Page 87 of Risky Passion

We needed to get out of here. Not to a cop station. But somewhere truly secure. Somewhere B couldn’t reach us.

I had a sinking feeling B was tying up loose ends.

And the three of us had just hit the top of those tangled threads.

CHAPTER 22

B

The temptation toslam my foot on the gas and get the hell out of there was strong, but I kept my cool. The last thing I needed was to drive off the road and into one of those barbed-wire fences. My breathing steadied as I stared at the road ahead, forcing myself to focus. I had too much to do.

I grabbed my phone and dialed Eddie’s number again. It rang. And rang. And rang.

No answer.

“Fucking hell, Eddie,” I muttered, tossing the phone onto the passenger seat. My jaw tightened as anger flared hot in my chest. Maybe he really did get taken by a crocodile in that swamp. Served him right. Or maybe he got smart, or stupid, just like Cooper did in the end. Thinking too much. Thinking they could outsmart me or outrun me.

They were wrong.

They werealwayswrong.

When my legacy was finally revealed, they would be shocked to learn I had been living among them for decades. Right under their noses. Half the cops knew me. Border Force too. Ryder and Whisper, those self-righteous bastards. Hell, I even had face-to-face dealings with the Alpha Tactical Ops team, and every time, the urge to put a bullet in their brains nearly got the better of me.

Had they died in that warehouse explosion?

They had to. If the blast didn’t kill them outright, the building collapse would’ve finished the job. The whole team was dead in an instant.

Nowthatwas the stuff legends were made of.

Maybe that was what I would become. A legend. Maybe someone would make a movie about me–a sixty-three-year-old woman who brought a special ops team to their knees and shattered the systems they thought were untouchable.

A laugh burst from my throat, giddy and wild, dancing on the knife’s edge between triumph and hysteria.

"What do you think, Alice?" My voice cracked as the words spilled out to her ghost. "Will they write about us in history books?"

Alice had always pushed me to tell our story, two orphan girls against a world of wolves in sheep's clothing. But I'd brushed her off. Who would want to read about us? Just two more victims of a system everyone pretended was saving us, when instead it had stripped away our souls.

Maybe Alice had known all along that our story wouldn't end in that orphanage, and that one day we would burn down the walls that had caged us.

“Maybe I’ll write that book after all,” I said, feeling a grin tug at the corners of my mouth.

I could almost see her smile . . . the one she gave me when I told her my stories. She loved those tales, especially the ones about the bastards who’d wronged us and abused the other kids. We were the avenging angels, she and I, killing all the devils.

And there were so many.

As I navigated the winding, deserted road, I tried to do the math. How many had I killed? My fingers tapped the wheel as I counted. Most of them were men, of course. But two had been women; teachers at the orphanage who thrived on cruelty like it was their lifeblood.

The memory of their faces surfaced, unbidden. They hadn’t been so brave when I’d given them a taste of their own brutality.

Like the bitch who’d humiliated Thomas. Miss Williams hadbroken him so completely that it ultimately cost him his life. When she knew I was going to kill her, she’d begged for mercy, sobbing harder than Thomas ever had, pissing her pants. But just like she’d done to him, I showed her no compassion.

A cold satisfaction curled in my chest. They’d all deserved it. Every single one of them.

The thoughts trailed off as I turned onto the main highway. Instead of focusing on the pulsing ache of memories I’d been facing forever, I tried to work out where I would take Alice.

My mind drifted, though, over forty years of our lives together, too many of them burdened with horrors and sadness we couldn’t shake.

But there was one little place I hadn’t thought about in years—a little fishing shack by the ocean at Stanage Bay. A tiny hamlet with barely sixty homes, a local store, café, and pub. There were no tourists. Just a rugged stretch of coastline and the endless whispers of the waves.

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