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My father knew none of this. He was just after a hunk of prime real estate. He’d been trying to get me enrolled in the school for years under different aliases, but despite offering millions of dollars in tuition fees, he’d always been turned down.
Then, out of the blue, one of my father’s billionaire buddies received an offer for a place at the academy for his son. The boy was a handsome, dim-witted, but cheerful kid. It made no sense to us at the time why the school would offer a place to such a moron, but we ran with it. We used the connection to get an interview, and I designed my cover based on the perky moron who had scored himself a place. I went in under my real name—Chloe West, daughter of Harry West, billionaire property developer—and played a sweet, dumb, young teenage girl.
At my enrollment interview in that stuffy dark office, Principal Mannix decided immediately that Sweet Dumb Chloe would be a perfect addition to his school as a practice normie. Then, because he was a lazy asshole, and he didn’t want to have to deal with me if I accidentally got exposed to the supernatural, he put a spell on me to fix me exactly as I was.
He meant to fix the veil on my eyes in place so it wouldn’t lift no matter what I saw. But the words he used in his spell had an unintended side-effect.
He didn’t know that Sweet Dumb Chloe was a character I was playing. And the words of his spell fixed me exactly as I appeared to be, right in that moment.
As the spell hit me, the razor-sharp child assassin I used to be disappeared almost completely. She was buried deep down at the bottom of my subconscious, and, for the next ten years of my life, I was Sweet Dumb Chloe.
It was pure bliss.
I made friends at school—the best friends I’d ever have. I eventually dropped out to become a hairdresser. My friends and I opened a salon together. I dated. I partied at clubs. I had sleepovers. It was heaven.
My father was apoplectic with rage. It was three weeks before he realized I was really gone. He had no idea what had happened to me—his favorite tool, his weapon of choice. At first, he shoved me through endless psychiatrist appointments, trying to get me back. Then, he tried torturing me out of my Sweet Dumb Chloe persona.
I didn’t like to think about that time. I remembered it as who I was now; but as Sweet Dumb Chloe, I repressed it. Sweet Chloe couldn’t process the idea of her own beloved father waterboarding her or holding her legs open for his friends to take turns with her. So, she blocked it out.
But I remembered now.
That’s why he was my first target once I woke up.
My father was at the top of my list. I’d never had a vengeance mission before, but I was approaching it like I’d done all my assignments in the past—strategically, logically, thoroughly. And mercilessly.
This wasn’t a video game; I wasn’t going to battle all the little bosses before I went for the big one. My dad needed to die for what he’d done to me, and he was going to be the first.
It took me less than a day. It was almost too easy. He’d been in jail—Sweet Chloe had put him there, funnily enough—and it was as easy as flicking a tab of meta-methamphetamine into his mouth during visitation. I stayed in that room long enough to watch the panic in his eyes as his heart seized up, long enough to make sure he understood that I’d done it, and that he was going straight to Hell for all eternity for what he’d done to me.
His death gave me no satisfaction at all. But I carried on.
After that, it was just a short skip to the cells, where I took out two of my handlers who were also in jail at the time. Slitting their throats with my own hands felt more appropriate, but it gave me no peace.
It was then that I understood that no matter what I did, I would probably never find peace ever again. But I had a list, and I was going to cross off every name on it.
None of their deaths would ever be traced back to me. I was too good. My father’s death was officially a massive heart attack, and the handlers were the tragic victims of a vicious prison fight.
Since then, I’d been working my way around the East Coast, killing every single mark who had clambered over my body when I was young. I murdered every single CEO, politician and billionaire who my handlers assigned to kill their siblings, parents and wives for them. I took special care with the men who had hired me to kill children. There were lots of those.
My hands would never be clean. I wasn’t trying for redemption; I knew that was never an option for me. I just wanted vengeance.
So, I went to work, and read the headlines the next day. A senator overdosed on sedatives and drowned himself in the bath. A banking executive jumped from the forty-eighth floor window of his building. A famous actor put a bullet in his temple. No one had any idea it was me.
I was good at suicides. It was the extra touches that sealed the deal. Nothing says “I’m going to kill myself” like a cleared browser history and a note to a lawyer about an up-to-date will. Most of the time, you don’t even need to leave a suicide note. If you hack into their phone and send a vague “I’m sorry for everything” text to an emergency contact, the police will shrug, and the coroner will slam the file closed.
I was good at suicides, but my specialty was tragic accidents. It was almost an art form—fatal mishaps took vision and creativity. A judge accidentally strangled himself with a belt during an auto-erotic asphyxiation masturbation session. A congressman choked on a grape in the toilet, of all places, and no one could get through the locked door to save him. A billionaire lobbyist slipped in a river while fishing; his waders filled with water and dragged him into the current. They found his bloated body almost two miles downriver.
I crossed off all the names on my list from the East Coast, then made my way to the west, hitting the cities of California. A tech billionaire tragically overdosed after mixing up his ADHD meds with party pills. A trust fund baby tripped and fell off his rooftop garden. And just yesterday, an entertainment lawyer severed an artery on a smashed whiskey glass and bled to death in his office before any of his staff found him.
It was all too easy.
The only hard part had been dodging the woman who lifted the spell on me. Marcheline chased me all the way to New York before I lost her.
My chest ached, piercing the alcohol induced numbness in my body. God, I missed Aunt Marche. I missed my old life; I missed all my friends. There was no chance I could go back, though. They loved Sweet Chloe. They’d never love me as who I really was.
I didn’t deserve love, anyway. There was far too much blood on my hands. I was too damaged, too broken. Even now, with alcohol numbing the pain in my body, I still had the impulse to kill.
A heightened prey drive. That’s what my handlers called it.
