed their feelings for each other.

  Xander had made the first move, and that lit a fire under Allison. She may consider herself a modern, professional woman, but in matters of the heart, she wanted tradition.

  It wasn’t a classically romantic scene, but that made it all the more real. They were on their way out of the bar around the corner from the precinct when she tripped and fell into his arms. Xander stooped to catch her, and they found themselves face-to-face.

  “I’m sor-” she had started to say, but he interrupted her with a kiss, a strong kiss that was deep yet tender. She had kissed back, more forcefully.

  They ended up in her bed that night. They had walked up the stairwell, arm in arm, supporting each other. Allison had fumbled for her keys, and they stumbled into the apartment, kissing each other greedily as they clumsily pulled each other’s clothes off.

  Once they reached the bed, things became so much more tender. Xander traced a line with his finger from Allison’s forehead, down her nose, between her breasts and lightly touched her soft mound.

  He took his time, massaging and caressing, all the while kissing the nape of her neck, nuzzling into her bosom.

  There were no words that night. Just passion. When Xander had entered her for the first time, she gasped. Allison had been with men before, but none as fulfilling and sensual as Xander. They fit together perfectly, as if they had been molded for each other.

  As they made love, Allison locked her heels behind Xander’s thin, muscular waist. They rolled over together in a full embrace, becoming one creature for the night. It was the happiest Allison had ever been with another person in her life.

  After a long night of love-making, both found themselves surprised and content with what had happened. And while they remained professional at work, it was soon common knowledge that they were a couple. They never let it interfere with their jobs, and so no one complained. In fact, no one even openly acknowledged that they were lovers... until Detective Stein had caught her in his arms as Allison raced into Xander’s murder scene.

  “You don’t need to see him like this,” Stein had said to her as she struggled and wailed. “You need to remember him as you loved him.”

  Xander’s murder had left Allison crushed. She took the mandatory time off, but she after that, she just couldn’t focus on her job. Even after the Chief had taken her off of the homicide beat, she couldn’t focus on anything but solving Xander’s murder.

  Even now, on indeterminate leave, with her gun and badge turned in for the better part of a year, Allison could think of nothing else but solving Xander’s murder.

  So this is what she did, with her cheerful cup of hazelnut coffee. She walked from the kitchen to her desk where piles of papers and photographs sat. On the wall was a massive bulletin board with evidence, hunches and other data posted about the serial killer known as The Sieve.

  He had shown up in Cleveland three years ago, right when Xander and Allison were first partnered together. It was their first open case, in fact.

  The Sieve was terribly elusive but shockingly brutal. He would capture his victims alive, then take them to a secluded location where he would hang them from the ceiling, wrapped in cheesecloth. The Sieve would then open his victim’s main arteries and drain the blood from their bodies.

  And he would leave them there... bloodless and wrapped in cheesecloth.

  The blood, though, would be gone, as if strained through a sieve, hence the name the press bestowed upon him.

  Xander and Allison tracked The Sieve for years. The only forensic evidence they ever found were DNA samples from a French aristocrat who had died in the 1980s. How The Sieve gotten his hands on this man’s DNA – let alone how he managed to consistently leave it all over his crime scenes but never leave even a flake of his own skin or a strand of his own hair – was beyond Allison and Xander.

  Right before Xander was killed, they had caught a break. A records search had connected two of the murder locations to a lease under the same name. They had a name and an apartment to check out. The only problem was that Allison had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon, so Xander went alone. He had left her a voicemail saying he didn’t want to miss the opportunity to catch The Sieve.

  By the time Allison was out of her appointment – a blasted routine physical that she could have rescheduled for any other day of the year – she had heard the news on the police scanner.

  Xander was attacked the moment he showed up. He managed to call for back-up, but by the time a patrol car got there, he was dead.

  Everything from that point on was a nightmare. The other officers refused to give her any details, deeming them too horrific for her to handle. The only thing she caught was a snippet of a conversation as she walked into a room.

  “So much blood,” Detective Stein had said to a colleague before clamming up completely when Allison walked in.

  To make things worse, later that night, Xander’s body went missing from the morgue. No one had an explanation. The lock had not been forced, but it had not been left unlocked. The coroner conducted a routine investigation into the body’s disappearance, but aside from that, the department covered up the case of the missing corpse. An officer murdered by the serial killer he was chasing was bad enough, but his body going missing less than 48 hours later... well, that was just an embarrassment.

  So Allison was left, on grievance leave, to continue the investigation herself. This morning, she caught a break.

  No longer being an official detective for the city of Cleveland offered Allison some leeway. She was no longer bound by the letter of the law. She had no worries about impropriety when she caught The Sieve. There would be no acquittals on a technicality for him because she planned to hunt him down and kill him herself.

  And this morning, she got one step closer.

  Just as Allison sat down with her cup of coffee, an email appeared in her inbox from Georgia Bennett, a private detective to whom she outsourced her marginally illegal research. She clicked on it to open, and inside she found an address which came from an unofficial and completely illegal search of credit card numbers and purchases of cheesecloth.

  The address was an old warehouse on the Flats.

  It was him. It had to be. It was The Sieve.

  Allison grinned and sipped her coffee. The o
nly problem now was to wait until sunset, after any workers in nearby warehouses went home. But Allison was used to waiting. Another ten hours wouldn’t be a problem.

  CHAPTER 3

  Allison drove past the now-closed buildings of the bars and businesses that were part of the resurrected Flats twenty years ago. Since the downturn of popularity in the 21st century, the industrial flats along the Cuyahoga River had returned to their somewhat the barren state. This is where Allison found the warehouse Georgia had identified for her. She approached with her headlights off, then parked several blocks away from the building. The rest of the journey would be on foot.

  It took her only a few short minutes to reach the warehouse, and she did not see a single person on the street. That was not a big surprise, as this area becomes deserted quickly once the remaining businesses close for the day. There were no cars in the parking lot, and sodium vapor lamps lit up the area well enough.

  As a precaution, Allison pulled a .45 pistol from her belt. Though she had turned in her gun after her indeterminate leave began, that didn’t mean she didn’t have her own firearms at home. Legal or not, Allison had amassed a small arsenal in her apartment in preparation for her tête-à-tête with The Sieve.

  She stopped for a moment to scan the parking lot. There was no evidence of security cameras, though Allison knew that there could still be guards, so she approached cautiously.

  She got to the door of the warehouse and pulled a lock-picking kit from her coat. As an officer of the law, she knew this was breaking-and-entering, but she didn’t care. Like the illegal firearms and the disregard for the right to privacy, this was a personal vendetta and not a professional investigation.

  It only took Allison thirty seconds to pick the lock and slip inside the warehouse. Once inside, she pulled out a small flashlight and flipped it on. She froze at the sight in front of her.