Chapter 1Waiting for the Devil to Grow Up

My daughter was only twenty months old when she was murdered.

Not a single bone in her tiny body was left intact.

The suspect was just a child himself. Because of his age, he faced no prison time. The system sealed his records and protected him.

I spent the next ten years waiting for him to grow up.

* * *

My name is Elena. If you looked at my stark white hair, you would think I was an old woman, but I am only thirty four years old.

No one knows how I survived this past decade.

I was born in a deeply impoverished, isolated town nestled high in the Appalachian mountains. I was pulled out of school by the time I was fourteen. When I turned eighteen, my father handed me over to a man in a neighboring county to be his wife.

In that backwards, off the grid community, a woman had no real standing until she gave a man a son. My husband, Jared, was over a decade older than me. He spent his days reeking of cheap whiskey. Most people in the county had left to find real work in the city, but Jared refused to leave. He kept me trapped on a desolate plot of farmland with his aging parents, living a life of suffocating misery.

I was not afraid of hardship. I had grown up with nothing. I was not even afraid of the beatings, because violence was all I had ever known.

The following year, I gave birth to a baby girl. That was when Jared's mother turned on me. Whether it was complications from the birth or sheer exhaustion, I never got pregnant again.

Jared grew disgusted with me. The beatings became merciless. One night, after a particularly brutal attack left me bleeding on the floor, my survival instinct took over. In a haze of panic and desperation, I ran.

I fled the farmhouse and ran into the pitch black night.

But I left my daughter behind.

I know it was the greatest sin of my life. But I had less than two dollars to my name. I was starving, bruised, and had absolutely no way to keep a baby alive on the streets. My plan was to make it to a city, find a job, get a roof over my head, and then come back to steal my daughter away in the dead of night.