Page 22 of Creeping Lily
I stop as the firm voice wraps around me, pulling me back to the group. When I turn, Justin is sitting, but he’s pinned me with his intense stare, causing my feet to stand still.
“It was nice to finally meet the girl my sister can’t stop talking about.”
Bethany scowls and throws an irritated punch to his arm before she grabs mine and pulls me out the door, suddenly in a hurry to get away from the café.
“What was that?” I ask, unable to mask my surprise. “You talk about me to your brother?”
She waves her hand around dismissively.
“Justin’s overprotective. He insists on knowing everything about anyone I come in contact with. Believe me, if I hadn’t told him, he would have had you investigated.”
“Investigated? Me?”
I throw a hand to my chest, horrified. Why would anyone ever want to investigate me? And what would he even find? The fear that he could possibly do this and uncover my secret coils deep in my stomach, lacing my insides with poison. I’d rather Bethany told him what little she knows than for him to go digging around trying to find information about my life. My past. How would I ever live down the shame if he did learn my secrets?
“But you hardly even know anything about me,” I remind her.
She smiles. “I know. That’s why I re-invented you.”
11
TITAN
Killers aren’t born. They’re made.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a bedtime story for grown-ups—something neat and easy, so they can keep believing that monsters are born different from the rest of us.
I am a killer.
My first kill? Was out of necessity, not sport.
Don’t mistake me for a martyr. I’m not here for praise, and I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’ve made my peace with what I am. But I won’t stand by and let another innocent slip through the cracks if I can stop it. That’s why I’m here now—miles from civilization, the wind biting through my jacket, in the middle of an assignment no one else wanted to touch.
This isn’t a routine job.
It’s a disease that’s been festering for years.
And disease needs to be eradicated.
Mary Jane Denaud was nine years old when she vanished from Kaneda Ridge. Riding her bike home from the corner store. Simple, ordinary, safe—until it wasn’t. Her bike turned upin a ditch, twisted and bent like something had sideswiped it. The cops called it a hit-and-run. Wrote it off. No body, no blood, no witnesses. Case closed.
But the Denauds weren’t buying it. They hired a private investigator, who scraped away the official version and found something far uglier: the crash was a cover. The girl was taken. The bike left behind like bait, a distraction to steer eyes in the wrong direction.
Years passed. The trail iced over. The world forgot. But the Denauds didn’t. They carried their file to Goliath—the kind of society that operates in the shadows, the kind that steps in when the law folds its hands and looks away.
It landed on my desk.
And as I flipped through those pages, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time—purpose.
No one else wanted it. A bizarre cold case tied to a man across state lines with a reputation like a disease? Not exactly a line of work people volunteer for. But for me, it was perfect. A hunt worth the time.
The name at the center of it all: Walt Barnaby.
Saying it tastes like bile on my tongue.
He’s a king without a crown—a tyrant who’s choked the life out of his own town. Accused of enough crimes to fill a courthouse ledger, but never convicted. His neighbors flinch at the sound of his voice. Those who’ve stood up to him either vanished into thin air or came out the other side with their lives in ruins.
The deeper I dug, the clearer it became: Walt isn’t just a bully. He’s a predator.
