Chapter 9 I'd always known my parents favored my brother over us girls , even as a little kid . But I never imagined that after losing three daughters , they'd still be plotting how to cash in on me . That day , I didn't go inside . I avoided the main roads and cut through the woods all the way back to the town where my school was . I walked from sunset to sunrise without stopping , until I reached the police station . The moment I saw the cops , I collapsed . When I came to , the first thing I said was : " I need to report a murder. My parents killed my sisters . " My memories of the two months after filing that report are pretty fuzzy . Everything was complete chaos . My parents screaming at me , neighbors treating me like garbage , classmates looking at me like I was some kind of monster . I got so thin I barely looked human anymore . After my parents got arrested , my brother and I ended up in the system . Since he was a boy and still little , some family adopted him from foster care pretty fast . We completely lost touch . But I was stuck in that nightmare . Everyone who saw me would point and whisper : " That's the girl whose parents killed her sisters , then she ratted out her own family . Whole bunch of them are psychos ... " Finally , my homeroom teacher couldn't take it anymore . She pulled some strings through her family to get my records sealed and had me transferred to a group home in another state . Before she left , she told me : " Starting today , you're Ella Morgan . Leave the past behind and build your own future . " My teacher was just a fresh college grad - she couldn't take me in herself . She'd already done way more than she had to . I once heard her arguing with her family about me : " I'm partly to blame for what happened to those girls . I'm the one who kept her at school ! If she'd gone home during that time , maybe none of this would've happened ... " When she told me to forget the past , she meant I should forget her too . I knew it wasn't her fault , but I got it . From that point on , it was just me . Every birthday in foster care , I made the same wish : to have a real family someday . I barely graduated high school . With my shit grades , community college was my only shot . I was always broke , so when I saw this ad for some kind of program that actually paid you while you trained , I jumped on it . After a few days of intensive courses , I passed their final test . That's where I first saw Alex . Truth is , I figured out what kind of operation it was during the training . After one sleepless night of freaking out , I made peace with it . Even though changing my name meant nobody knew my backstory , I couldn't pretend my screwed - up childhood hadn't messed me up . Growing up , nobody taught me about right and wrong . Nobody taught me to have any self - respect . I just stumbled through life completely on my own . That program was probably my only chance to change everything . So I had to take it . But in my past life , being so desperate for a family got me killed . Now that I'd somehow gotten a do - over , even that was slipping away . Looking at all these college kids around me , I could see none of them had that haunted look that comes from surviving hell . I envied them so much . I had no idea what to do next . Discover our latest featured short drama reel. Watch now and enjoy the story!