Page 11 of Infamous

Grief doesn’t announce itself.

It seeps in. Quiet. Patient.

It waits.

One day you think you’re standing, the next it crushes your lungs. You reach for something, anything, that’ll make it stop, but there’s nothing. Just the ache.

I stopped working. Stopped eating. Spent eighteen months at the bottom of a bottle. Every shadow looked like her. Every laugh in the distance twisted the knife.

Then one night, I dreamt of her.

She was standing at the foot of my bed — barefoot again, just like that first night I found her. Only now she wasn’t a child. She was older, calm, radiant. Her eyes carried that quiet disappointment that always cut deeper than anger.

“Get up,” she said. Not cruel. Not kind. Just certain.

When I did, I saw it — the bottles, the dust, the wreck I’d become. I realized I hadn’t been living. I’d just been waiting to die.

That was the morning I stopped drinking.

Stopped mourning.

And started getting mad.

Grief had taken everything.

Love had failed.

The system had failed.

But vengeance — vengeance still made sense.

Eighteen months.

That’s how long grief devoured me. It stripped the flesh from my bones and left only rage. When they called Billie’s death anaccident, something inside me broke beyond repair.

The sorrow mutated. It grew teeth.

It stopped being mourning — it became survival.

It became purpose.

If grief wanted to kill me, vengeance gave me a reason to live.

I rebuilt myself from the ground up — no softness, no mercy. My body became armor. My mind, a blade. I trained until every nerve burned. Every drop of sweat was a promise:never again.

And while my body hardened, my mind followed.

I learned their habits — those parasites in designer skin. The girls who laughed while Billie cried. The ones who made cruelty fashionable. I memorized everything: who drank what, who locked their doors, who didn’t. The details that made them human. The details I’d use to undo them.

Then there was her — the queen.

The one who went to Billie’s grave every Sunday like she was confessing. Kneeling in silk, crying crocodile tears over the body she helped destroy.

I watched her from the trees. Every word. Every tremor. Every lie.

And for a moment, I almost believed she cared. Almost.

Then I remembered Billie’s last call.