Chapter One
Seraphine
There are three rules to staying alive when you’re already dead inside.
Trust no one, become invisible, and don’t let the past drag you back to hell.
“You look familiar.” The man behind the grocery counter studied me closely. His gaze slid from the snow still clinging to my coat to the black scarf tied around my neck.
Apparently, I was already failing at rule number two.
I handed him a wad of cash for my groceries. I didn’t offer anything else. Not where I was staying, not why I was traveling through a blizzard in upstate New York by myself, and not why my hands shook when he leaned in too close across the counter.
He counted the bills slowly, his tongue darting out to wet his fingers. I didn’t miss the curl of his lip as his eyes dropped, not to my face, not to the list in my hand, but to the curve of my chest beneath my thick layers.
Creep.
I knew exactly how this conversation would go if he recognized me. “Oh, you’re that girl. The one who survived. What was it like to die? What’s Barbara Walters like?”
Surviving attempted murder by a masked serial killer was the most interesting thing about me. Right up there with my sparkling conversation skills and my tendency to flinch at unexpected noises.
I’d spent six years trying to recover from being America’s favorite victim. It was a lot harder than you’d think. There should be some type of manual. So You Survived a Serial Killer: Now What? “Chapter One: Learn how to stop hyperventilating when you hear someone humming.”
“So, where you from then?” he asked, his tone accusing, as if I’d offended him by not taking his bait.
“Hell.” I smiled without showing teeth and grabbed my grocery bags.
The cold air hit my face like a slap, the door swooshing closed behind me. The snow was coming down in white waves, and I ducked my head as I shuffled back to my car. My hands were nearly frozen as I dumped my groceries into the back seat and slammed it shut.
The GPS had gone out an hour ago, but the cabin I’d rented was just another ten miles. On any other day, it would have been a twenty-minute drive. But in this blizzard? I’d be lucky if I got there in three hours.
I hadn’t been back to the Adirondacks in six years. Not since everything happened. These mountains had once felt like freedom during my college years. Now they were like a tomb I was willingly crawling back into.
I turned up the volume on my favorite true crime podcast, Crimson and Ash. My best friend Emmeline’s voice soothed me through the speakers even as she discussed the psychology of a killer who posed his victims with their eyes wide open.
Unfortunately, I knew all about corpses with open eyes. I’d been one, for two minutes and thirty-three seconds, according to a doctor who wouldn’t stop talking as he stitched my throat back together.
I gripped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles turned white.
The storm was picking up fast, snow covering my tire tracks mere seconds after making them.
The road wound higher into the Adirondack Mountains, the forest so dark it was almost impossible to see.
I shouldn’t be on this road. Hell, I shouldn’t have even been alive.
They called me a miracle. An icon for survivors all around the world. Seraphine Ashford, the lucky one. As if surviving had been a choice. Like I’d met Death himself and said, “No, thanks, I’ll take the lifetime of therapy and destructive behavior instead.”
Lucky, my ass.
Christ, if this was luck, I’d hate to see what bad fortune was like.
People didn’t know what it was like. They didn’t see the nights I woke up screaming from nightmares.
They didn’t see the times I scrubbed my hands raw, convinced I could still feel Courtney’s blood on them.
They didn’t know I’d been forced to finish college online because when I’d tried to go back to class, all I could hear were the screams of my dead sorority sisters.
They didn’t know I’d spent the last few years fulfilling the bucket lists of five dead girls like it would bring them peace.
Bring me peace.
Newsflash: it hadn’t. None of it had. If anything, it made my nightmares worse.
My hand instinctively went to the charm bracelet on my left wrist, tracing over the tiny metal pieces: a camel, the Eiffel Tower, a cupcake, a music note, a bird, and a castle.
Each represented a dream that belonged to someone else, our bucket list that we’d planned to do after college. Only they never got the chance.
So, one by one, country by country, I’d done it for them. I’d bought the tickets and taken the pictures. Signed their names on postcards and thrown them into the ocean. I’d screamed, I’d cried, I’d carved their names into a tree at each location. I’d done everything they never got to do.
Turned out living someone else’s dream didn’t make you feel less dead inside. And the only way I was going to reclaim my life was to face the darkness. Even if it cost me everything.
