Page 176 of I Will Break You

My brows rise. I know she pays my phone bill, but I didn’t think she was keeping tabs on my digital footprint. “If it’s about that website I visited, it was just a link I clicked?—”

“Don’t play ignorant with me, Amethyst Crowley,” she says, every word etched with disgust. “I tolerated the killing because you said it was self-defense. I even tolerated the way you humiliated me all over social media. But this…”

She bows her head, her shoulders trembling with silent sobs.

Alarm punches me in the chest. This reminds me so much of my first semester at college, when Mom and Dad turned up at my dorm to drive me home. There was no talk, no explanation, just the crushing weight of their disappointment.

“What did I do?” I whisper.

“Public nudity?” she asks, her voice breaking. “Rough sex on a convicted murder’s grave? How could you?”

On instinct, my lips form a denial, but realization seeps through my skull before I can utter the words. Then my jaw falls loose from its hinges, and I gasp.

Nights ago, Xero tore off my clothes and fucked me on his grave. But I didn’t see a single soul while we were having sex.

“How?” I whisper. “Who?”

She raises her head, her eyes venomous and sharp. “An anonymous note came in through the mail, telling me the precious daughter I spent over a million dollars trying to protect had finally found a profession.”

My breath quickens, and I shake my head.

“I knew writing fiction would lead you to ruin, but I never thought it was a slippery slope to humiliating yourself on social media and doing porn.”

Bristling, I bite back, “Will you stop being so judgmental? There’s nothing wrong with adult content as long as it’s consensual.”

She flinches, her nostrils flaring. “What are you saying?”

“I didn’t make a movie. Besides, how do you know it was me?”

“Don’t you think I’d recognize my own daughter, even if she was being…takenby a masked man dressed as the Grim Reaper?”

“Mom,” I snap my fingers. “Focus. What if someone impersonated me with artificial intelligence?”

“Nonsense.”

“Isn’t that what you said about the photo I showed you of me as a child? You’d be surprised at what they can do with AI.”

When she clamps her mouth shut, my eyes narrow. If she doesn’t believe in AI, then that photo of a younger version of me has to be real.

I advance on her, my fists curling. My memory of that night may be spotty, but I won’t let her come into my home hurling accusations and then clamming up when I need answers.

“Show me the video,” I say.

Her head snaps up. “Why?”

“I want to see if it’s even real.”

With a huff, she burrows into her purse and extracts her phone. After tapping a few icons, she fires up a video. There’s a montage from Xero’s official funeral, which I realize was the morning after the book fair. I couldn’t attend because he had locked me in the house.

Hundreds of mourners in black gather around the grave as the coffin is lowered into the earth. Shivers run down my spine at the thought of who could be inside.

My breath shallows during a time lapse, showing the graveyard going dark, and then a large figure stepping out from behind the Grim Reaper statue. His face is in shadows, obscured by the hood of a black leather coat, but there’s no mistaking the pale eyes glowing in the moonlight.

It’s Xero.

Or at least his ghost version.

Betrayal punches me in the gut, and I try not to double over. Out of the corner of my eye, Mom watches me with the diligence of a predator. This is the woman who never looks me in full in the face because something within my soul is too rotten for her to withstand.

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