1. Ghost

ONE

It took seven months for me to kill off Georgia Gayle.

Georgia Gayle was an earnest twenty-five-year-old brunette whose pride and joy was the vitamin store she owned in downtown Springfield. She avoided her parents the best she could, dreamed of going back to school for a business degree, was between boyfriends at the time, though she'd hoped the boy who worked at the deli might ask her out for coffee.

Four years in the Madison Correctional Facility—the minimum security prison I was trapped in until they released me nine months ago—and the woman who was marched into that hellhole was dead by the time she was allowed out again.

Erasing my identity as best I could just made it so that the rest of the world knew she was long gone…

I changed my name. As a nod to who I was, I chose ‘Savannah'. Trading my born and bred Springfield accent for a Southern drawl, I tacked on ‘Montgomery' as my new last name when I got my first set of fake papers.

The brunette with hints of gold woven through her soft curls disappeared when I dyed my hair black. I tried out colored contacts, too, to really change my appearance, but like the nose job I couldn't afford, the dark brown contacts weren't worth the trouble. They dried the shit out of my eyes, and after two weeks of struggling with them and the stupid eye drops I pocketed from the drug store, I had to be satisfied with the lighter shade instead.

Make-up helps. A little bit of contour changed the whole shape of my face until it became Savannah's face. I lost twenty pounds in prison. I thought I'd put them back on once I was on the outside again, but when the choice is between paying rent in my shitty apartment or eating more than one quick meal a day, a roof over my head wins. Now my cheeks are sunken in instead of rosy and round, giving me a fittingly fox-like look.

After all, I lost everything when I got arrested. My store. My home. My future…

Georgia was already a ghost. Her parents disowned her long before she was sentenced. Her friends? Gone. Her reputation? Shattered.

Her sanity?

Nonexistent.

Because of one man, I lost four fucking years of my life, plus any bit of good that was left in goody-goody Georgia Gayle.

Oh. Supposedly, I got lucky. That's what the judge told me. I didn't have any priors, and part of what makes counterfeiting a crime is the intent. The prosecutors needed to prove that I accepted those hundred dollar bills gleefully from the real crooks, putting them into my deposits so that they could circulate through the bank.

They couldn't. That's because I was a naive fucking idiot who never thought twice about the meathead repeat customers I'd get in my store, two, maybe three times a week for each of them, paying for their five-pound tubs of protein powder with cash that my counterfeit pen never flagged as fake. Just grateful to get the sale each time, it never dawned on me that they were giving me funny money—or that my shop was being used to funnel counterfeit bills for the Libellula Family.

Because that was exactly what was happening. Worse, it seems like I was the sacrificial lamb. One of the most powerful local mafias, the Libellula Family were untouchable—but I wasn't. For all the fake bills they pass, I was the one who got snagged because one bank clerk tried to be a hero and brought it to the higher-ups at the SPD.

Snitch. Even I knew better to go up against the local mafias so it was no surprise to me that he was conveniently missing by the time I was being prosecuted. Once I heard the name Libellula getting thrown around, I knew he had to be dead for trying to rat out the counterfeiting ring.

Just like I was bound to be after my stint in prison.

I was looking at a possible twenty-year sentence. That's not even counting the fines. The ten grand they slapped me with is just more salt in the wound when you think about it, but considering some fines can go upward of a quarter-million dollars, it could've been so much worse.

Tell that to the new world I had to navigate. The guards who looked the other way when it came to mistreatment and unfairness. The fellow inmates who sniffed out weakness like a great white tracking blood in the water. The depersonalization—the dehumanization—that happened inside…

I never expected to survive a prison stint. A minimum security prison—Club fucking Fed—might be for non-violent offenders or white collar criminals, but once it's lights out, a prison is a goddamn prison, and Georgia Gayle wasn't made for prison.

But Savannah Montgomery could be. And once I realized that I had to get through my sentence if only so that someone else could pay for crimes that were never mine, I would do it.

I made my revenge list my first year inside. The paper is worn now, with the same two bullet points on it, and I only recently got to put a check next to the first one.

Kill Georgia Gayle.

She's gone, and she's not coming back.

And if Savannah Montgomery has her way, it'll be the same for the second name on my list.

Because there was only one thought that kept me going during the four years after I got arrested, plus the months I've been out: get the man who ruined my life.

He has no idea who I am. He's not the one who came into my store to pass his gang's counterfeit bills through me, but that doesn't matter. As the head of the Libellula Family, his criminal enterprise ruined my life.

And I'm going to take his.

I'm going to kill Damien Libellula.