Wicked Ruthless (The Elites of Edgewood Prep #1)

Prologue

Run, my mother had said, her voice so calm it terrified me more than the screaming. Hide, baby. Don’t come out until I come get you.

So I ran. Seventeen years old, bare feet slapping on the hardwood, and I ran to my bedroom closet and pressed myself into the corner where the walls met.

I made myself as small as possible. Knees to chest. Gun in both hands the way Daddy taught me at the range—thumbs forward, finger off the trigger until you mean it.

Below me, the sounds of violence I’d spent six years trying to prevent.

Glass breaking. A body hitting a wall. My father’s voice—not words, just sound. Raw and animal. Then my mother, screaming in a register I didn’t know she could reach.

Then nothing.

That silence was worse than all of it. Silence meant someone had lost.

His footsteps found the stairs. Heavy. Deliberate.

Not rushing. Jack never rushed. He was a patient man—I knew that better than anyone.

Patient enough to groom a child for six years.

Patient enough to wait until I finally broke and told my parents before he made good on every whispered threat he’d ever pressed into my ear in the dark.

“Come out, Cat.” His voice drifted through my bedroom door like smoke. Casual. Like he was calling me down for dinner. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

My hands were shaking so badly the gun rattled against my kneecap. I pressed it harder into the bone to stop the sound.

Then—my mother. Somewhere behind him on the stairs, her voice shredded and desperate: “Leave her alone!”

Something in me shifted. Not courage—I want to be honest about that.

It wasn’t bravery that pulled me off that closet floor.

It was arithmetic. Cold, simple math: if I stayed hidden, he would kill my mother to get to me.

He’d already proven he was willing to burn the whole world down.

I could hear it—the first lick of smoke curling under my bedroom door, chemical and wrong.

He’d started a fire somewhere downstairs.

He set the house on fire.

The thought landed flat and factual. No surprise. This was Jack. He always followed through.

I stood. My legs felt borrowed from someone else—numb and mechanical. I crossed the room and opened the closet door. Opened my bedroom door. And there he was.

The hallway was hazy with smoke, and through it, Jack’s silhouette.

Tall. Hands at his sides. That same placid face he’d worn to every town meeting, every parent-teacher conference, every Sunday service.

The face that made people trust him. Behind him, my mother was pressed against the wall, blood running from a gash above her eye.

“There she is.” He smiled. That smile. “All grown up.”

“Let her go, Jack.”

He tilted his head. Studied me the way he always had—like I was something he owned and was deciding what to do with. “You know I can’t do that, Catherine. You went and told, and telling has consequences.”

“You broke your promise first. You said there wouldn’t be other girls.”

His expression didn’t change. That was the thing about Jack—he could discuss the most monstrous things with the mildness of someone commenting on the weather.

“You outgrew your usefulness. That’s how it works.

But you weren’t supposed to be a problem, Cat.

You were supposed to stay quiet, and now—” He gestured around at the smoke thickening in the hallway. “Now look what you made me do.”

Behind his back, I watched my mother inch toward the stairs. I kept my eyes on his. Kept talking. Kept him looking at me.

“This whole town trusted you.”

“This whole town is full of idiots.”

My mother disappeared around the corner. I had seconds, maybe, before he noticed.

I ran.

Not away from him. Past him. Shoulder catching the doorframe as I launched myself toward the stairs, taking them two at a time, the smoke thickening with every step until I hit the ground floor and a wall of heat slammed into my chest like a fist.

The living room was gone. Orange and black, the wallpaper curling off in sheets, the couch a skeleton of wire and flame. I dropped to my knees where the air was still breathable and crawled.

My father was on the kitchen floor. Eyes closed. Blood matting his silver hair. But his chest was moving—shallow, hitching, but moving.

“Daddy.” I shook his shoulder. “Daddy, please.”

His eyes opened. Glassy. Unfocused. “Baby—” A cough racked his body. “Run. Just run.”

“Not without you.”

