Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Long before that girl broke and shattered and had to be rebuilt.
But if there was one thing my father drilled into me as a kid, it was to be impeccable with my word, to stand behind my promises, to be trustworthy.
I had to go back.
No matter what I went back to.
No matter the anger, the grief, the resentment, the confusion.
I had to go back.
The question was simply when.
A week, a year, five? I had no idea.
"What about the mission?" he asked, making my head snap up.
"The mission is the mission. It has nothing to do with my family."
"You go back, they become your focus."
"No," I told him, gaining my feet, rolling my neck, feeling the satisfying crack. "Nothing will ever change the mission," I told him.
Then I lunged.
If he was looking for a fight, if he wanted to get me to focus, he knew my trigger, and he knew it was set to hair.
The mission.
It was all there was for me.
Eight years.
Eight years of my life dedicated to it.
I ripped the girl I had been apart at the seams, rebuilt her with stronger materials, set fire to her burning rage, showed her that as ugly as she may have once thought it was, it was infinitely worse. That demons wore the faces of men in this world. And that someone needed to send them on back to hell.
I killed myself to be reborn into the body and mind and soul of someone who could do what needed to be done.
I didn't do all of that just to shrug it off like a sweater that no longer fit right, to go back to my old life, and be that old person.
It wasn't possible.
I was too far gone.
Even if I wanted to, it wasn't an option anymore.
This was who I was.
As ugly as it was.
And this was what I did.
Righteous, but wicked in its own way.
I had finally succeeded in becoming what I told myself I needed to be over eight years before.
A weapon.
I was a weapon.
And the mission was to cut down anyone who dared believe they could get away with their evil, who thought there was nothing to fear.
There was.
Me.
I wanted to show them all that they should be piss-themselves fucking scared of me.
That was the mission.
And I took it very, very seriously.
Nothing and no one would take it away from me.
Not even those who wore the faces of family and had the best of intentions.
—
Two weeks later, it happened.
Something I—and he—had previously thought impossible.
I beat him.
I bested my teacher.
We both sat there in strained silence, sweat soaking through our clothes, breathing ragged, bodies exhausted, aching, minds completely shocked.
"Now," he said, nodding at me.
"Now what?" I asked, sucking in a greedy breath.
"Now you go home."
If there was any emotion in him about me leaving, he showed none as he pushed up off the floor, swiping the blood from under his nose with the back of his arm, walking out of the building into the steadily falling rain.
Even as nerves swarmed my system, I knew he was right.
It was time.
I was going back to Navesink Bank.
I was going home.
To what, I had no idea.
But I was about to find out.
Two
- Eight Years Before -
What was she doing?
Girls like her—privileged, loved, happy girls—didn't run away from home.
That said, girls like her—raised under the watchful eye of an entire outlaw biker gang and having aunts that owned martial arts studios and ran a sort of paramilitary camp—didn't often find themselves kidnapped, tormented, left to save themselves, leaving them a raw, open wound.
Girls like her didn't get shown the ugliness of the world at such a young age, get thrown into a situation that forced them to use the self-defense they'd learned growing up in a real life-or-death situation, trying to save another sixteen-year-old girl so traumatized that she couldn't even fight back if she wanted to.
Girls like her weren't locked in basements by human traffickers. Girls like her weren't forced to live with the promise of rape and torture. Girls like her weren't made to watch the aftermath of other girls like her being tossed down on the floor, body and mind broken from such abuse.
And girls like her definitely didn't find out that it was all part of some twisted power play amongst a family that they had known and loved, and the woman who turned out to be her grandmother. A woman so wicked, so evil, so vile that she could even imagine kidnapping and traumatizing their only granddaughter. Someone with such a black soul that she could gleefully traffick other women just for profit.
Girls like her didn't fight grown men full of bad intentions with the tops of toilet tanks.
Girls like her didn't raise a gun, aim, and shoot.
Girls like her didn't take lives.
Girls like her didn't kill their own grandmothers.