Page 106 of Holy Sinner

So does Alexia.

“Jax?” Alexia moves to go to him. “What is happening? This isn’t-you said she was sick but she’s here. Who is Mark?”

What I hear clicks into place when my mother snaps her fingers at Jax. “Kill her.” I know who she means. I understand how she played Alexia in this game of hers.

But Alexia doesn’t.

Jax’s gun swings towards Alexia and he pulls the trigger. Alana screams and grabs her ears and so do I. The sound makes me feel deaf and I drop down into a crouch out of instinct, even though the bullet wasn’t meant for me. Alexia hits the floor facedown, the back of her shirt is staining dark red and blood pools under her where she’s fallen, one hand outstretched towards the man that betrayed her.

“She’s my girlfriend. She’ll say any fucking thing I want.”

Alexia got played because she loved the wrong man. She died not understanding her error either. I look at my mom while Alana sobs.

“Why did you do that?”

“Because too many fucking witnesses, Kit. Jesus fucking Christ. You’d think you would be smarter, going to Harvard.”

I shake my head. “She would have lied for Jax. She did lie for Jax. She wouldn’t have told anyone what she knew.”

My mother crosses her arms and looks down at Alexia’s body with distaste. “She would have but I was tired of letting her touch my things. Let me tell you, I was fucking tired of it weeks ago. Isn’t that right, darling?” She looks at Jax and I feel sick.

“You’re together,” I say and my mother smiles at me.

“We are. You didn’t think you were the only one who could pull two men, now were you?”

My eyes go wide and I look at Scott who’s grinning at my mother. “Oh god. Y-you’re with both of them.”

My mother laughs. “Oh my god, you did, didn’t you? You really thought I couldn’t have what you have. That’s sad, Kit. Anything you can do, I can do better. You know this. That’s why I found Jax and Scott so perfect. They’re what your washed up boyfriends could never be. They’re the real thing. True killers. True heroes. Your men only pretend to be the monster but I have the real deal, Kit. You’ll never do better than me.”

“You’re sick,” I whisper but there’s no real venom in my voice. I’m playing for time while my mother goes through her villain speech about how her two shitty boyfriends are better than mine. I haven’t seen her in nearly ten years and this is what she does?

She chooses to compare boyfriends?

Fucking pathetic.

“If I am, it’s because you made me like this,” my mother snaps and holds out an arm to Scott, who comes to her. “You destroyed my life but that’s over now, isn't it?” She simpers and looks up at Scott like he’s her savior and she’s a damsel in distress.

I have to find a way out of this. I edge around the blood pooling around Alexia. I have to find a way to get Alana in the clear so that I can handle my mother and her demented lovers once and for all.

“I didn’t do shit to you. I was a kid. You were my mother. You were the adult. Just because your life never amounted to shit, you don’t get to ruin mine.” I move closer to the window. It’s locked. It’ll take too long for me to get it open and get outside. I’ll never make it before they hurt Alana. I stop and look at my mother. “You’ve been dead to me for nine years, mother. How have you not managed to make something of yourself in all that time?” She pales when I say that.

“Shut the fuck up,” she snaps and grabs onto Scott’s arm. “You don’t know shit.”

“I know a washed up aging bitch when I see one.” Now it’s me that looks her up and down. I do it in a mimic of the way she looked at me all those years and I must do it well from the anger that makes her face go red.

“You never could quite make it, could you? Never smart enough, never pretty enough, never connected enough, because you ran everyone off with your temper. It must have killed you to see me make something of myself, didn’t it?” I ask her and it’s as I’m talking that a switch inside of me flips. It’s the one that Grant and Rafe tried to turn for me but never could. The one that I should have been trying to flip off all my life. I do it now.

“You couldn’t stand knowing that it wasn’t the world that was set up wrong, it was you. You were the reason you never made anything out of yourself because I had no problem doing what you couldn’t. That’s why you tried to break me, isn’t it? Because if I made something of myself, if I became someone worth something, it was you that was wrong. Then you’d know. It was you that couldn’t do it.”

My mother screams. The sound is raw and ragged. Hate morphs her face into a grotesque picture of her normally pretty features but it’s how I’ve always seen her.

“You’re the one that’s wrong,” I tell her.

She lifts her hand and I know she’s thrown her revenge plan out the window. She’s not going to ask for the money. She’s going to tell Scott to put a hole in my chest the way Jax did to Alexia. I only have a second, maybe a few at most, to do something. I start to shift towards the freezer. I’ll have to get inside with Jane and pray his shot misses me. But before I can turn, the lights cut out while the generator keeps humming away. That tells me one important thing.

It’s not a storm that knocked out the lights.

It’s my monsters.

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