Page 1 of Vengeful Rotten Casualties

PROLOGUE

MICKI

There’sblood in my teeth. I can feel it coating my tongue with a nasty, coppery taste. Out of habit, I lick my lips and regret it almost immediately because of the sting from one of my many cuts, and well, you aren’t supposed to get blood in your wounds, right? Or does it even matter if it’s your own blood?

I lift my eyes and stare into an empty black void of the gaze that lands on mine. My face hurts. My side hurts. My whole body freakinghurts. But just because this asshole thinks I’m broken doesn’t mean shit.

I’m not, and I never will be. I hadn’t broken forhim, and I certainly won’t break for this asshole either. My hand slides back, over the cold tile until my fingers hit something sharp. A long shard of a glass edge cuts into my fingers—but I don’t care. I grab a hold of it, slide down to the larger end and grip it hard.

If it scars, all the better. It’ll be a war wound. A reminder of my own strength.

A long, dark shadow shifts over me.

“I’ve wanted to do this for a real long time,” he says, hovering close. “So long…” His eyes dip to where he’d ripped my shirt and it now gapes open.

“Funny…” I hold the shard of glass even tighter. I leverage up, closer to him, and his gaze snaps back to my face as I grin, feeling a new kind of cruelty invade my mind. “So have I,” I say.

And then I strike.

Blood sprays into my face and for a moment, I want to open my mouth. I want to let it rain down my throat. Like some Viking of old, I want to relish in my kill and walk out covered in what once kept this monster alive. But I don’t. Letting his foul blood fill me up in any way would contaminate me even more than I already am. This man has already taken too much from me. My willpower. My virginity. My very soul.

He can’t take this.

Not my vengeance.

1

MICKI

16 years old…

Ashes to Ashes and dust to dust.The priest mumbles through the last of the prayer and then gives the man to his right with a sallow complexion—so pale that it makes him look like one of the corpses he’s in charge of burying—a nod to lower the casket into position.

My eyes veer down to the black hull of the coffin as it’s lowered into the ground. I don’t know whose cemetery this is—it’s one of many on the outskirts of Eastpoint—but all of the arrangements for my mother’s death have been made by the man she spent her last few years with. He chose everything, from what she’s wearing now as she’s lowered into the ground, to the casket, to the place she will forever be laid to rest.

She was too young to die.The thought pervades my mind and that incessant feeling that something is definitely not right with this whole ordeal continues to pound against the inside of my skull. But I have no power here. No authority. I don’t have the connections or the voice to investigate this even if I feel like it’s wrong. No one around me seems to think anything is amiss.

People die young all of the time, and I’d been told she was sick for a while—it was why I hadn’t been allowed to see her in the last few months.Was it all part of his plan? Or was it real?I don’t know anymore.

I continue to stare down at her casket as it makes it to the bottom of the hole. It feels strange to bury her here. She wasn’t even born in Eastpoint. It’s just the latest in a long line of places we’ve moved to over the course of the last sixteen years. I don’t know where she was born, though, and I don’t know how to find that out. So, I guess I have no other choice than to let her be laid to rest in the place she died. In the place Thomas Kincaid permits her. My fingers clench into fists.

A familiar figure hovers at my back as I stand at the edge of the hole in the ground. “Miss?” The groundskeeper says, but I ignore him. He and the priest have asked me repeatedly to step back—as if they’re afraid I might throw myself into the hole in the ground along with my mother. I can’t say the thought hasn’t crossed my mind, but I’m not that far gone. Not yet. After all, there’s stillhim.

Almost as soon as I think of him, Luc’s hand closes on my arm. “Micki?” I close my eyes against the wind and suck in a deep breath.

“I’m fine,” I croak out the lie without thinking.

He pulls me against his chest and closes his arms around me. “No, you’re not,” he says.

I try to resist. I really do, but his warmth is so damn hard to not want, especially when everything around me feels so fucking cold. He’s everything keeping me together right now and everything I don’t deserve. I never have.

“He’s a fucking asshole,” Luc mutters, confusing my grief for something else. I don’t have to look around to know he’s right, but I also don’t care. She might not have seen it, but I’ve always known that Thomas Kincaid had only ever wanted my mother for one thing—her beauty. This whole show of him paying for her funeral is just to keep up appearances. It’s enough for him to open his checkbook, but not for him to show up.

Her alluring complexion with her naturally tawny skin and her big eyes and petite waist had made man after man approach her, not even caring that she was carting me along. Thomas Kincaid, though, was her biggest catch, and moving into the multi-million-dollar mansion with his son had been the best thing to ever happen to me, even if I hate the man who owns the house.

I cling to Luc like one strong gust of wind will yank me away from him. The tears wet my cheeks as they slowly slip down. My heart thuds in an inconsistent rhythm inside the prison of my ribcage. There’s a question neither of us has asked aloud yet, but one that pervades every second that has passed since we learned of my mother’s death.

What happens to us now?

---