Page 58 of Body Tox

Echo patted heads and tried to smile as best she could, walking forward and engaging with the hoard waiting for her. When she finally reached me at the front door, she looked back to Beatrice, who was blubbering again and holding a tablet to her chest like a treasure.

“Let’s go,” she whispered harshly to me, grabbing my bindings openly and yanking me out of the door.

I stared at the only home I really knew, backing out of the house, out of the painful past this place held for me.

The door closed, and that chapter of my life closed with it.

“You gonna tell me why sister Beatrice thinks you’re St. Katherine?” Asher egged for the fifteenth time.

We were nearly back at the church, and I didn’t want to admit it, but a part of me wanted him to know. It was clear that the place had some bad memories for him…maybe knowing would help him somehow.

“I donated some money to the orphanage.” I shrugged and kept my pace steady.

I didn’t give him a chance to ask me to elaborate. Instead, I said, “I saw you from the window when you were outside. What’s at the bottom of the pretty tree?”

Now, hewas silent.

“Okay then.” I shrugged. The question was eating at me, but I had to act like it didn’t matter.

The truth was that the moment I saw him escape outside, I had had my face shoved against the glass of the upstairs hallway, but then I had input the ‘anonymous’ donation that had Beatrice shrieking and getting all the fucking kids crying from being startled.

I had expected her to receive the notification well after I ditched the facility. However, she apparently wasn’t the dinosaur I’d thought she was. She’d used her bifocals to read the dollar signs listed for her funding page.

I didn’t confirm it was me, but the look in her eyes, her incessant hugging, and calling me a savior was enough for me to know I didn’t fool the old bat.

My teenhood sucked without my mom, and my father was a true monster.

I couldn’t imagine my life without having had my mother to lessen the blow. I wanted all those kids, drooly and loud as they were, to have a home someday, or at the very least live in a safe and comfortable environment.

Beatrice deserved that much, too.

The way she had talked about Asher made me wonder what had happened to change his prankster nature. Could that girl’s death change him so much? What was she to him, anyway?

You’re jealous of a ghost.

I ignored the annoying voice running around my brain, smacking myself upside the head to knock the bitch out.

“Were you…” I paused, thinking of how to word my question without sounding like the pathetic woman asking it.

“Was I what, Little Wraith?”

He had stopped and looked at me, his tied binds collecting snow as we stood still. I pulled my coat further onto my shoulders. Alaska was fucking bipolar. It could downpour oneminute, snow the next, or be sunshine and rainbows an hour later.

“Why would someone want you dead, Asher Ballard?” I peered up at him and focused on his sparkling eyes and brown hair.

He got very close to my face, enough to make out those little freckles under his eyes and dimples in his cheeks.

The cold air suddenly felt warm.

“You really wanna know?” he said with no emotion on his face.

I nodded, chewing my lip at the realization of how badly I needed to know.

“Unpaid parking tickets.”

I blinked, the annoyance at the flourishing smile growing on his face enough to make me see red. Suddenly, I could easily picture him as a child oversalting food and tying hair ties to water faucets.

I threw my fist out, smacking him hard in the chest. He laughed out loud and backed up in surrender, raising his bound arms in front of him.

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