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B

As the waves tumbled onto the shore and the night air cooled my burning, weary body, the words spilled out of me and onto the notepad like they’d been waiting years just to breathe.

I was dumped on the orphanage steps as a newborn. No note. No name. No date of birth. Just a ratty old blanket wrapped around me. And no details of the bitch who gave birth to me. All I know is that she didn’t want me, and I was abandoned like an unwanted dog.

That’s how my story started.

My first memories start at around five or six.

Angelsong Orphanage was always freezing in winter and blistering hot in summer.

We were herded like cattle to the dining hall three times a day.

You ate everything on your plate—watery vegetables gone cold, rubbery meat.

Or you were force-fed until you finished or threw up.

Making our beds was a ritual of punishment. Corners had to be crisp enough to bounce a coin. Anything less, and you’d do it again. And again. Until your fingers bled or your knees ached from kneeling on the floorboards.

Discipline came with bruises.

And silence.

The showers were the worst. Cold, always cold. Rows of us, stripped bare, standing under the freezing spray while Mrs. Nathan watched from her wooden stool in the corner. Her eyes lingered too long. Always too long.

Even now, the memory of her gaze made my skin crawl.

I paused with the pen hovering above the page as I recalled her death.

Mrs. Nathan begged for her life when I strangled her with a towel.

Her death was brutal, and it took more strength than I thought I had to kill her.

Then again, I was only fifteen, and she was a big bitch.

But I’d caught her by surprise, and once I had her, I wasn’t letting go.

Strangulation took much longer than I expected.

But it was pure poetry that she could watch herself die in the mirrors above the hand basins. That was perfect revenge for all those times she watched us girls shower like she was sizing us up for her own sick pleasure.

Her body is buried near the gardener’s shed.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My first murder was Mr. Fucking Whitmore.

The school principal who thought he was king shit in his tweed vest. He always smelled like pipe smoke and peppermint. The kind of man everyone trusted. Including me.

I was thirteen the first time he took me to his “secret” room. Said he needed help organizing files. Said I was smart. Said he had something special for me . . . a Kit Kat chocolate.

He violated me more times than I could count in that room.

He called it our little secret. Said I was his special girl.

I was fourteen when I killed him with a HB pencil.

The same pencils he made me sharpen every time before we “worked.” All perfectly sharp. He liked neatness. He liked control.

His murder wasn’t planned. I still didn’t know what the trigger was. But as he bent me over his office desk, I grabbed a pencil and rammed it into his throat. It slid in easier than I expected. Well, the pencils were sharp, just like he’d instructed me to make them.

He’d looked surprised when I’d stabbed him. Like it had never once crossed his mind that I could fight back. That I could kill him.

There was so much blood.

Mr. Whitmore’s grave was the first one I ever dug. Took me all night.

I glanced out at Alice’s partially dug grave.

That one would take me all night, too. Maybe all day tomorrow. But just like every other grave I’d dug, I would get it done.

Because that was what I did. I got things done.

Whitmore never molested any more little girls after that.

Dragging his body up those stairs had been damn hard, especially since it was the middle of the night and I was trying to be quiet. Lucky for me, the night security guard was too busy screwing the deputy principal at the time. So I didn’t have to worry about him.

Whitmore’s body is also buried in the side paddock behind the gardener’s shed.

I stopped writing and stared out at the moonlit waves. The wind had picked up, rustling the leaves and whispering through the shack’s weathered boards.

I took a long breath. Then I wrote:

My next murder was another teacher, Miss Williams. The bitch who tortured poor little Thomas Wexler.

My heart sagged as I wrote his name down.

I was sixteen when I lured Miss Williams into the laundry room and beat her to death with a metal bucket. She begged for her life, tears pouring down her face. But she never stopped hurting Thomas when he cried like that . . . so she didn’t deserve my mercy.

She, too, is buried behind the gardener’s shed.

The soil was soft there, on account of the gardener using that area for his veggie patches over the years.

The mention of poor Thomas brought me to a group of fucking assholes who had ruined many lives. Especially mine—over and over:

The Kincaid Brothers.

Two of the Kincaid brothers changed their names. You should recognize who they are:

Fred Kincaid – Frank Kingsman

Mark Kincaid – Mason Kingsman

Robert Kincaid

Ryan Kincaid

Henry Kincaid

Fred and Mark kicked Thomas Wexler to death. His body is in an unmarked grave out in the back paddock.

