Page 61 of Risky Passion

He found my weakness—Alice.

That bastard dragged me back into the darkness I’d fought so hard to escape. He put a leash on me and tightened it until I couldn’t breathe . . . until I had no choice but to obey.

Then he handed me over to Ziháo Hàorán Chui.

Chui made my blood run cold. He was the only man who had ever truly terrified me. Not because of what he did, though his acts were monstrous beyond anything I'd imagined, but because of the way he did them. He didn’t just embody evil. He perfected it.

But that was all over. Those bastards were all dead now. Chui. Frank and his brothers. Every last one of them.

Now I was the one running the show.

Some show, though . . . when there was no one left to share the glory with.

“You were an orphan here, weren’t you?” Cooper’s voice cut through the storm of my memories, yanking me back to the present.

I shot him a glare sharp enough to silence anyone with half a brain. “Shut up.”

But Cooper wasn’t exactly the smart type. He kept going. “I see it in your eyes. Memories are like ghosts . . . they can either be your friends or scare the shit out of you.”

His words hit me harder than I wanted to admit, like he’d reached into my chest and pressed on something sore, a festering wound I’d tried to forget. It was like he understood. Like hereallyknew how my memories shackled me. The good and the evil, swirling together, fighting for space in my head.

Between us, Alice’s lifeless body swayed gently as we carried her through the orphanage. She'd been the only one who truly understood what I'd become, what they'd forced me to be. Every life I took, every crime I committed, she knew it was all to keep us both breathing. And now she was gone.

Everyone had darkness in them, waiting for the right trigger to set it loose. But living with what I've done, and telling myself it was necessary, that was the inferno that never stopped burning.

“It’s okay, B. I won’t tell anyone,” Cooper said softly, his tone digging into me like a burrowing insect.Persistent fucker.

“Just keep moving,” I snapped.

The ghosts of this place weren’t just memories. They were fuel to my rage.

We stepped out of the orphanage’s front entrance and onto the crumbling steps.

“What the fuck? You came on a motorbike?” Cooper’s tone was thick with disbelief.

“Yeah,” I said as we reached the bottom of the stairs. “Open the trunk.”

Cooper froze mid-step, forcing me to stop. He stared at me like I’d just asked him to chop off his own arm. “No way,” he hissed. “No fucking way. She’s not going in my cruiser.”

The moonlight twisted his features, carving dark shadows across his face, turning his expression into something feral.

I glared at him, cold and lethal. “Open the fucking trunk, Cooper.”

“No!” he snapped.

He shifted his grip on Alice’s body, fumbling as if her weight had suddenly become unbearable. Grunting, he lowered her feet to the ground, forcing me to set Alice down in the dirt, just a few feet from his cop car.

He crossed his arms like a petulant child throwing a tantrum. “I’m not driving around with that stink in my car. The stench’ll never come out.”

My hands trembled from sheer, volcanic rage. The world around us seemed to still. No crickets, no breeze.

“That stink in your car?” I repeated, my voice low and deadly like each word was sharp enough to draw blood.

“Yeah,” he sneered, his lip curling in disgust. “Not to mention the DNA evidence that body’ll leave behind. I’m not getting dragged into your shitstorm.”

Stink.

DNA.

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