Page 1 of 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.