Revenge (eBook)

DeAnna Channell (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
236 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-0-00-108396-7 (ISBN)

Infos

She was the girl no one believed. Now, she's the woman no one can escape.

Betrayed, broken, and burning for revenge, Lilith Russell hunts those who ruined her life- only to discover she's not the only one keeping score.

The game is rigged. The players are dangerous.

And Lilith is done playing by the rules.

Textauszug

Chapter One: The Man with the Red Solo Cup

The night air in the city was thick with sweat and secrets. Heat clung to skin like a second layer; neon breathed a slow, cheap halo over the wet streets. From inside the club, a bassline thudded like a pulse you could feel behind your teeth. Laughter spilled out in waves, bright and careless, and then folded back into the building, as if the noise itself were a door being shut against something the city didn’t want to hear.

Lilith Russell stepped out into all of it, the door shutting soft behind her. She kept her shoulders steady; her stilettos wobbled only a fraction of an inch when she planted them on the slick pavement. She was not drunk. Adrenaline made the world sharper, edges better defined. Her chest tightened like a fist and the taxi lights smeared past like comets. She had to breathe through it.

She had seen him.

Justin Gamble. The name tasted like iron and salt. It was a hard, shapeless thing that lived in the mouth and would not be swallowed. Two years ago: a house party she could not remember arriving at properly and would never forget leaving. A red Solo cup, a smirk, hands that refused the small syllable of “no.” A man who could turn a bad night into someone else’s ruin and then smile as if charm were absolution.

For a long time after, the memory had been a thing that hovered at the edges of everything she did. The world had not believed her. He’d laughed the next morning, spun a story like cotton candy that everyone was happy to taste. “She climbed into my lap,” he’d said loud enough for friends to hear. “What was I supposed to do?” Those words stuck to her like barbed wire. Her mother had looked away. Friends had smoothed her down, said it was simpler to let the narrative rest. Justin had kept his laugh like a public mask and walked as if nothing needed answering.

She had not forgotten.

Over the months that followed, getting close to him had become an unreachable geometry, a problem she solved with patience and method. She learned his schedule, not out of obsession but because the world had taught her that otherwise men like him kept repeating themselves and the world kept forgiving them. He worked the club’s back room security three nights a week. He collected cash with a dealer’s handshake and thought the street owed him a cloak. He sold pills on the side, small transactions with big consequences. He walked through the city with the swagger of a man who believed his own invincibility was an inheritance.

Tonight he was wrong about that.

Lilith had watched from the shadows for weeks, memorizing, cataloging, timing. She had mapped his exits, counted his cigarettes, learned how he liked to stand when he pocketed the cash. The plan had not been elaborate; it was a single, steady calculus. If justice would not come for her, she would move until it did.

He came out the rear door like always, whistling and blinking the wet from his lashes. The grin he wore split his face into a promise and a threat. He was all bulk and bravado, the kind of man whose gestures read like headlines: loud, readable, designed to draw attention away from everything he wanted to keep hidden.

“Justin,” she said, soft as a folded letter.

He paused; the grin curdled into something like curiosity. “Lilith?” He squinted into the dark, the club’s light backlighting him into a silhouette of self-satisfaction. “Damn, you grew up–”

She did not let him finish.

The knife was small, clean, the kind of instrument you could hide on the inside of your wrist and forget about until you needed it. It slid in with a precision that surprised her own hands. There was a wet crunch, a shock that traveled up the blade and into her teeth. He screamed, not the practiced, performative ejaculation of a man who needed an audience, but a raw, ragged animal noise that made the alley walls answer back.

He fell.

His hands clawed at the wound, slick with bright red. For the first few seconds, there was a scramble of limbs and a flailing attempt at control. He tried to stand; the leg that had been robbed of its strength betrayed him. He collapsed like a marionette with its string cut.

“What the fuck?!” he shouted, eyes wild, panic blooming like algae. “You’re–fucking insane!”

“Maybe,” Lilith said, crouching beside him. Her voice was calm, flat as a blade. The moon glinted off the knife’s edge. “But this?” She let the word hang. “This is justice.”

She raised the knife again, because she could not trust the city to hand him time to think.

Then the world stopped.