He was too heavy for me. I knew that. But I hooked my arms under his and dragged, my bare feet slipping on the floor, the heat pressing down like something alive.

I could see the living room window—the one my mother always left cracked because she liked the breeze.

I grabbed a book from the shelf—hardcover, something heavy—and smashed it through the glass.

The night air hit my face. Cold. November cold. I wrapped my hands in my shirt and knocked the shards out of the frame, then dragged my father’s dead weight through the opening. He tumbled onto the grass, and I collapsed beside him, coughing so hard I thought my ribs would crack.

Sirens. Red and blue light already painting the trees. Someone had called. We would be safe. We would—

My mother screamed.

The sound came from inside the house. From the dining room.

I didn’t think. I climbed back through the window.

The fire was worse now—half the ceiling gone, beams sagging overhead like broken ribs. Through the smoke, I found her. Tied to one of the dining room chairs with what looked like the cord from the curtains. Her face was swollen. She was shaking her head before I even reached her.

“No, baby. It’s a trap. He’s—”

The blow came from behind. Something hard and blunt across the back of my skull. My knees hit the floor first, then my palms, and the gun skittered across the tile.

Jack crouched in front of me. Picked up the .38 and turned it over in his hands like he was examining a curiosity.

“You really thought you could shoot me, Cat?” He set the gun on the table, just out of reach, and leaned down until his face was level with mine. “You can barely hold it steady.”

My vision doubled. Tripled. Blood ran warm down the back of my neck. But I could see the gun on the table. I could see the distance. I’d been calculating distances from Jack my entire adolescence—the length of a hallway, the width of a room, how many steps to a locked door.

Three feet.

He was still talking. Saying something about consequences, about how this was my fault, about how none of this had to happen. The same monologue he’d been giving me since I was twelve. The same justifications. The same sickening calm.

I lunged.

My hand closed around the grip. I rolled onto my back. Jack was already moving toward me, that smile finally cracking, something real and ugly surfacing beneath it—

I squeezed the trigger.

The first shot caught him center mass. He staggered. Looked down at his chest like he couldn’t process it. I fired again. He dropped to one knee. The third shot—I don’t remember aiming. I just remember the sound and the way his body folded to the floor and didn’t move again.

The gun fell from my hands. I couldn’t feel my fingers. I couldn’t feel anything except a high-pitched ringing that filled my entire skull and the distant understanding that I had just killed a man and the world was still on fire around me.

“Catherine.” My mother’s voice. Wrecked but steady. “Untie me, baby. We need to move.”

My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. It took three tries to work the knots free. The cord was slick—sweat or blood, I didn’t look. We crawled toward the window, my mother half-dragging me now because my legs had stopped cooperating and the smoke had turned the air into something solid and unbreathable.

A section of ceiling collapsed to our left. We flinched together, pressed flat to the floor, and kept moving. Hand over hand. The window was right there—I could see the flashing lights, hear the firefighters shouting, feel the cold air.

I helped my mother through first. Watched her fall into the arms of a firefighter who was already wrapping a blanket around her. Two more were running toward the window, reaching for me—

The beam came down without warning.

It caught me across the back and pinned me to the floor.

The weight was absolute. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, could only press my face to the tile and feel the heat searing through the back of my shirt and into my skin.

My mother was screaming my name, over and over, and the firefighters were trying to get to me, but another section of roof gave way and they had to fall back.

I tried to move. Pushed with everything I had. The beam didn’t shift.

The fire crept closer. Embers landed on my bare arms, my neck, the exposed strip of skin between my shirt and my waistband. I stopped screaming because there wasn’t enough air left to scream with.

I will not die in this house. Not tonight. Not after everything.

Something cracked above me. I looked up in time to see a second beam split and drop.

I didn’t feel the impact.

I only remember the dark that followed—absolute and total, like someone pulling a curtain across the world. And in that dark, one thought, clear as a bell:

I survived him. Whatever comes next, I survived him.

Then nothing at all.