Chapter 001

Emily

The muffled scream before the knife came down on her throat excited me way more than it should have.

She was asleep on her back, mouth slightly open, one hand curled beneath the pillow like she didn't have a single guilty thing weighing on her conscience. I stood over her for a moment, and for the first time in years, I wasn't afraid. I thought of the bathtub, the cold water, her hand at the back of my neck. I thought of the years of abuse, and the restraints, and the word complications.

She woke up as the knife came down. Her eyes found mine in the dark, wide with a fear I recognized. It was mine, worn for years, finally handed back.

She didn't get to finish screaming as she choked on her own blood.

Jake's door was next. I pushed it open with the knife still slick in my hand, and some small, starved part of me wanted him to wake up first. Wanted him to see me standing there and understand, even for a second, what he had built.

He stirred at the sound of the door, groggy, already reaching for the lamp. "Mom?"

"No," I said.

He had half a second to place my voice before I was on him. He grabbed for my wrist, strong even half-asleep, and for one terrible moment I thought he would win, thought seven years of training my body to go still around him would win out over everything I had decided that night. Then I thought of his hand crawling over my skin every night. His foot under the table. The word sister, said like it belonged to him.

I didn't give him the chance to talk, to smile that smile that made my stomach churn in disgust, to say my name like it was something he owned. I made sure of that.

He barely stirred again after.

My father was last. He was standing in the hallway by the time I reached him, woken by something. A sound, an instinct, seven years too late. He looked at me the way he never had before. He looked at me like he finally saw me.

"Cora," he whispered.

"You watched," I said. "Every time. You just... watched."

I didn't let him finish whatever he was going to say. I don't think it would have mattered. There was nothing left he could say that would undo a decade of silence.

I stood in the hallway afterward, breathing hard, blood on my hands and my hospital clothes, and I waited to feel something. Horror, grief, guilt, anything. It didn't come. What I felt instead was quiet. The kind of quiet that house had never once given me.

I went to the garage, took the keg of gasoline, and poured it through every room I had suffered in. My old bedroom, the storage room that had been my prison, the dining room, and over their lifeless bodies. I struck the match on the porch, tossed it through the open door, and walked away without looking back.

By the time the sky behind me turned orange, I was already gone. Cora Prescott burned with that house.

Emily Vance walked out of the wreckage instead.

I learned fast that grief takes up space a person doesn't have room for when they are busy surviving. I didn't cry on the bus out of town. I didn't cry in the shelter, or the motel I paid for in cash, or the first night I slept in an alley because the shelter was full. Somewhere between the fire and the city, I stopped being able to feel most things at all. It was easier that way. Safer.

I found work cleaning floors at a club downtown, mopping up spilled drinks and worse at four in the morning for cash under the table, no questions asked. By eighteen, I had worked my way behind the bar. Good hands, steady nerves, a face people trusted without knowing why. I was good at pretending. I had a lifetime of practice.

One night, closing out my shift, I cut through the alley behind the club to shortcut home and found a man with his hand around a stripper's throat, pinning her to the brick.

"Plea..se," she was saying, her voice cracking. "Please, I don't have it."

He backhanded her before she finished the sentence.

I didn't think. I didn't plan it, not the way I had the first time. I just moved. I grabbed the nearest thing, a broken bottle from the dumpster, and put it through his throat before he heard me coming.

He went down fast. She stared at me, wide-eyed, shaking, and ran without a word of thanks, which was fine. I didn't need one.

I needed a way to make a body disappear, and I had no idea how to do that twice in one lifetime without getting caught.

I was still crouched over him, trying to decide whether I could drag him to the dumpster without being seen, when a pair of expensive shoes stopped directly in front of me.

"That's an interesting way to end a shift," a voice said above me, low and unbothered, like he found dead men in alleys on a regular basis.

I looked up. Dark suit, darker eyes, a man who looked like he belonged anywhere except a filthy alley behind a dive bar, and yet looked completely unsurprised to be standing in one, next to a body, talking to the woman who had made it.

"He had it coming," I said, because there was no point lying to a man who had clearly already seen everything.

"I don't doubt it." He crouched slightly, studying the body with the detached interest of someone checking a receipt. "Sloppy, though. You'll want to work on that."

"Who are you?"

"Someone who can make this go away." He straightened, brushing invisible dust from his sleeve, and finally looked at me properly. He really looked, the way almost no one ever had. "The question is whether you're worth the trouble."

My hands were still slick with someone else's blood, my heart finally starting to pound the way it hadn't since the fire, and some small, cold part of me recognized exactly what kind of man was offering.

"What do you want in exchange?" I asked.

He smiled, faint and unreadable, already pulling out his phone to make a call I wasn't meant to hear. "Come work for me, and find out."