Dead Girls Don’t Forget

Chapter 1 Tonight It Starts

The car was an older-model dark blue Civic with a few dings and faded paint. I rented it at four that afternoon from a lot thirty miles east, using the fake ID Brian had made for me three years ago. The clerk never bothered to look at my face. He stared at his phone the entire time.

I parked four blocks from Colt’s house and sat for two minutes with the engine off. It was a quiet suburban Tuesday at eleven forty at night. A dog barked two streets over and a transformer hummed in the distance, but otherwise the neighborhood stayed still.

The burner phone on the passenger seat showed the live feeds from the living room camera, the kitchen camera, and the bedroom camera. I had installed them weeks earlier while Colt was at the pack compound. He never noticed a thing.

The bedroom feed showed him asleep on his back with his mouth open and one arm flung across the empty side of the bed. Six empty cans stood stacked in a pyramid on the kitchen counter, the kind a man builds when he drinks alone and pretends he isn’t falling apart.

He had cracked the last one at nine ten, dozed off on the couch by ten thirty, and stumbled to bed at eleven fifteen. He had been still ever since.

I closed the app.

I gave the bag one last check. Hunting knife in its sheath, scent neutralizer, gloves with titanium inserts along the knuckles, duct tape, bleach, and a spare shirt at the bottom.

I stepped out and closed the door against my hip so it would not click.

Then I sprayed my throat, wrists, and the soles of my boots.

Any wolf passing through the neighborhood would smell nothing worth noting.

I slung the bag over my shoulder, pulled on the gloves, and started walking. The short distance gave me time to make sure I wasn’t being followed.

Colt’s house was a single story with an attached garage on the right and a basement on the left.

I had been inside twice in the last four weeks, once to map the layout and once to place the cameras.

Every hallway and floorboard was burned into my memory.

The laundry room window catch was broken, and his bedroom sat at the back of the house with the door open when he slept.

I lifted the side gate latch with two fingers.

The yard was unkempt. Beer cans littered the back step beside a cooler full of melted ice. Men like him never maintained what they did not need to see.

Harmony used to weed our garden every Saturday morning.

I let the memory pass.

The laundry room window slid up with a soft scrape of dry wood. I went through it the same way I had twice before, gloved hands first, body folding through the frame before I dropped to the linoleum without a sound.

I stood still for ten seconds in the dark. The refrigerator hummed. The furnace ticked. A faint creak came from somewhere in the settling house. Nothing else moved.

I drew the hunting knife from the bag, slid the sheath onto my belt, and set the bag down by the laundry-room door where I would grab it on the way out. Then I went down the hall and slipped into the bedroom.

He hadn't moved.

I stood at the end of the bed and looked at him. Weeks of watching him on a screen had not prepared me for the real thing. Up close he looked older, but I knew him immediately.

Colton Harlan. Fifty-two years old. Pack enforcer.

The same nose. The same receding hairline. The same hands that had pinned me down.

For a second I was thirteen again. Smoke filled the air. Screaming echoed in my ears. My mother’s voice cut through it all.

My cougar surged forward, claws scraping beneath my skin.

Not now, I told her.

Colt snorted in his sleep. One hand twitched against the mattress. His brow furrowed.

I moved before he could wake.

The butt of the knife slammed against his temple. His body jerked once, then went limp again. He never woke.

I stood over him and listened. His breathing stayed deep and even. He would be out for several minutes. Maybe longer.

I worked fast. I went back to the laundry room, retrieved the duct tape from the bag, and returned to the bedroom.

After cutting off a length, I pressed it firmly across his mouth.

Just in case. Drunks with head injuries could wake confused, loud, and violent.

I wasn't giving him the chance to shout.

I rolled him into the duvet, tight from shoulders to mid-thigh, feet sticking out the bottom. A human burrito. It would buy me seconds if he woke unexpectedly.

With a grip around his ankles, I dragged him off the bed. He hit the floor with a heavy thud but didn't wake. He weighed roughly two hundred pounds. I weighed one hundred forty-five. The math should have been against me.

It wasn't.

Brian had spent two years adding deadlifts and farmer's carries to my training before he let me do anything else.

He'd made me drag his one hundred ninety pounds across the concrete floor of his workshop dozens of times, until my heart rate stayed under one-twenty.

Every time he reminded me that the men I'd need to move would outweigh me.

I dragged Colt by the ankles down the hall, through the kitchen, and to the open basement door.

Down the basement stairs we went. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. His head bounced off the first step, then the next, then almost every one after that. The blanket softened the blows, but it couldn't silence them.

I dragged him to the center of the basement and let his ankles drop.

The basement was windowless. Concrete walls stood bare except for a few stacked boxes in one corner. A water heater sat in the back. A single bare bulb hung on a chain that I did not turn on. The only light spilled through the open door at the top of the stairs.

It was quiet. Isolated. Perfect.

I stepped back into the shadow of the stairwell and waited.

That was the problem with knocking someone out. You had to wait for them to wake, and the hits to the head on the way down probably had not helped.

I watched him. A monster wrapped in a duvet. Someone who preyed on girls who never stood a chance. Someone who had laughed.

Harmony had been sixteen. She liked terrible reality television and made chocolate chip cookies that came out softer than they should have. She sang in the shower. She was supposed to have a whole life.

I had been thirteen.

My hand settled around the knife grip as I waited.

After a long time he moaned. The sound came up muffled against the tape.

He twisted inside the blanket, fighting the thick duvet. His arms were pinned tight. For a few seconds he could not find his hands.

One hand finally broke free. He ripped the duct tape off his mouth in one wild yank, taking some of his lip with it. He gasped and coughed. “What the hell…”

The other hand came loose. He shoved and kicked until the wrap loosened, then rolled onto his stomach and pushed up onto his hands and knees.

He swayed there, head down. Then he sat back on his heels, breathing hard, eyes adjusting to the dark.

I covered the distance before he could focus on me.

The blade flashed once across the back of both calves before he registered the motion. Deep enough to sever the major tendons. Shallow enough to miss the artery.

He screamed and collapsed face down, clutching at his legs as blood pooled beneath him. With a groan he lifted his head. His eyes darted wildly until they found me.

“What the hell. Who are you, you fucking bitch—”

I tilted my head, stepping closer, trailing a finger along the blood-stained blade.

“Now, now,” I said softly. “That’s no way to speak to a lady.”

I smiled.