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prologue
VAUGHN
AGE 7
Blood dripped down my nose onto the white shirt I’d put on for school. A tooth was rolling around in my mouth, but it had been wiggling for a few days, so I was kind of glad the boy had punched me in the face a few times. I’d already lost three other teeth in the last two months. They hurt when they wiggled in the gums. When they were loose enough, I could pull them myself, but this one hadn’t gotten there yet.
Spitting out the tooth, I watched it hit the ground near where the boy had dropped to his knees and then curled in on himself after I’d punched him back. He was bigger than me and didn’t attend the same school, but he’d been taunting me all week when I walked home.
Words didn’t bother me. Daria tried to rile me up plenty, always telling me how much she hated me. How I was just like my real mom, Anya. I’d never met the woman who’d thrown me away because I was too small when I was born, but according to Daria and Polina, she was a bitch.
Wiping my nose on the sleeve of my shirt, I dropped down beside the boy and pushed him onto his back. The pocketknife I’d stabbed him in the belly with didn’t go too deep. It wouldn’t kill him. If he died from the wounds I’d given him, it would be from infection, not because I’d hit anything important. He was out cold, but that was due to the fact that I’d hit him in the head with a brick.
Wiping the blood from the knife on the boy’s shirt, I closed it up and slipped it back into my pocket. Picking up my bag with my books in it, I stood and slowly limped home. My body hurt, but that wasn’t anything new. If I didn’t get jumped on the way home from school, then Daria would have something she needed me to do that always ended up hurting.
She wasn’t going to be happy about the blood on my shirt.
Stray dogs barked as I made my way past a few abandoned buildings. The pimp on the corner sneered at me as I walked by, his few remaining teeth obviously rotting away. Ignoring him, I made a right at the next street and then stopped in front of a door that looked like it was going to blow off with a strong wind.
Grunting when my bag dropped forward, knocking into a bruise that was already forming, I pushed the knob inward. A secret panel popped up, a screen waiting for me to input a code.
As soon as the lock snicked, I stepped inside. The outside of my home was dirty, decrepit. A disguise to keep people like the pimp from trying to rob us. Not that he would live past getting in the door. But he would try, regardless. Inside, my house was all gleaming surfaces, sparkling lights, expensive art on the walls. Still, a lie, just like the outside.
Hearing a soft, whirling noise, I dropped my dirty bag and stood there waiting. Polina’s wheelchair came out of the office down the hall, her short hair sticking up in a few different directions, telling me she’d been working on a new computer program that had frustrated her.
Seeing me standing there, covered in dirt and blood, she released a heavy sigh. “Can you make it to and from school at least once without killing someone?”
“I didn’t kill anyone today,” I told her, not looking away from her displeased scowl as she powered her chair toward me.
No doubt Daria would find a reason to change that. Another test to ensure I was loyal to her and Polina.
“Yet,” she muttered, an underlying hint of affection in her hard tone. Or what I had to guess was affection. I’d witnessed a few parents being that way with their kids. One of my teachers even used that same tone with other students. Polina was my only source of comparison, so I wasn’t sure.
Anyone else might have been confused that she felt anything for a child who often came home covered in blood. Especially when that blood wasn’t primarily his own. I understood that murder was wrong. But I valued my life over any others.
There was a word for that, according to all the books I read.
Sociopath.
I called it surviving my surrogate mothers.
Daria tested my loyalty every day, which meant I had a ninety percent chance of being ambushed when I left the house. In her deranged mind, if I survived the day, I was loyal. If I died, I was the traitor she suspected all along. Each night when she stood before me, demanding a full report of my day, I could see the disappointment in her eyes that I had made it home alive.
What she considered my loyalty by walking through the door covered in other people’s blood, I knew was really stubbornness at not giving her the pleasure of my death.
Stomping footsteps pulled my gaze from Polina to watch as Daria walked from her suite at the back of the house. Her hair was just as short as Polina’s, but where the disabled woman was thin and fragile in appearance, Daria was more muscular than the average woman. She worked out for hours twice a day in the gym that was housed in the basement along with the small gun range where I had to practice every night before bed.
A sadistic smile pulled at her mouth when she saw me, her black eyes barely flitting across the blood on my shirt. “Mommy dearest has officially adopted your little bitch of a brother.”
Throwing down the paper she had in her hand, she spat at my feet. I looked at the printout of a new image, a beautiful woman in her thirties with dark hair and blue eyes who smiled for the camera. Beside her on a sofa sat a boy who could have easily been confused for my twin.
Ryan Vitucci.
My brother. We shared the same father, but his biological mother was dead. Not a real loss. Our father killed her when he found her abusing Ryan. Broke her neck without thinking. Daria had voiced sympathy for the dead woman, but she’d only valued Sheena O’Brion’s life for the torment she could bring Anya knowing the man she loved was married to someone else and they’d had a child together.
Now, Anya was legally Ryan’s mother. The woman who had thrown me away like trash for being too small at birth had adopted a son who looked just like me.
Ryan’s smile as he looked up at his new mom belied the neutral lines of his expression. In past pictures I’d been shown of the boy, he was normally tense, his eyes haunted. But the photographer had captured a joy on Ryan’s face I had yet to feel, ever.
