Page 148 of Risky Passion

Was this bravery? Or madness?

It didn’t matter.

We were already in too deep to turn back.

CHAPTER 34

B

As the wavestumbled onto the shore and the night air cooled my burning, weary body, the words spilled out of me and onto the notepad like they’d been waiting years just to breathe.

I was dumped on the orphanage steps as a newborn. No note. No name. No date of birth. Just a ratty old blanket wrapped around me. And no details of the bitch who gave birth to me. All I know is that she didn’t want me, and I was abandoned like an unwanted dog.

That’s how my story started.

My first memories start at around five or six. Angelsong Orphanage was always freezing in winter and blistering hot in summer. We were herded like cattle to the dining hall three times a day. You ate everything on your plate—watery vegetables gone cold, rubbery meat. Or you were force-fed until you finished or threw up.

Making our beds was a ritual of punishment. Corners had to be crisp enough to bounce a coin. Anything less, and you’d do it again. And again. Until your fingers bled or your knees ached from kneeling on the floorboards.

Discipline came with bruises.

And silence.

The showers were the worst. Cold, always cold. Rows of us, stripped bare, standing under the freezing spray while Mrs. Nathan watchedfrom her wooden stool in the corner. Her eyes lingered too long. Always too long.

Even now, the memory of her gaze made my skin crawl.

I paused with the pen hovering above the page as I recalled her death.

Mrs. Nathan begged for her life when I strangled her with a towel. Her death was brutal, and it took more strength than I thought I had to kill her. Then again, I was only fifteen, and she was a big bitch. But I’d caught her by surprise, and once I had her, I wasn’t letting go. Strangulation took much longer than I expected.

But it was pure poetry that she could watch herself die in the mirrors above the hand basins. That was perfect revenge for all those times she watched us girls shower like she was sizing us up for her own sick pleasure.

Her body is buried near the gardener’s shed.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My first murder was Mr. Fucking Whitmore.

The school principal who thought he was king shit in his tweed vest. He always smelled like pipe smoke and peppermint. The kind of man everyone trusted. Including me.

I was thirteen the first time he took me to his “secret” room. Said he needed help organizing files. Said I was smart. Said he had something special for me . . . a Kit Kat chocolate.

He violated me more times than I could count in that room.

He called itour little secret.Said I was hisspecial girl.

I was fourteen when I killed him with a HB pencil.

The same pencils he made me sharpen every time before we “worked.” All perfectly sharp. He liked neatness. He liked control.

His murder wasn’t planned. I still didn’t know what the trigger was. But as he bent me over his office desk, I grabbed a pencil and rammed it into his throat. It slid in easier than I expected. Well, the pencils were sharp, just like he’d instructed me to make them.

He’d looked surprised when I’d stabbed him. Like it had never once crossed his mind that I could fight back. That I could kill him.

There wasso much blood.

Mr. Whitmore’s grave was the first one I ever dug. Took me all night.

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