With my tray in hand, I dumped the trash into the bin and left the dining room. My heart pounded.
Violence disgusted and fascinated me in equal measure. I hated myself for it. There was no way for me to get away from it.
The marks on my back were already evidence of my absolute hatred of it. My father wasn’t known for his patience and since I was his only daughter, he always made an example of me. Unlike my brother, who was always considered the best thing in the Crane household.
Stepping out into the cold day, I stayed perfectly still.
Would dying from being left in the cold be so bad? In the movies, it never looked painful. I’d rather go out with no pain than to be screaming.
After a few seconds of stillness, I moved, heading toward my next lesson. There were five minutes of lunch left. Teachers rushed past me and I stepped out of their way. The last thing I wanted to do was step in their path. They had a boy to save.
This was what you got at Crude Hill High. There was a time it was a boarding school for our very kind, but there was too much death, leaving the families no choice but to keep the gates open.
On rare occasions, the gates would be locked and it was like a free-for-all. Two years ago, that had happened. Someone had broken the rules and brought a gun. That had ended messy. Mom tried to persuade my dad to send me elsewhere. To let me have a normal life.
No Crane was normal.
We were sharks, thriving to be on top.
The truth was my father craved a place at the four. He wanted to be the fifth shark, but with what I knew, he didn’t have the balls to do what these guys did.
I arrived at English, taking a seat in the back near the window. School sucked. It was boring. Teachers tried to pretend we were like other kids. The ones who weren’t going to be responsible for killing people when we got out of here, but no matter what they tried to tell themselves, it was never going to happen.
We were the enemy. Plain and simple, and if one of them stepped out of line, their lives would be forfeit. It was hard for a teacher to threaten you when you could have them killed at a snap of your fingers. The cops were useless here, so was security footage. Money talked and the more you had, the better it was for you.
My family was wealthy and throughout the years, I’d learned how to take care of myself. I had to. Without it, I’d have been dead in the water long ago.
The English teacher came in. It was Mr. Bucati, who had replaced the previous teacher two years ago. The one before him had been caught sleeping with a student, and seeing as he was supposed to be teaching all the fine arts of literature, and the girl in question was supposed to remain a virgin until her precious wedding night, the previous English teacher was now lying dead in an unmarked grave, at the bottom of the lake, or just plain dead. No one knew, and the girl had also disappeared. This was another precious little detail in our world. We weren’t just shipped off to some foreign place until the scandal died down. Nope, sometimes the girls or the guys were never seen or heard from again.
Keeping your nose clean was more important in this world.
I licked my dry lips, keeping a close eye on the door as one by one, students filed in. To the outside world, we were set up like every other school. Like in the cafeteria, jocks, cheerleaders, the rebels, the nerds, and me, the loner. But the truth was, lower your guard for even a second, and we were all dead.
It was odd to think how many of us actually went here. I don’t have an exact number, but we filled a rather prestigious school. The crooks’ kids. Criminals. Taking over from our families when the time was right.
Since I was a female, my only role, according to my dad, was to get my education so I could marry. I was sure he already had a man who I would hate lined up. Unlike some of the more exclusive mafia types who liked to keep their daughters virginal and completely cut off from the rest of the world, there were those who wanted us to be prepared. For my dad, I was potentially a spy. With a daughter in high school, right in the middle, he could find out who was who. It gave him an excuse to come to my parent-teacher nights. Those were fucking fake. I knew he was fucking my art teacher. I was shit at drawing or painting, but yet, it was a subject I had to take. My mom never came to my parent-teacher nights. She always had to stay home.