Chapter 1

The last thing I remembered was the screech of tires on hot asphalt.

Then, the sickening crunch of metal and the world turning upside down.

I remembered the suffocating smell of gasoline and my own blood.

Most of all, I remembered my father' s face just before we left, his smile a tight, ugly thing.

He had murdered me.

Frank, my father, had sabotaged our car to kill my mother and me on a lonely desert highway.

All for our kidneys.

He had an illegitimate son, Leo, with his mistress, Jessica. The boy was dying, and we were the unwilling donors.

My father, the man who was supposed to protect me, had planned to have me carved up for parts.

I gasped, my eyes flying open.

I wasn't on the highway. I was in my cramped bedroom, the cheap floral wallpaper mocking me.

The morning sun streamed through the window.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand. It was a text from my dad.

"Morning, sunshine. Get ready. Big day! Vegas, here we come!"

My blood ran cold. It was today. The day I died.

I wasn't dead. I was back.

A wave of nausea hit me, but it was quickly replaced by something else, something cold and hard and sharp.

Rage.

I wasn' t the same naive 19-year-old anymore. I was a ghost with a score to settle.

I got out of bed, my movements stiff.

Downstairs, my mother, Sarah, was humming in the kitchen, making pancakes. She was a kind, gentle woman who had spent twenty years believing in a man who despised her.

She saw his resentment as stress from his dead-end construction job. She saw his coldness as fatigue.

She was blind.

"Morning, sweetie," she said, her smile warm and genuine. "Excited for our trip?"

"Thrilled," I said, my voice flat.

Frank walked in, ruffling my hair. I flinched away from his touch. His hand felt like a spider on my skin.

"What's wrong with you?" he grunted, his good-mood facade already cracking.

"Just a headache," I lied.

He looked at my mother. "Is she always this moody?"

Sarah just offered him a plate of pancakes, her smile faltering slightly. "She's just tired, Frank. It's a long drive."

He grunted again and started shoveling food into his mouth.

I watched him, this man who had resented every dollar spent on me, every moment of attention my mother gave me. He saw us as the anchors weighing him down, the reason he was a construction foreman and not something more.

And all the while, he had another family. A secret one he was willing to kill for.

I remembered the crash. I remembered the pain.

This time, there would be no crash.

This time, they would be the ones to feel pain.