Body Tox (The Bodies duet #1)

Chapter 11

I coughed, pushing away the debris of splintered wood and shattered glass from me.

That fucking woman…

Oddly smiling when I looked at the tornado that my Little Wraith left in her wake gave me with a feeling of…pride? The door was completely destroyed. The crater-size hole in its center bent it forward, giving it a warped appearance of an eerie smile.

“Where, oh where, did you go after your tantrum?” I said, dusting myself off and following the trail left behind of tiny blood droplets and dust from the wood.

A booming voice sounded from some unknown location in the damn labyrinth of a house, and I ducked into the corner near a plant that seemed to have its own damn room.

Rich people gave a single plant a room bigger than my house growing up…good to know.

I thought about the different foster houses I had shuffled through. I didn’t think a single one of them even owned plants because that required them ‘to give a shit about keeping something alive.’

For many, there was no check fat enough for that special breed of human to pretend the living things they ‘cared for’ were thriving.

I rubbed the scar on my wrist. The long-forgotten pink line was still there, but the memory burned as much as the day it happened. The first foster house I had been put in was as wonderful as if I were a sheep being sent to slaughter.

But I’d realized it was a bad situation too late because I’d been ‘picked.’It meant something to be chosen by someone when not a fucking soul in your life gave a damn about you. To feel like I finally mattered overrode any obvious and not-so-obvious red flags.

That feeling was short-lived. As soon as I got there, I realized why I had been chosen over the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed girls with me. I may have been eight, but I could use my scrawny arms to get shit done better than a girl.

These people had a farm, and they needed to get someone to shovel shit, dump feed into cages, and scrub animal pens for hours on my fucking knees. I had basically lived in the barn to keep moose, bears, and foxes from stealing their precious livestock. Thinking back, it was absurd that I’d survived because Alaskan winters were cold as fuck.

However, I learned how to stay alive in the frigid, snow-filled weather really fast. In the summers, I used to soak my clothes in the water troughs to keep cool, and in the winter, I snuck into the house to sleep in the warm laundry room.

During one of those winters, I’d been caught sleeping on the damn floor, which was how I got my scar.

The foster mother screamed when she tripped over me for her husband.

“You’re filthy body is making my floor disgusting,” she said.

The next thing I knew, her husband had thrown me into a china cabinet filled with antique porcelain and crystal glassware. The dishes busted under my body, and the white and blue jagged edges of one of the plates sliced my wrist. That mark had blemished their perfect workhorse, and I had been ripped away from my only friends—the animals in the barn.

I started to learn that the more I ruined my skin and damaged the “property,” the less these assholes wanted to use me.

I had grown up in the orphanage until I was finally booted out at sixteen. Crude tattoos of each of the rejections colored my skin. Some of the images were of a porcelain china bowl, a piece of jagged fence that had surrounded the home, and sharp edges from the other fosters’ little memorabilia littered about the house. It was all there, my story written on my body.

Leaving these marks and freeing myself with the blood spilled was maybe how I ended up becoming downright addicted to the high it gave me.

I had killed for the first time not out of interest but survival. You couldn’t be a teenager trying to break into businesses to escape the brutal end of Alaska weather. A few people were kind enough to pretend I didn’t exist, but others weren’t satisfied until I’d become a human popsicle on the street or beat up by bears attempting to make me into their meal.

It was my third winter on the street when I’d snuck into the house that looked abandoned. I was nineteen and starving. The mass hunting occurring in Alaska was drying up the woods of any viable stock. I had to cull pigs from farms and take the scraps of downed moose left by wolves.

But this place looked safe and dark.

The old lady who found me had scared me so badly that I reacted in pure survival mode. Thinking a bear or wolf got through my entrance in the backboards, I raised my knives and threw them to kill.

There wasn’t even a sound when that woman fell, just a wordless puff of dust pluming around her body.

I realized that day that people were so intent on killing me for nothing, but I had the ability to take them out first. Protecting myself was possible, and living like an animal wasn’t necessary.