Not metaphorically. Not the way late-night metaphors narrators use to dress up feeling. It stopped so cleanly that breath froze in her throat and the phosphorescent sweat on Justin’s temple hung in the air like beads of memory. The distant bassline held one single note and then ceased. The hum of the street, the hiss of tires, a laugh from two blocks over, everything folded into an uncanny stillness.

A cold wind brushed the alleys, but it carried no sound. Something ancient and patient moved into the space between heartbeats and filled it.

He stepped from the shadow as if he had always been there, as if the alley had been waiting for him to appear. He was wrapped in black that drank the light and left nothing behind. He moved with the slow certainty of weather; his presence had the inevitability of a sentence read aloud. Eyes like dying stars stared out of a face that was both too old and ageless. When he spoke, his voice was the creak of old wood and midnight rain.

“Interesting,” he said.

Everything in Lilith’s body recognized the name before her mind did. There are some archetypes that register in the bones: endings, edges, the thin sound that warnings make. This was one of them.

“Who the hell are you?” she asked, more curiosity than fear.

“Death,” he said simply. “Azrael. But I like ‘Death.’ Has a nice finality to it.”

She laughed short and ugly. “I’ve lost it,” she breathed. “I’ve finally lost it.”

“No,” he said, and the word arrived without pity. “But you are lost. Or maybe… you’re finally finding your purpose.”

Justin whimpered; his voice came out like a small animal’s. He was still alive and near to certain terror. Death moved with the soft inspection of someone who has cataloged the end of things for a very long time. He looked at Justin the way a curator looks at some flawed antiquity: with an air of analytical distance softened by a weight of history.

“This one is yours,” he said to Lilith. “Would you like some help, Lilith Russell?”

Her name from his mouth felt like a binding. She did not ask how he knew it. She did not ask how he knew the small, private things that made up the shape of her life. Those questions felt small in that moment, like querying the sky about weather.

“I’ve wanted to do this for years,” she said. The words had a kind of consecration to them, iron and salt and something that tasted like promised relief.

“Then allow me to make it easier.”

Power slid into her like frost and lightning at once. It did not announce itself with fireworks. It was an old, surgical thing: cool along the edges, sharpening the world into clean lines. Her heartbeat stilled. Her hands stopped trembling. The fear she’d carried for two years rearranged itself into something else.

The second strike was precise. She found his throat with a motion that was more elegy than violence, and Justin Gamble choked once, eyes widening with disbelief as if the world had changed the rules without warning. Then he was still; the alley held him as if it had always been meant to keep such small, quiet things.

The moment his breath left him, something inside Lilith shifted. It was not a monster sprouting in the dark. It was subtler: a shadow that had always been a shape waiting to fill a vacancy. Not evil, not sweetness, a toolset. She felt it like a new muscle memory in her bones, clean and precise and terrible in its usefulness.

Death stood and smoothed his cloak with the quiet manners of a man who tidies up after storms. “How do you feel?” he asked.

Lilith stared at the blood, at the body, at the small, finalness of what she had done. For a long moment she could not find the word.

“Alive,” she whispered.

“That’s the paradox, isn’t it?” The corners of his mouth moved minutely; amusement, sorrow, and an authority older than law threaded through it.

Another figure stepped out of the stillness behind him, and Lilith’s rigid surprise cracked into a laugh that surprised even her. He was more boy than man: soft features, a crooked grin, and eyes that assessed like inventory. He wore jeans and a hoodie and held a taser like it was a travel mug. He had the fragile glamour of someone who works nights and knows how to keep secrets.

“She’s cute,” he said, the shrug of the line casual as a stage note. “Is she staying?”

“This is Lucas,” Death said. “My assistant. He’ll help you. Think of him as your partner-in-revenge.”

Lucas smirked. “More like your gay sidekick with fashion advice and a taser.” He gave Lilith a once-over and then a quick, almost tender gesture toward her shoes, where blood dotted the leather like a bruise.

Despite the gravity of what had just occurred, Lilith laughed. It bubbled out of her, thin and bright and raw. It was the first honest sound that had lived in her in months.

The blood on her hands gleamed in the moonlight, a small planet complete in its own way. It did not feel like absolution; it felt like...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 17.10.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
• ISBN-10: 0-00-108396-1 / 0001083961
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-108396-7 / 9780001083967