No Home for Killers

Someone killed her.' A quick inhalation. 'Are you sure? Maybe it was a heart attack or something?' 'Only if her heart attacked her face.

Death is the opposite of desire,

Melinda should have been spared. Married Rick. Lived on beyond the disgraces of Markus and Emily, had children, kept a watchful eye on them to make sure they didn’t turn out like her siblings.

All this money, and you can’t buy a fucking ounce of decency.” “You don’t even know me.” “Let’s see . . . a women-beating drunk who sleeps with abused women and no amount of money can ever change him. Is that close?

Used to poverty and loneliness and callous men and the lingering threat of James.

She barely made enough to cover her rent and food, not to mention her truck payments and a pair of insurmountable credit card bills. Often Dani felt like her debt was a giant chasing her, his footsteps smashing the land.

Melinda’s mind flashed back to Rick calmly telling her, just hours ago, that they would be okay. That there were more good people than bad in the world. And she looked at the fear consuming David.

My father’s pushing everyone away and living in depression and isolation. My sister’s going to get herself killed. I just sabotaged my own future.

You can’t handle it,” Markus said distantly. “They chose me. Mom and Dad chose me. Jessy chose me. Everyone chose me. And now these women are choosing me. Instead of you.” “Those women are hurt.” “They’re mine.

You’re not even here for Mom. You’re here because you’re pissed off that I caught you and almost showed the world who you really are.

I made it, and you’re nothing. And you were always the smart one. You were always the good kid. You loved making me and Em look bad. Now you can’t stand that one of us is doing better than you.

She did it too much, of course, to a dangerous level of avoidance and lack of self-awareness. But, right now, Melinda felt it was a better defense mechanism than anything she had.

Isabel thought about Victor’s voice over the phone, the damage to his eye. Anger flashed like lightning. “My name is Isabel. And whoever did this is going to pay, and pay dearly.

Of course she is,” Isabel snapped, continuing the push. “I wasn’t waiting for proof. She’s a dangerous, delusional criminal.

As Isabel had expected, Melinda was taken aback. People didn’t do well with a sudden deadline, even one arbitrary or artificial. Subconsciously, they responded to the urgency

You don’t get to decide who’s a hero and who isn’t, Mel. Not after you abandoned all those women.” “I’m sorry?” “All those women, trying to start new lives. And you just stopped working with them.” “You mean when I left social work?

Markus would drink and fume, fuck and beat her. Taunt her about the car accident that had taken her parents when she was a child, left her in the care of her criminal uncle. Tell her that never having a true family was why she didn’t understand his true love.

And her uncle. Determined to control her under a guise of concern. Emotionally distant and secretive but always present.

For all they knew, there could be a group of people called Three Strikes, taking down the Winters family one at a time.

Considered how scared she’d been during her short pregnancy as a warning sign, an emotional hint that their relationship was far more ruinous than she realized. But it was just a thought, different from how she’d felt the other times in her life when she’d firmly ended a relationship with some man. And she’d always firmly ended relationships.

Like a Jackson Pollock painting,” Rebecca said, “but with words instead of paint.” “You mean a masterpiece?” Emily cried out delightedly.

It reminded Melinda of the day after the 9/11 attacks, when people overwhelmingly, unironically, loved each other.

There was something wrong about this, unforgivable, about choosing sin after someone had been murdered. Melinda knew it as she showered, as she applied her makeup and dressed and examined her face in the mirror.

He would live, and Emily’s father would use what connections he had to help her avoid jail or any long-term consequences, but she was never allowed back to that campus. Or back into Crystal’s life.

This life was something that had seemed destined for Melinda. A handsome partner, upper-middle-class living, a pair of nice cars, the American fairy tale. Emily and Markus were different.

The kind of home single men often lived in, one in desperate need of personality.

Emily felt so disconnected from the small Central American country she shared blood with, the language she used to know so well fading like the feeling of a last kiss.

Running advertising campaigns on websites, placing relevant tweets and Facebook posts whenever the organization had a notable success, assisting with public relations and media inquiries and drafting press releases and other repetitive tasks.

After everything she was going through to help these women, everything that had haunted her career, now to discover that Markus had used her to find and seduce vulnerable women . . .

Depression was starting to overwhelm her, like a vulture perched over her body, its beak digging into her soul.