Chapter 1

I've always been a bad kid.

When I was eight, the boy sitting next to me threatened to tell the teacher I'd copied his homework.

I shoved him down the stairs from the second floor.

He broke three ribs.

When I was twelve, the school dorm supervisor confiscated the snacks I'd hidden in my locker.

That night, I cut the brake cable on her electric bike.

The next morning, she lost control going downhill, crashed into a ditch, and needed seventeen stitches.

Then, when I turned eighteen, my biological parents finally found me and brought me back to their wealthy family.

Everyone in the city knew Richard and Margaret Whitmore as famous philanthropists.

People said a couple like them could surely straighten out a bad kid like me.

Instead, on my very first night in their house, they pinned me down in a surgical chair in the basement and started drawing bag after bag of my blood.

They said it was for the daughter they'd raised for eighteen years.

Claire.

I didn't say a word.

When the nurses changed shifts, I got my hands on one of the blood bags prepared for her, poured hot pepper liquid into it, sealed it back up, and returned it to the medical cooler exactly where I'd found it.

The next day, Claire received the transfusion.

She went straight to the ICU.

That was the last straw for my parents.

That same night, they tied me up and drove me deep into the mountains.

Richard shoved me out of the SUV.

"This is Black Hollow! Everyone here is a killer or some kind of criminal!"

"An ungrateful little bitch like you won't last three days in there. They won't even leave enough of you to bury!"

Margaret rolled her eyes from the passenger seat.

"When you finally learn your lesson, admit you're wrong, and beg us to take you home so you can keep giving Claire blood, then this ends."

Richard kicked me away from the car.

I landed on the gravel and looked at the familiar dirt road ahead of me.

Smoke drifted from chimneys in the distance.

I almost laughed.

Did they really never stop to wonder...

where I'd learned to be this bad?