Hush

It was revenge.

That’s why she escaped.

That drunken kiss with Maddox had shocked her back into her feral state. It had highlighted her purpose. Because once she got inside her apartment, once Maddox had respectfully stepped away from her and bid her goodnight, she’d been sickened. She wanted to tear apart her skin because she didn’t want its filth touching his. In that moment, she was certain, no matter what April or the shrinks said, she’d never have a first kiss again.

Maddox had been the first boy to kiss her. And he would be the last.

She spent that night in a state of confusion, torn between the feeling of his lips on hers, and the life of the best friend she still mourned. Orion could still feel Jaclyn’s presence, could still hear her sometimes too. Jaclyn had not faded away as Orion had secretly hoped. She haunted Orion, moved her toward revenge, toward bloodshed.

Orion wiped her glistening eyes, grabbed her computer, and went to work.

She had a lot to think about, to research. To consider. There was the location, for example. The easiest place for her would be his home. She’d been watching it for a while now. For as long as she had her license, her Range Rover fit in on the street, so no one even looked twice at her. She knew when his wife and children weren’t there, and when he was. Had memorized everyone’s schedules. There was a window of time when his wife was meeting with her personal trainer and the child was at some kind of sports practice. There were no street cameras that she could see, and interstate access within five miles. She would remove her plate, just in case, and find another. A plate from a random car would do. She’d switch them out and toss it when she was finished. As long as she was driving the speed limit and obeying traffic laws, no cop would waste time running the plate.

It should’ve bothered her. His wife. His child. The family she’d be ripping apart. It should’ve bothered her, but it didn’t. She had put herself in his wife’s shoes. Did she know she was living a filthy lifelong lie? She imagined the woman doing the deed herself if she knew. Or maybe she was one of those Stepford Wives, who knew but ignored it. In that case, the punishment of a broken family seemed more than fair.

Though she didn’t care about the repercussions his death would have on the family, she decided that night that she wouldn’t do it in the house. She couldn’t subject the child to such carnage. And carnage is what that motherfucker was going to face. Besides, it was too risky. Too many things could go wrong. Cameras likely in every corner of the house. The kid could get sick, sprain her ankle. The wife could decide to stop screwing the personal trainer. An unexpected visitor could stop by for a coffee. Too many people had the possibility to get caught up in it. Turn into witnesses, victims. No, she needed to do this quickly and on the street. Somewhere dark and desolate like the place she was taken from, or the place where she spent so many years of her life.

She fell asleep with the computer in her lap and evil thoughts running through her brain.

Orion had only meant to watch him.

This was only meant to be another surveillance exercise. She still hadn’t organized the right location. She had already figured out how to navigate the Dark Web, and she’d also spent hours making sure her movements and IP address could never be traced to her.

It was interesting, how quickly she was picking up all of these nefarious skills. She wondered if it was something in her nature, something dark, that had always been lurking inside her. Like fate. Like what she had told April about that night over tequila. Something lurking in her veins. In her genes.

Or maybe it was just the burning need for revenge. She needed to learn this stuff quickly in order to get what she craved.

It didn’t quite matter why she was good at this stuff, why she understood it, it just mattered that she did it.

Because she was good at it, she knew that time was important. The Dark Web, she discovered, was full of dark things. You could hire a hitman, but she wouldn’t contract out her revenge. You could find fake documentation—which she had done in case things went bad and she had to disappear. You could order drugs—which she didn’t do, for obvious reasons. You could even order women, and that made her furious. That made her feel like that little girl with the chain on her ankle again.

Orion had tried to track these sites and the people on them, tried to get any kind of information. But her skills were rudimentary at best, and it was obvious this was an organized and sophisticated network. She could waste hours in front of a computer trying to find a scrap of information, or she could take what she had and do something with it.