Page 134 of Reaper and Ruin

I blinked, those words not at all what I had expected her to say. “I didn’t have a mother.”

She snorted and leaned the tip of her gun to the floorboards beneath her feet as she stared down at us at the bottom of the trap she’d laid. “You’re lucky. I unfortunately did.” Her voice turned high-pitched and mocking. “You’ll never keep a man with your hair like that, Francine. Francine, why don’t you put some more makeup on, cover up some of that ugly? Francine, if you just lost some weight, you’d be so much more attractive to men.”

I flinched at the familiar words. I might not have had a mother, but I’d had a foster mom who had said much the same things. “I know what—”

Francine cut me off with a sharp laugh. “Don’t tell me you know what that feels like, Violet. You have so many men falling all over you, you can’t even keep up.”

I nodded, not stupid enough to argue with the woman with the gun, who clearly didn’t want to hear the truth. “Skinny girls are what men want, Francine,” she mocked. “Not girls who look like they could eat a man whole.”

If I hadn’t been lying at the bottom of an oversized coffin, I might have felt sorry for her. Her mother sounded like a piece of work. “She shouldn’t have said that to you. It’s not true.”

But Francine laughed bitterly. “But it is true, Violet. You don’t know it yet, but they’ll leave. Those men, they’ll leave you. No matter what you do.” Her eyes darkened. “I did everything. Everything he wanted. And he still left.”

I glanced at Nyah.

Her mouth pulled into a grim line; her gaze trained on that gun in Francine’s hands.

I didn’t know what to do, other than to keep her talking. To give the guys time to find me.

Because unlike whoever Francine was talking about, I knew my guys were never leaving. The realization, the strength of that knowledge, fueled me, pushing away some of the fear.

I wasn’t that girl back in Paul Jeddersen’s house on Olympic Drive. I wasn’t the girl in the warehouse. I wasn’t the girl on the bluffs.

I wasn’t alone.

They would come.

“Who left, Francine?” I asked, voice clear and strong.

She stared at me. “Paul. I sent him girls. Watched him have sex with them. Watched him…” She shook her head. “I did everything he wanted, and he still left.”

My blood ran cold. “You sent me to Paul Jeddersen’s house, knowing he was going to rape and kill me?”

Francine shrugged. “You. Elizabeth. The women before. I kept their bodies for him. But it was never enough, was it? He always wanted more.” She sniffed. “I just wanted him.”

Bile rose in my throat, anger stirring up from deep inside me. That same anger I’d felt the night I’d killed Travis. “He didn’t leave you,” I hissed. “We murdered him.”

In reality, it had been X’s kill, but in the moment, it didn’t feel like it mattered.

Francine pointed the gun at me. “You think I didn’t know that? You think I didn’t watch the entire thing happen? You took him from me, Violet!” She laughed bitterly. “So I took something from you.”

“Toby,” I supplied for her.

Francine nodded. “With a bit of help. I wanted to go after all of you. Everyone who was there that night. Everyone who helped cover up Paul’s murder. Everyone who had ever meant anything to you. I knew all about your men and their little murder squad. They laid it all out for me, all the details of the list. I have it all on the fucking nanny cam Paul made me watch through.”

My stomach twisted at the thought of someone having video of X killing a man in cold blood in the most violently brutal way. “Why not just go to the police and have him arrested?”

“Because you were all to blame!” She pointed the gun at me again. “You most of all, you slut. But if I’d taken that footage to the cops, they would have said, oh poor Violet. Wouldn’t they? And you would have walked away, scot-free!”

I didn’t understand her twisted ramblings. The lies she’d let herself believe.

“I was a victim, Francine.” I cleared my throat. “Maybe you were too.”

“No, don’t try to make me feel sorry for you. You were a slut, with your pretty blond hair and big blue eyes. I saw the way he stared at you. Saw the way he stripped your clothes and touched your body.”

My skin crawled at the memory. “He attacked me. I didn’t want him.”

“But I did,” she said miserably. “I wanted him, and you took him from me. So I have to take everything away from you. I zoomed in on the footage of your little list, made out as manynames on it as I could, and then tracked them all down. Offered them all a bribe to take you all out, one by one. Not that I had to incentivize them much, considering they weren’t too happy to hear they were targets themselves. They were more than happy to turn the tables and come for you. I just added some theatrics to the game, writing rhymes, making sure you knew you were being hunted.”