Page 113 of Reaper and Ruin

A woman who’d taken her first life and suddenly realized why they liked it.

Whip’s forehead furrowed. His gaze skipped from X to Levi, and then back to me. “Vi, sweetheart. Give me the knife.”

I didn’t want to. Couldn’t.

I stepped over Travis’s bleeding body and slammed it blade first into my foster mother’s chest. Over and over. Until it was a pulpy, disgusting mess.

And then I did the same to the man slumped beside her.

It didn’t matter to me that they were dead long before.

“I hate you,” I whispered while I stabbed them. Travis’s blood smeared my face. The stench in the room was overwhelmingly vile, but I couldn’t stop. “I hate you for what you did to me. Always making me feel like shit. Always making me scared.” I glanced down at Travis, his dead, unseeing eyes. “And I hate you for what you did to him. None of us deserved this. None of us deservedyou.”

All the fight went out of me.

And I stared in horror at what I’d done.

“Please don’t hurt us,” the tiniest whisper came from the doorway.

I spun. The knife clattered to the floorboards as my knees crumpled.

And all four of us stared in horror at the two little faces peering up at us.

35

WHIP

“Well, shit.” X shoved his hands on his hips and stared down at the two children. “Guess I’ll go google ‘how to explain murder to minors.’”

I shot him a look, and he pressed his lips together but didn’t make a move toward the kids.

Levi was so frozen it was like his feet were cemented to the floor. “What the fuck do we do now?”

Wasn’t that the million-dollar question?

Violet stood in the middle of the carnage, soaked in blood and shaking, her hand still twitching like it missed the weight of the knife she’d just used to carve open the man who used to be her brother.

She stared up at me helplessly. “I didn’t… What do we…?”

All five of them seemed to be waiting on me for answers. The two kids included.

It had been years since I’d had anything to do with a child. I’d actively avoided them after I’d lost mine, the hurt of seeing other dads with their kids too much for my broken heart to bear. Even now, my stomach rolled at the sight of the boy and girl, who weremuch too close to the ages my children had been when they’d died.

But where my kids had been blond and blue-eyed, these two were dark-haired with the biggest brown eyes I’d ever seen.

I found myself down on my knees in front of them, using a voice I hadn’t used since I’d gotten in a car with my family. and I’d been the only one to walk away from it.

“Hi.” My voice cracked, and I had to swallow hard. “My name is Wyatt. Sometimes people call me Whip though. What are your names?”

They were dirty, hair matted and unbrushed. Despite the late hour, they didn’t wear pajamas. They both had on oversized T-shirts that fell around their knees, and grimy sweatpants that clearly hadn’t been washed in a very long time.

I suspected the kids probably didn’t smell very good, but it was hard to tell with the stench of rotting bodies and blood in the air so thick that it drowned out everything else.

They were roughly the same height, and when they didn’t offer their names, I tried a different question. “Are you guys twins?”

The boy nodded.

I smiled at him. “Let me guess. You’re the oldest, right?”