Emmeline’s voice faded in and out through my cell phone, choosing the worst possible moment to die.
She’d been my lifeline since the trial, and the only person who knew where I was headed.
She’d tried to talk me out of coming back.
“Going back to the actual town where you were almost murdered? That’s literally the opposite of what every survival expert says to do. ”
Of course, I’d left out the part about using myself as bait for a serial killer. If the real killer was going to find me anywhere, it would be here. Where it all began.
There was a blur of movement, so fast I slammed on the brakes, making the car skid slightly. A deer stood in the middle of the road, steam coming out of its nose in the frigid air. It stared at me, motionless, unblinking, for one long eerie moment before it ran back into the trees.
The sudden stop made the pile of newspapers on the passenger seat spill to the ground.
SORORITY SLAYING ANNIVERSARY DRAWS NEAR
SORORITY SLASHER STRIKES AGAIN IN CHICAGO
VALEN CREED RELEASED—CITY TO PAY MILLIONS
The article on top was faded from the numerous times I had read it, coffee stains making the ink bleed. It didn’t matter though; I’d already memorized it six months ago.
Valen Creed walked free after spending five years behind bars for the murders of five sorority sisters at a local Adirondack college.
The case against him, built largely on circumstantial evidence, was overturned after a bloody hunting knife was recovered during a building demolition.
Partial DNA on the handle could not be matched to Creed, raising questions about the original investigation’s compromised scene and contaminated evidence.
Local contractor Creed had been working on renovations at the Kappa Theta sorority house when the murders occurred.
A retired detective, Mason Parsons, has also been charged with evidence tampering and misconduct in connection with the case.
The state has issued a formal apology and a substantial settlement.
Valen Creed.
The name that had haunted me for six years.
In court, he was the one I’d pointed at with a shaking finger. The man I’d been convinced by Detective Parsons was the monster who’d turned my sorority into a slaughterhouse.
But in my dreams, the monster never had a face. Sometimes it wore a mask with the same awful, hollow eyes staring through me. Sometimes it twisted into Valen’s features. Sometimes it was me. And, even worse, sometimes it was one of my sorority sisters with their mouth open screaming.
Detective Parsons had been so sure. So convincing. “Look at the photo again, Seraphine. This is the man we arrested. He was the contractor in your house that day. The scar matches what you described. Dark hair, scar on the cheek. This is him, the monster who hurt you.”
The cops had questioned me for hours, even though I had a concussion. Showed me a folded photo of Valen and his scar over and over until I started to wonder if maybe I did remember seeing him standing over me.
But I’d told them I hadn’t been able to make out the killer’s face.
Dark hair and a scar. That was it. That was all I could describe besides the creepy mask.
Parsons insisted it was Valen. “Think harder, Seraphine. You survived for a reason. Help me put this monster away.”
Then the DA had pressured me into testifying, saying I could save so many other girls. They kept going on and on about the contaminated crime scene, the lack of DNA evidence, and how my testimony was all they had.
So I agreed to testify, but I hadn’t lied. I’d told the jury exactly what I’d told the cops—that I couldn’t identify exactly who attacked me. The DA had given me a seething look when I’d stuck to my story. I’d never said Valen Creed was the killer, but I’d never said he wasn’t either.
Because I didn’t fucking know.
But apparently, “I don’t know” isn’t good enough when everyone wants justice served.
The jury convicted him anyway.
His life gone. Because I survived but couldn’t remember, and everyone else needed someone to blame.
Now there were too many unanswered questions. Fingerprints that didn’t match. A knife found years too late in a demolished building. A confession of planted evidence by Parsons.
And I was the star witness who’d helped send an innocent man to prison while the real killer walked free.
Talk about a twist nobody saw coming. Well, except maybe the real killer. In the end, I was wrong when it mattered the most. And it hadn’t just broken me. It made me the villain in someone else’s story. Every memory was twisted, and every nightmare a lie.
But that wasn’t what mattered now. Because if Valen Creed was innocent, then the real killer was out there. Probably laughing in that disturbing way of his at the woman who’d survived just long enough to ruin the wrong man’s life, then run away.
But I wasn’t running anymore.