Queen of Quarantine (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep #4) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,220

in a clothes store, I came to speak with you both. To see if you remembered me, to see what kind of people he’d raised you to be. You were ten and Josie was thirteen.”

“That’s not her name,” I snarled, hating that her story sounded vaguely familiar. I remembered my dad making us leave that town when I’d really wanted to stay. Having to leave my friend Elle behind without any notice. Had he known Karen had tracked us down? “Her name was Jessica.”

She waved a hand dismissively, irritation flashing in her eyes. “The two of you were riddled with your father’s influence. He hadn’t brought you up how I’d hoped. You were just pawns of society, just like every other child in the United States.” She sneered in disgust, raising the gun a little and making me shift in my seat. “I knew then it was too late to save you from him, that you’d always see me as the big bad wolf. Your father ruined you both and then he went and killed one of you.” She shook her head in irritation.

“Don’t you speak about him like that,” I snapped, my blood heating. “He was trying to protect us. That was all he ever did.”

“Oh yes,” she said mockingly. “I saw how frightened he was. I had my people watch him for a while, teaching you all of that prepper nonsense. And do you know why he did that?” She stepped closer, gazing down her nose at me. “Because he was afraid of me. Of what I was capable of. Of my power.” She said the final word with reverence in her tone and it made me hate her with a fierce passion. “He had seen behind the curtain. He knew that the world could fall at any moment because of my inventions and those of my friends. So he tried to prepare you and your sister for the end of days. He made you afraid. He made you weak. He vaccinated you against any virus he could just in case that was the one that ended up out in the world. If you’d been at my side, on the side of the real power, you would never have been afraid a day in your life.”

“My dad did not make me weak,” I hissed. “He made me strong. Far stronger than you.”

She tsked. “You know nothing of real strength. I have the whole country on puppet strings. I can make the great fall and the small rise. I am a goddess, Adriana. And you could have been one too.”

I stood from my seat with my teeth bared and Karen raised the gun to aim it between my eyes. “I told you not to use that name,” I warned. “I’m Tatum Rivers. The daughter of Donovan Rivers. I’m not yours, I’m his.”

“Sit down and listen to me,” she barked. I hesitated before complying, the darkness in her eyes telling me she really would pull that trigger if she had to. And I was no good to my boys dead. “That wasn’t even his real name you sad fool. So if you’re his then you belong to a dead man with a fake identity,” she laughed coldly and my breaths came frantically, though I was too proud to demand to know his real name. Because it didn’t matter. He was my dad. He was Donovan just like I was Tatum and Jess was Jess. We were the Rivers family, and this bitch was not a part of it.

“He’s dead because of me, you know?” she went on with a triumphant smile on her face and pain and rage spilled through my chest. I said nothing, containing my emotions as Dad would have instructed, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. I’d let her talk until I had that gun and was planting six bullets in her skull. “I set him up, I had the Apollo Company send him a letter to offer him a job there – a company that I own. I’d been working on a virus which would make an exceptional bioweapon. One that would wipe out the weak and allow the strong to rise. But when your father moved close to the California lab, I saw an opportunity for revenge against him. He accepted of course, considering the high salary included in the package, but then the dumb schmuck went and gave you a half-cocked vaccine for the damn Hades Virus years later.”

Her whole face screwed up