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And we drove… to the destination.

To the end of this story.

24

THE UNHOLY BEGINNING

YARA

Ryden: Hey Red. We’re at Enzo’s. Come when u r done.

Ryden: I love u. I miss u.

I smiled a little.

I typed up the reports, neatly arranging everything on my desk before I stood up with a groan and stretched.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Patricia. Or Tany. Tany and her broken body. Tany crying every night. Things I’d buried clawed their way back to the surface, tearing at my heart. It ached, as though someone was slicing open old wounds until they were fresh again.

I was tired of hurting, tired of carrying ghosts of people who refused to stay buried.

The pictures kept coming. It was too much.

My mother in her room… My father’s blood on the crumpled dollhouse… Robert Miller with the knife in his dick… Sister Serena and the way she bled out…

I pressed a hand to my head as the voices grew. Howling. Begging for a way out.

I couldn’t save any of them.

You were only a child yourself. Nobody came to save you either!

There was no escaping all of them. They would forever chase me…

You will find a way out, Kat said, but Kat was lying. She had to be.

She knew there was no running. No hiding. The voices, they were in my head.

I had made my bed, and now I had to lie in it.

Shaking my head, I pulled on my jacket and stepped out into the night. Damp air slipped beneath my coat like unwanted fingers as I unlocked the car. I slid into the driver’s seat and shut the door.

I sat there, my hands resting on the steering wheel, staring through the windshield without really seeing anything.

I want to sleep and never wake up, I thought. I want to fall asleep and wake up to find out this is all a nightmare.

If it’s a nightmare, you wouldn’t have met me, Kat said. Or Ryden.

A bitter laugh caught in my throat.

Would that have been better?

To have never met Kat or Ryden. To have never stabbed my father that night. To have never killed Robert Miller. To have never learned what I was capable of.

Maybe I would have been someone else. Someone who slept through the night. Someone who didn’t look at every child and wonder what monsters had found them first.

But then...

Without Kat, I wouldn’t have survived.