Nothing.
I should’ve remembered that.
Except, I’d had a dream that this day would be different.
Now that we were separated, and he was no longer a child in the eyes of the law, I would be able to live a life again.
I was wrong.
Amon may not live with me, but he found a way to make his presence known.
And, for shits and giggles, he made sure to always show me that he could reach me, no matter what.
Like today.
Today, I’d gone to school happy, clean, and for once, optimistic.
I’d gotten home to find my foster parents had been murdered.
When my bus dropped me off, the first thing to catch my eye was the yellow crime scene tape.
Then it was the cops that were all mingling around in the front yard, looking upset.
But even though I knew that I shouldn’t, I got off the bus anyway and walked up to them.
“W-what happened?” I asked quietly.
The first cop that got to me stilled me with a hand on my shoulder.
Then he told me the news.
My foster parents, the best that I’d ever had, had been murdered in their beds.
And I knew.
I knew.
Closing my eyes, I whispered. “My brother…”
The words stilled in my mouth as I looked up to find two men walking toward me.
Both in suits and looking important.
“Looks like you have a big brother that’s willing to take you in,” the man in the suit standing next to my brother said. “You don’t need a foster home.”
I swallowed hard, knowing that, no matter what, this wouldn’t end how I wanted it to end.
I would be going to my brother’s.
I would have to either agree or run away.
And only one of those options was going to get me finished with school.
“Umm.” I licked my lips, wondering why in the hell my brother was dressed like that. “Uhh…”
“She’s in shock.” My brother’s eyes, a wild blue just like my own, looked at me with a soullessness that turned my blood cold. “I’ll get her home. Thank you for all the help, gentlemen.”
And he did.
To our old, broken-down trailer sans parents—since he’d killed them, too.
“You almost had a brain fart there, didn’t you, sis?” Amon asked, looking amused, even though I knew that to be untrue. “Glad I got there when I did.”
My brother didn’t have emotions.
He was a true psychopath.
Oh, he could fake them.
He could fake a lot of things—like being sane, being a good brother, being rich—but he couldn’t hide the truth from me.
Not any longer.
“I didn’t say anything,” I whispered.
And I didn’t.
Because, if there was one thing that I knew, it was that the punishment for tattling was always bad.
So, so bad.
CHAPTER 1
No matter how stupid you feel, remember that Little Red Riding Hood couldn’t flush out that a wolf was dressing in drag and acting like her grandmother.
-Dory’s secret thoughts
DORY
“What’s the one way you’d never like to die?” Lulu asked. “Like mine? I’ve had a fear of log trucks. After watching Final Destination, I am terrified to drive past one because all I can see is the log’s chain breaking, and them falling on me.”
“Suffocation,” I whispered, so desperately wanting to fit in, to be a normal nineteen-year-old. “I’m terrified that someone will hold me under the water and drown me.”
Or smother me with a pillow.
“What about you, Della?” Lulu asked. “What’s your worst fear?”
“Worst fear? Or worst way to die?” Della asked curiously, sipping on her illegally bought alcoholic drink.
“Either,” Lulu said.
Della shrugged. “I’m terrified of being beaten up and raped while I’m running. I carry mace and a knife with me.”
That was a horrific thought.
But since I didn’t run, that had never occurred to me before.
But, since Della was well on her way to being a superstar runner in track and field, I could see how that would be a scary situation for her.
“I have a fear of losing my boyfriend,” the newest girl to our group, Mimi, said. “Like one day, I’m gonna wake up, and he’s going to be dead.”
I would’ve laughed at the thought, but she was so dead serious that I didn’t.
Not that the thought of losing someone wasn’t scary.
It was.
But the funny thought was me actually having a boyfriend.
Having to get one would be a feat in and of itself with trauma. But having to keep one for any length of time? That would be downright comical.
Hence the laughter in my thoughts.
“Why do you ask what our worst fear is?” I found myself asking instead. “Seems kind of morbid.”
As I asked it, I started to take in the sights around us.
We were at a bar with about a hundred people milling about around us. Some were standing up drinking at high top tables. Some, like us, were filled with younger adults that couldn’t drink yet—as evidenced by the bright neon green wristband we all wore.
“Oh, no reason.” Lulu shrugged. “I guess maybe it was just a thought leftover from my psych class today. Did you know there are…”
That’s when I looked over and saw my brother at the next table over, being deathly quiet and dousing himself in the shadows. I knew I should’ve cut the conversation short with my friends. But I didn’t. And that cost them their lives.
Not that I knew it at the time.
I swallowed hard and tried to look away, but time after time, my gaze would be drawn back to him.
To him, listening to every single instance of our conversation.
Not that I was scared about him listening in to my worst fear.
He knew it well.
He’d been the one to instill that fear inside of me.
My thoughts went back to a few years ago. To when he’d given me that fear.
• • •
Two years ago
I woke to the sound of a shuffling lurch.
One second, I was lying in bed, face up, sleeping.
And the next I had a pillow over my face, and a massive body holding my arms down to my sides and my torso to the bed so I couldn’t move the pillow away.
My first inclination was to scream. Which was comical, because if I screamed, nobody would hear me.
I was living with my brother after all. The one person that could hear me was the one person that was doing the smothering.
I struggled uselessly against the pillow, knowing that this was it.
This was the time that I would die.
Oxygen started to deplete the moment the last of the scream fled from my mouth.
My struggles went from intense and immediate to lethargic from one breath to the next.
My nose hurt.
My eyes were wide open but unseeing.
A hand pressed hard over my mouth from the top of my pillow, and that’s when I realized the truth.
My brother really did kill me.
Except, sometime later, after the last of the fight left my body, I woke up.
It was morning.
There was light shining through the dirty window, and there were dust particles floating around the still air of my room.