Page 91 of Cruel Riches

There were only a couple of things that she was actually innocent of—she didn’t kill Emilie, and she didn’t kill my father or my Uncle Greg, either. I shouldn’t punish her for their demises, but the cold way she spoke about them drove me fucking insane. Sorry, but I’m not sorry, was what it boiled down to. As far as she was concerned, she didn’t have to feel bad because she thought her father was innocent of Emilie’s murder, and she definitely didn’t think she had to feel bad for the accident that killed my father and Greg because she was even more detached from that.

Fucking bitch.

I pushed aside the mental images of her face and body and let Emilie’ssmiling face flash in my mind instead.

I still remembered every little bit of her, even though I was only a kid when she died. Those friendly brown eyes that always crinkled around the sides when she saw me. That little button nose that wrinkled and twitched with amusement whenever I said something silly. Her round cheeks, always pink with exertion when she chased me around the house. She was pretty, but not in a way I’d ever find attractive. She was too close to me for that. Like a sister. That was the only way I’d ever see her.

It wasn’t as easy to conjure up a mental picture of Uncle Greg. He wasn’t around much when I was a kid, so the details of his face had faded in my mind, but I remembered that he was tall with dark wavy hair, just like my mother. I remembered how much she cried at his loss, too. Just as much as she cried for my father.

Dad.His loss felt like a red-hot knife in the guts when it happened, and that pain hadn’t lessened over the years.

He wasn’t like most of the Arcadia Bay parents. Wasn’t cold and aloof or obsessed with image and reputation. Wasn’t from a background worth billions, either. He married into the Lockwood dynasty and even changed his last name to become one of them, all for my mother, but his attitude remained solidly middle class. He was a decent, hardworking man who loved and cared about his family above everything. He didn’t deserve to crash off a cliff and have his corpse ravaged by animals until most of it was lost forever, leaving us with only a few mangled bits and pieces to bury.

He should still be here today, but Peter Covington made sure he wasn’t.

Alexis was a real chip off the old block. She cried innocent, but I knew the truth. She was here to finish her nasty father’s dirty work and destroy even more lives. It was just like I said to her the other day. In all her mad delusions, she truly thought he was innocent, but in trying to exonerate him, she’d turned into the exact same monster as him.

She was a crazy fucking bitch, evil to the very core.

Every time I thought about what she’d done, it felt as if there were a flame inside me, filling my entire body. The rage gripped me, and I didn’t want to let it go. It energized me, and I wanted to stay in that hot furious state forever, ripping things up and slamming my fists into walls. Each destroyed object was a surrogate for the girl whose face and body I really wanted to break.

I knew I could turn her in to the cops and let them deal with her, but that wasn’t the sort of justice I wanted for her. I wanted her to suffer. I wanted her to feel exactly what she made those girls feel, and I wanted to be the one to make it happen, as if I were a god tasked with judging and punishing the wicked.

The legal system favored rehabilitation over punishment these days, and in most cases that made sense. But in some bloodlines the evil ran so thick and deep that it couldn’t be fixed. It could only be stamped out with sheer force.

That was what I needed to do to Alexis. Stamp her out just like some mysterious vigilante stamped out her psycho father’s life ten years ago.

Doing that definitely didn’t involve fucking her brains out or letting her soft lips get to me with their pleas and cries of innocence.

I knew I was only human, and I couldn’t stop my body from reacting every time she was near, making my dick ache with the need to sink inside her and my fingers itch with the need to touch her. But I had to get control of myself. I had to remember the answer to one fundamental question: what did I want more? Her, or revenge?

Obviously, it was revenge. Cold, merciless revenge.

Regret sank cold black talons into my chest all over again, and I took a deep breath and shook my head. Earlier, I lost my damn mind.

It wouldn’t happen again.

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