Page 66 of Ruthless Riches
She let out a heavy sigh. “After it happened, we went from having a proper family to nothing, and everyone hated our guts. It was fucked up,” she said, scrubbing a hand over her face.
I frowned. “Our family wasn’t nothing. You still had me and Mom,” I said. “And then Simon a few years later.”
“I know. But it just didn’t feel the same anymore. Everywhere I went, I saw all these other people with big families. They were all part of something. Something that gave them endless love and support. A community.” She slowly shook her head. “But with us… we were different. It was never going to be the same after what happened with Dad. It was like everything had frozen for us. We were never going to fit in anywhere ever again.”
“I guess I can understand that,” I murmured, nodding slowly.
“I wanted to be a part of something bigger. Something warmer and safer. Just like everyone else,” she said. Her eyes were shining with a fervent madness I’d never seen in her before now.
Or maybe I had, and I just wasn’t paying attention.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she went on. “When we had our grandparents over that day, I was so excited. I really thought they’d say yes, and that would be it. We’d have a big family again. I could feel safe and happy again.”
“But they didn’t say yes.”
Her face hardened. “I was so fucking mad when they rejected us. It was like….” She cut herself off, twisting her lips. “It felt like something broke inside me. Just fucking broke. Then I realized something. They weren’t really rejecting us. They were rejecting Dad because of the Butcher stuff. So then I realized something else. All I had to do to make them accept us was to convince them that Dad was innocent all along. Then they wouldn’t have any reason to reject us.”
Coldness flushed through my core. “Sascha… are you telling me you murdered four people because of that?” I said in a hollow voice. “Because you wanted a bigger family?”
It was crazy. Totally fucking crazy.
“Just listen,” she said impatiently. “It makes total sense if you think about it. All I had to do was make it seem like the Butcher was back. Then everyone would think Dad was innocent all along because they knew he was already dead, so it couldn’t be him.”
I slowly shook my head. “You’re wrong. This doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“It does!” she snapped, making me jerk with fright as she hit the bars again. “And you know what? You’re not so innocent in all of this. You practically gave me a roadmap to copying the original Butcher murders.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You were always so obsessed with Dad’s case. You had an entire fucking murder board set up in your room,” she said, raising her brows. “So much information on every single detail of the murders. There was even a page of notes on the exact method used to remove their eyes.”
I swallowed thickly. “It was just research. I needed to know every single detail of those cases to prove it wasn’t Dad.”
She lifted a shoulder in a casual shrug. “Well, it was very helpful to me. After you left for Blackthorne, I went nuts in your room, reading everything I could. You actually almost caught me once, you know.”
“I did?”
“Yes. Remember when you left your laptop at the apartment? Then you came back to get it later that night,” she said. “I told you I was going on a date that night. Technically, I was, but before I even got to the restaurant I turned around and went home. I didn’t want to spend time with some guy. I just wanted to read and learn more. Focus on my plan.”
I nodded slowly. I remembered now. I’d returned to the apartment that night to find my research strewn all over my bedroom.
“I pretended to be asleep on the couch when I heard your key in the door,” Sascha said. “Then I acted like I had no idea what happened to your room. Made up some story about the wind, or something like that.”
I rubbed my left temple and sighed. “I remember,” I muttered. All this time, I thought it was Nate who rummaged through my stuff that evening. I even confronted him about it once, and when he denied it, I assumed he was lying.
But he wasn’t. It was Sascha all along.
“So you understand, then. It’s not entirely my fault,” she said, blinking rapidly. “I never would’ve been able to copy the original murders so well if it wasn’t for you. You practically handed me a perfect first victim, too.”
My stomach lurched. “What do you mean?”
She slowly rose to her feet and stared down at me, eyes flickering with glee. “You called me earlier that night. You said you’d just had dinner with a new friend at Blackthorne. Claire. You told me all about her. How she was so nice, and how you felt sorry for her because she had no one on the island and her parents didn’t seem to give a shit about her.” A grin spread across her face. “You even told me where she lived. Right next to your dorm.”
Nausea rose in my throat. “That’s why you killed Claire? Because you thought I made her sound like an easy target?”
“Yes. You practically handed her to me on a silver platter.” The twisted smile remained on Sascha’s face, frozen there like it was part of an ugly carnival mask. “She let me in because we look similar, so she thought I was you. By the time she realized it wasn’t, it was too late. I was already in.”
Horror and guilt pulsed through my veins as I recalled that evening. “I went to check on her that night,” I said, voice barely above a whisper. “You were right there behind the door, weren’t you?”
