Page 66 of The Truths We Burn

I’m not stupid—he didn’t come here to check on me or to see how I’m doing. He’s the reason I’m locked inside of here in the first place. The reason I’ll never get out.

Not because I’m sick or I need help either. He shoved me in here to keep me quiet so that I can’t tell anyone what I had found out.

What I know he did.

Frank Donahue had painted me as the crazy daughter who lost her mind after the accidental death of her twin sister.

Even if I’m let out, no one would believe a word I said, and that’s exactly how he wants it.

“Please.”

Chills decorate my spine, little bumps of irritation along my skin.

“Please?” I spit out at him. “I should kick you in the balls right now for even thinking you could say that word around me. Please? You don’t deserve to ask for anything.”

“You always did have a flair for the dramatics, even as a little girl,” Cain mutters as he waltzes past me, returning to his seat next to my sperm donor. “Sit. It’s for your own good.”

One thing this place has taught me or, well, what I have learned is I really just don’t give a fuck anymore. I do not care about what people think of me, how others view me, or what is expected of me. I have no regard for anyone else but myself.

So, I don’t care to show my anger or my disgust when it comes to these two. There are no cameras to act for, and even if there were, I would do the same thing.

I slam my hands down onto the table, fuming beneath my cool exterior. I’m in shock at how entitled they truly are. The man who molested me as a child and the man who’d had my twin killed to pay off his debt—how could they think for a moment I would do anything for either of them? They have nothing to hold over my head, nothing to bribe me with.

My teeth start grinding together as I spit out,“Either tell me what it is you came here for, or I’m going to stab you both to death with a plastic spork.”

There is no bluff. No fabrication.

My dad looks at my extended arms. Self-consciously, I look down as well to make sure my horrible orange zip-up hoodie is covering them. Then I think, why should I have to hide the scars he caused?

Rosemary died on April twenty-ninth, and almost a month later, I was admitted to Monarch after having a “psychotic break.”

Everyone was told it was because of the loss of Rose and the abrupt divorce my parents were getting. It had been too much for an eighteen-year-old girl to handle, and the town thought I’d finally snapped.

What had actually gone down was something far more sinister. I’d gone innocently into my father’s office with the intention of printing a paper for school. Something I’d done a million times before, expecting the same blown-up image of our family portrait on the monitor.

But that time was different.

When I’d logged in to the computer, there was a video pulled up, already halfway played, and I remember thinking it looked like a Jason Statham movie.

My dad sat tied to a chair, hair disheveled and clothes filthy, while Greg West, a professor at Hollow Heights, interrogated him for money that he owed his boss. Money that he’d borrowed from a sex ring, and now, they were short on product.

And when there was no chance of payment, he gave my father a choice.

“You die, or you sell one of your daughters as settlement.”

I wanted to be surprised, but I hadn’t been. I knew that my father was capable of corrupt things. Willing to do whatever he had to in order to keep up appearances. To stay on top.

With ease, he chose Rose.

Like she wasn’t a human being, his own flesh and blood, as if she was just a name.

I wish he would’ve picked me.

My sister had been killed to settle my father’s debt, and I’d never tasted anger so bitter in my mouth before.

Retaliation. Vengeance. The hunger to make him pay.

I would do anything to have it.

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