Total pages in book: 218
Estimated words: 215412 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 862(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 215412 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 862(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
He knows I can’t attack him. Each inhale stretches the cuts across my torso, slick with blood and gaping open. Each exhale is an assault from within, my body demanding me to surrender.
I won’t.
I’ll live just to remember this. Every second. Every slice. Every flicker of sadistic pleasure in his eyes.
When the time comes, I’ll make him feel this pain.
All of it.
Tenfold.
Slowly.
“We’ll talk again soon.” He stands, wiping bloody hands on my ripped, discarded shirt. My only shirt.
“Can’t wait.”
The overhead light clicks off, and the door shuts, plunging me into darkness. Outside, the lock gives a final clunk.
He’s gone.
Regret slithers across the floor, pausing to sniff my wounds.
I release a breath, and it feels like I’m forcing air from a punctured lung.
My heart is a raging monster in my chest, stomping so violently I can feel it in my gums. It’s not fear. It’s not rage. It’s worse. It’s more dangerous and crushing.
Hope.
They’re alive.
Leo. Kody. Frankie.
They didn’t just survive.
They escaped Hoss.
The doctor showed me more news stories on his phone, torturing me with videos of them, grainy and low-resolution, but I saw their faces.
I felt them.
A rush of static hits my bloodstream, spasming my fingers. I wanted so badly to reach through the screen and touch them.
They survived the Arctic. Frankie and my brothers are free.
Except they’re not my brothers.
The truth came in pieces. Little incisions of information carved between swipes of the scalpel.
Leo is my cousin.
Kody is my uncle.
Denver, the man who raised us, the devil we all feared, is Leo’s father and my uncle.
And my sperm donor?
I almost laugh, but the sound catches in my throat, too sharp to swallow. My lips might’ve curled into a grin if my face wasn’t so wrecked with pain.
My father is Frankie’s husband.
The cheating, two-pump-chump billionaire Monty Novak is my damn father.
I press my tongue against my teeth, biting down hard enough to taste iron.
Montgomery Strakh. That’s his real name.
My father.
I wouldn’t believe it if the doctor hadn’t played the audio clips of my family discussing it in private. I heard their voices, their validations of our DNA.
It’s too much. Too fucking much.
I want to roar. I want to laugh. I want to tear the truth out of my skin like shrapnel because what the fuck does it even mean? I spent my whole life not knowing who fathered me. How fitting that I learned the truth while being cut open during my own autopsy?
I let out a breathless, shuddering, maniacal laugh, my torso shaking and weeping blood. The pain lances through me, but it’s distant now, nothing compared to the torture of my thoughts.
The doctor told me everything he knew about my family, and I told him nothing.
I won’t be able to keep my silence next time. And there will be a next time. Many, many more.
He has terrible plans for my family and me. Delusional, mad-clown, chainsaw-massacre plans.
I don’t know what to do with this information. I don’t know how to save them.
“They escaped,” I whisper. “They survived.”
Now I must do the same.
3500 miles away
The screen shatters in my grip, glass and pixels dying under my fist. I’ve already wiped the drives, but it’s not enough. I have to make sure there’s nothing left. No scraps. No fragments. No breadcrumbs for them to follow.
The laptop hits the floor, a final blow from my boot reducing it to a mangled corpse of circuits and plastic.
Controlled destruction.
Precision in violence.
The walls of my studio apartment close in, the air thick with the scent of sweat and burned hardware.
I should’ve seen this coming. I track everyone. I watch from the shadows, pulling their strings. I’m the ghost in their machines, the virus in their networks, the spider in their dark webs they don’t even know they fear.
Yet somehow, they found me.
A miscalculation. A hairline fracture in my impenetrable firewalls.
I grin, seething.
They think they’re omnipotent, but they have no idea what they’ve done. They stirred the waters and released the Kraken. They should’ve let the sleeping beast lie.
The law thinks it has me in its sights. I see them lurking outside, the unmarked cars and pathetic attempts at surveillance.
They think I don’t know, don’t see them, don’t feel them breathing.
They don’t know me at all.
They think I’m just another criminal, a hacker playing games.
I don’t play games. I play god, and I’m vengeful as fuck.
They’ve been sniffing around my accounts, tracking the money trails, trying to pin something on me. Fraud. Cyberterrorism. Murder by proxy. Oh, they’d love to slap those labels on me and drag me into a courtroom.
The law is nothing but a crippled institution run by the weak to corral the strong. They want to put me behind bars? I’ll burn their prisons to the ground.
I rip the cords from the wall, dragging my rig to the center of the room. The servers hum their last breaths as I take a sledgehammer to them. The sound is deafening, like breaking bones, like punching a reset button I never wanted to press.