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A twenty-five-year-old woman who comes off as fresh. Not yet jaded. Still confident and filled

with self-assurance.

Way women aren’t fresh and strong. They’re weary and worn down. I don’t have a lot of

experience with them because if there was one lesson I learned early it was to avoid them at all cost,

but I remember my mother. She was not fresh and she was not strong. Not even that night she brought

Joey home. She was afraid. She was angry. She was begging my father to listen.

She acted like baby Joey was her last stand. She acted like she was done.

And she was young when she went missing. Probably younger than this girl right here.

So Megan makes no sense.

“I’m Johnny Boston,” I say, just to get this show on the road. “Who the fuck are you?”

CHAPTER FOUR - MEGAN

Who am I ?

It’s a question I’ve been asking myself my whole life. I am lots of things. Many labels attached to

me. Daughter, of course. Everyone has parents. But the meaning of the label of daughter goes beyond

just family ties for me.

It’s the label that defines me most. One mention of my daughter status to anyone in the Way and they

instantly take notice. Eyes get wider. Chins tip up. Spines straighten.

At least that’s how it was up until our recent misfortune.

I grew up on the Way Island of Osprey Cay. Just a stone’s throw—relatively speaking—from

Nassau. It’s a lot like the island I just came from. Which does not have a name. At least, not one that

can be found on a map like Osprey Cay can.

My island is bigger than the prison island I was just liberated from by Johnny Boston by almost

three hundred acres. The main house—which was my home until just a few weeks ago—is a twenty-

thousand-square-foot boutique resort for the “privileged friends” of the Way Board of Directors. I

call it home, but it was never really mine. Or my father’s. We were just the caretakers. But our family

has lived in the main house for four generations now. We are synonymous with that place.

My great-great-grandfather is the one who elevated our station in life. He was the one who turned

the mansion’s expansive basement into a laboratory. Granted, what he was doing in that lab eighty

years ago was nothing compared to what my father was up to, but he had vision.

It was pretty iffy science back then. The things he was doing down in that lab could be considered