Pure Taboo — Gina Valentina

The police had stopped looking. Julian hadn’t.

Gina Valentina learned to ignore the rot. She’d lived with it since she was twelve, when her mother married Julian Cross—a man with soft hands and a hard stare, a collector of rare books and even rarer rules. He kept the house immaculate. He kept the thermostat at sixty-eight degrees. He kept Gina’s mother quiet with pills and promises.

“She left us, Gina,” he said each morning, setting a single placemat across from his own at the long oak table. “But I won’t leave you. That’s not the kind of man I am.” gina valentina pure taboo

The house on Hemlock Lane always smelled of lavender and something rotting beneath the floorboards.

“That you’re not your mother’s daughter,” he said. “Not really. You’re mine. Have been since you were a child. I just needed her out of the way to make it official.” The police had stopped looking

The basement stairs groaned beneath her weight. The air turned cold and wet, smelling of earth and iron and something else—something sweet, like overripe fruit.

Then everything went red.

The padlock clicked open like a confession.