Jace

“Mina—”

“I want to meet your family this weekend,” she continued, steamrolling over my protests. “Sunday dinner. That’s perfect, isn’t it? We can all sit down together like a real family. Your father, your stepmother, Celeste, me, and you. We’ll eat and talk and laugh, and they’ll see how perfect we are together.”

The image she painted was so absurd, so nightmarish, that I almost laughed. Sunday dinner with my family, where my father was secretly planning to murder his wife, where Celeste and I were hiding our own dirty little secret, and where Mina would sit there, delusional and dangerous, threatening us all.

“I’ll think about it,” I...