Page 5 of By the Time You Read This

It wasn’t a foolproof method of losing a tail, but it was a good one in a pinch. Whoever was following her might have been in a car, or might have simply trusted that this was the ferry she was going to take.

Still, when the gates shut, she exhaled some of the tension she’d been carrying over the past hour.

When they reached the halfway point, Delaney dropped her phone into the sound without bothering to reset it. There was nothing interesting on there anyway. She’d learned long ago not to keep that kind of stuff on a device that could be lifted out of your pocket at Pike Place by someone no more skilled than a toddler.

If someone was tracking her movements, though, it would be a clear sign that she’d clued in on the fact she was being followed.

You’re as guilty as I am.

And in that moment, despite the fact that her sister was dead, she hated Isabel more than she ever had before.

Because the truth was, now, because of Isabel, Delaney actually was.

Excerpt from Isabel Parker’s Journal

Everyone always wants me to start from the beginning.

But where is the beginning?

The first time I felt the urge to kill? Or the first time I acted upon it?

The first time I laid hands on a vulnerable creature and wondered not how I could protect it but how I could best destroy it?

The first time my parents said “no” and I envisioned swinging a lamp at mother’s head before using the shards to slice father’s throat? That had been when I was eight, for those keeping track.

The first time I heard the voice in my head, whispering that all these things were right and good and were my destiny?

Or is the beginning simply when my DNA mutated wrong, all the way back in the womb, giving me that voice in my head, giving me those ideas to swing the lamp and kill the bird, giving me this black hole where everyone else said a conscience should live?

They say there’s no psychopath gene, but I think that’s bullshit. My parents weren’t what anyone would call stellar, but they weren’t abusive either.

There was no terrible childhood section on my Wikipedia page, not like the ones that fill the rest of the big-name serial killers.

Alex, our golden boy older brother, was a shithead with some kind of personality disorder who deserved a slower death than I gave him, but he wasn’t terrible enough to change the trajectory of my life.

That voice had started long before Alex even knew what his dick could be used for.

So maybe the beginning was when our parents met, both of them secretly harboring genes that would cause their oldest children to develop into things that society deems monsters.

Lana and Larissa had escaped those genes, as would be expected when breaking down the statistics and probability of dominant versus recessive traits.

I watched them all their lives for signs that they were like me.

I wanted them to be like me.

Was that the beginning? When Lana—she goes by Delaney now, but I refuse to use that—was born and I thought mine.

By the time Larissa—Raisa, you correct me and I suppose you are not wrong—came the voice had grown so loud I was shocked others couldn’t hear it.

When I held that baby, it was no longer a whisper, that thought.

It was a roar.

Mine.

I never understood why people wanted to protect the toys that belonged to them when all I ever wanted to do was to destroy them. Because I could. Because it felt better to see a doll in pieces than the boring version of it that was whole and healthy.

I wanted to make them the same as me.

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