Page 13 of Cruel Elite (Princes of Ravenlake Academy 3)

I pluck the frame from her hands. Mom’s arms fall limply into place, completely unresponsive.

I’m eight or nine in the picture, a mess of curly brown hair like a mop on my head and a lopsided grin on my face.

Penny is wrong about a lot of things, but she’s right about the fact that I don’t smile much.

Not anymore.

I have my mom’s angular chin and my dad’s caramel brown hair. In this shot, we look like the happy stock photo family you see inside of picture frames at the store.

The sky behind us is a bright blue. We are standing on the turned-over earth of what would become our house. Construction was just starting, and Mom and Dad took me to the lot to have a picnic.

“Our first family meal at our forever home,”Mom said that day. All these years later, I still remember those words.

God, what I wouldn’t give to jump into that picture.

To warn those smiling fools what’s coming for them.

There haven’t been very many family meals lately. These days, Mom is usually too drunk or too depressed to cook, so she swallows a few pills with her drink of choice while I order delivery.

I eat alone in my room more often than not. If we didn’t have a cleaning lady, the dining table would be buried in a foot of dust by now.

Mom moves on the couch, pulling me out of my thoughts. For a second, I think she might be waking up.

Then she hiccups and lets out a small, pitiful whimper before settling back to sleep.

I sigh and look back down at the picture.

I should have destroyed it the way I did the others.

I got tired of Mom moping around the house and bursting into tears whenever she saw a picture of Dad, so I got rid of them all. I shredded and burned his memory from the house, doing what I thought was best for her.

But when I came to this picture, I couldn’t find it in me to rip up the happy, eight-year-old version of me.

Right now, though, it’s easy.

I shatter the glass on the brick interior of the fireplace, letting it scatter across the hearth, and pull the picture free of the frame. I don’t even give it a second look before I rip it up.

There’s no need to.

It’s the ghost of a life that no longer exists.

Mom may fall asleep clutching old memories, but I can’t. They slip between my fingers like wisps of smoke, intangible.

I slide my mom off the couch, tucking one arm under her knees and the other under her back, and carry her upstairs to her room.

She murmurs something under her breath as I settle her into her bed, but I don’t bother trying to decode it. It’s just a sleepy, drunken mumble. Meaningless.

Just like the life we used to have, it’s better off forgotten.

It’s not lost on me that everything changed when I hunted down Penny in the woods tonight.

Two years of frigid silence—gone.

Two years of pretending the past didn’t happen—gone.

So it’s time to do to Penny what I did to the photograph: rip her to shreds and feed her to the fire.

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