Page 118 of From Hell

Fuck Wolf. I hope Shina bites his dick off.“I’m heading to work.”

“Wait.” She places a hand on my shoulder. “You’d tell me if anything is wrong, right? Because we’re moving out of the family home pretty fast.”

“Of course,” I say smoothly.

“It’s not because of your university friend? That girl, what’s her name?”

My shoulders stiffen before I can force them to relax. Matty catches it; she’s that astute, but instead of getting angrier with me…she smiles and squeezes my shoulder.

“Whoever she is, I approve. You deserve to be happy, Jaxon. If you must take down that horrid patriarchal men’s club to be with her, we’re with you all the way.” She glances back at Wolf, who smirks and raises a shot glass of whatever alcohol hasn’t been packed away yet.

Shifted under the weight of her words, I make my excuses and leave.

My sister is wrong. I don’t deserve to be happy. My life was never meant to be like theirs. I’m not like them.

We’re not like them,my alter adds, coming out of the darkness as I sit in the front seat of my car, staring at nothing.

“You disappeared.”

I was having a holiday after all that work you made me do.

“You still haven’t taken control.”

Fronting full-time is fucking exhausting.

“We had a deal. You said you wouldn’t hurt her.”

The Ripper chuckles.I can see what you like about her. She’s feisty. Maybe we should keep her.

I narrow my eyes, looking back at myself in the rearview mirror. “She told us never to come back.”

The little bird was most definitely telling fibs. Her lower lip was trembling so fucking adoringly.

Laine is better off without me. Without us. It’s the reason I left before and will again. I thought she’d evolved, but she’s still the same girl I knew at university, with fractures of light and darkness. I used to think we were the same, but I have no light…not anymore.

I’m just as evil as my alter, I’m just better at hiding it.

I tell myself that as I drive over to her cousin’s house, where she’s staying, and watch her until the light in her room switches off and she goes to bed, before heading to work.

41

LAINE

Flames lick the edges of the page. Edges blacken and curl up in smoke. It’s cathartic to watch.

It’s been two weeks since I saw Jaxon, and he ordered me to hand the evidence in. I couldn’t do it. Jaxon’s name was there in black and white as the person who cleaned up every murder, carving bodies and delivering black market organs to every hospital funded by the foundation.

But the organization was profiteering off rape and murder, still is if what Jaxon says is true, and there’s a Sanctuary in every major city.

I can’t let that go.

So I stuffed everything that didn’t have Jaxon’s name on it and left it in a manilla envelope on my dad’s porch—an anonymous tip. My dad isn’t in the crime investigation department anymore, but he’ll see that it gets to the right channels.

As for the rest of it, I’m feeding it to the light, hoping that, in some way, Jaxon’s recent actions can atone for what he did. Maybe I’m delusional, but I can’t bring myself to condemn him, not after what I’ve done.

I’m a killer, too.

Cash, recovering from his gunshot wound, hobbles into the sitting room where I’m burning the contents of the envelope.