I started going from house to house in the upper regions of Alaska, killing the owners that were usually old nothings or hunters themselves, making my way lower and lower to where the winters wouldn’t fucking kill me so easily.

Finally, by the time I reached the age of twenty, I was living in Anchorage. I’d become a fisherman, saved myself some food anytime I could, and spent money on heat at the shack I had found and made my own.

“Bodyguard?” I jerked my head out of the past, the looming man in front of me as red as a tomato. “Where is my daughter?”

I looked back to the storm of wood and glass, and the old man followed my gaze.

“Oh dear, not again.”

Again?

Nice to know I was dealing with a bonafide psychopath then.

“I am pursuing her, Sir Svenson,” I amended, standing in an awkward bow formation the other fucks always did around this man.

“I swear, that girl. She is more trouble than she’s worth. Mark my words, and I will find a facility to take over her care. I am going to die of old age trying to keep her from…herself.”

This man was as bad as my foster ‘rents. He only wanted to use his daughter, and because she wasn’t his ideal perfect robot, she was to be disposed of, so it was out of sight, out of mind to him, him being the hero in the whole fucking thing.

“Sir, if I may, she just lost her friend…her erratic actions may be due to that?”

The man was sniffling, blowing his nose into one of those nasty-ass handkerchiefs they tucked back in their pristine clothes after.

“I can’t do this anymore with her. She doesn’t handle anything like the dignified person I have tirelessly taught her to be.”

I thought about her records, all the paid private tutors for schooling, the etiquette classes, and business lessons. This woman wasn’t raised by her father at all. He was a figurehead in her life, spending all this money to have strangers do his job.

Her mother had died when she was a teenager, and any information on Echo was obsolete when her mother was alive. It was after that death that the warrants, tickets for DUIs, misdemeanors, theft, and assault charges started popping up all over her files. It was weird to feel like this debutante wasn’t all that different than…myself.

Her ‘father’ coughed and straightened. “You go fetch her. I will double your salary. Do as you must, and when you finish take her to this address. I will call with the arrangements.”

Just like that. This man was writing her away from his conscience and heart.

I frowned, reading the unknown address on the note given. For some reason, I got a sense of deja vu, but then again, I knew most of the places in this town.

Was this the corrective housing address?

I could kill this mark too easily. Her father would think she lived a meaningless life in the facility to the bitter end. So much easier than the security that boarded up around her…so why did I feel so strange at the fact she became easy prey?

The man didn’t stick around. Instead, he snapped his fingers and barked for a hoard of cleaning personnel to start erasing any existence that was here. Her room was being emptied and cleared out before my eyes.

Leaning down, I picked up a chunk of her fluorescent pink door. The wood sat in my hand. The last piece of proof this woman ever existed was in my palm.

Pocketing the item, I walked through her room, snatching the laptop and some god-awful stuffed animal that at one time may have been a moose. It was missing both eyes, and its fur was matted so badly that patches of it were gone.

It made sense that the little nut case could love something this ugly.

Shoving the sorry excuse of a stuffed animal in my pants pocket, I walked out of the fake hallways with its fake-ass robots milling around for their fake-ass owner.

I gripped the piece of wood in my pocket, knowing it was time to find this girl and end her miserable life.

Making my way over to Echo’s father, I paused in front of him. The crisp, rich fucking man was barking orders at his slaves. Taking a deep breath, I cracked my knuckles.

Overthinking was the last thing I needed to do for my Little Wraith, and I put every ounce of power I had into punching that old fuck down onto the ground.

The moose fell out of my pocket onto the ground below me.

My Little Wraith’s father’s blood dripped down onto the stuffed piece of shit, but I reached down to pick it up. It hung in my grip, the blood seeping deeper into the matted fur. It took everything I had to ignore it and keep walking. My Little Wraith would want this final trophy from a father she would mourn.

Blood for blood.

I was doing this woman a favor, and I sure wished someone had been there to put a bullet in my head before I’d gotten to this point. Maybe she would be safe from me then to live in her fake ass existence.

Maybe we both would.