Seven more children buried in that paddock were killed by Fred and Mark.

I racked my brain for the names of those kids. Shelly may have been one. James , too.

Heaving a sigh, I gave up.

I never forgot the names of the bastards I killed, though.

I set the pen down and grabbed the shovel.

The air had turned colder, and the moon was high enough to cast shadows across the grass.

I trudged out to the half-dug grave with the dirt piled high like a scar beside it.

My shoulders ached, and my back screamed with every lift, but I kept going.

A few more feet. Just enough to make sure Alice stayed down.

When the sweat started dripping into my eyes and my back couldn’t take even one more shovelful, I stopped, wiped my face on my sleeve, I headed back to the porch.

“Where were we up to, Alice?” I asked, flipping back a page. I read my last entry aloud. “That’s right. I just told them about those fucking Kincaid brothers.”

Pity they were all dead. Would have been nice to see them get what they really deserved.

The last brother to die was Henry. That was the only good thing those assholes at Alpha Tactical Ops ever did for me. Viper beat the shit out of Henry and put him in a coma he never woke from.

As I tapped the pen against the notepad, thinking, a breeze came off the ocean, lifting the flap on Alice’s tarp, like she was trying to tell me something, and a wave of sadness rolled through me.

“Yes, you’re right, Alice. The next bastard I killed was Graham Watts.”

Graham Watts was a cop.

It was Alice’s first day at the orphanage. He’d brought her in and the fucker was supposed to be protecting her. She had absolutely nobody .

Until I came along.

He still had his pants around his ankles when I put his own gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

That night was a lot of firsts for Alice and me.

First time I used a gun.

First time I met Alice.

First time I didn’t bury the body.

Instead, I wiped my prints off the gun and whisked her away before anyone could find us.

I expected there would be an investigation. A dead cop, shot in the doctor’s office after hours? Should’ve raised alarms.

But there was nothing. No questions. Nobody asked what he was doing there after dark, why his pants were down, why he kept showing up at the orphanage, but never took away any criminals.

That was when Alice and I realized the truth.

Nobody cared about us.

Alice didn’t talk for three days after that.

Not a single word. She just looked out the window from her bunk bed with her knees pulled up to her chest, mind gone somewhere deep inside.

I snuck her food and made sure she drank water.

Sat with her in silence, even when it felt like it was scraping the inside of me raw.

On the fourth day, she said my name.

Just one syllable: “B.”

Like it meant something.

Like I meant something.

That was the day she became mine. Not in a creepy way. Not like those bastards. Mine like family. Like blood. Like the only fucking thing in the world worth protecting.

We made rules. We made plans. We buried the past and built something new . . . something just for us.

For a while, it worked.

And we fell in love.

Yeah. You read that right.

Alice and I were lovers.

Lesbians .

Girls in love, and then women in love. Head-over-heels, screw-what-the-world-thinks, blindly, absolutely in love.

But that was the problem . . . gay love was illegal back then.

We had to keep it secret.

It was shameful. Disgusting. Evil. Like we were the criminals. Us, and not the fuckers who raped or beat us.

“I did it, Alice. We’re out in the open, sweetheart, just like we always wanted . . . to show the world that our love was normal and kind and sweet.”

Well, Alice was the sweet one. And pure. And I would do anything to keep her that way. Including murder.

I returned to the pit, and I was still fucking digging when the sun cracked the horizon in a smear of red and gold.

The earth was fighting back now, clumped and wet, packed tight like it didn’t want me to bury Alice there. My arms felt like they were filled with broken glass. I tried to push myself to go faster, but my body had other plans.

So I stopped. I picked up the notepad again with fingers that wouldn’t stop trembling and sat on the porch steps.

My brain hurt too much from thinking, like it was splintering under the weight of the deepest, rawest sadness I’d ever felt.

So instead of going into great details, I just wrote a quick list of the assholes I’d killed.

I made three columns: Name. What he did. Where the body was. Or if there even was one.

When I couldn’t focus anymore, I dragged myself back out to the grave and dug some more. As the sun crept higher in the sky, the stretches of writing were getting longer. The stretches of digging, shorter.