AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Sorry, Marie. It was my fault. I wanted to stay in the yard. It’s such a nice day, and well, I wasn’t ready to come inside.”
Shit, Penny, I silently cursed. She knew better than to take the blame, especially with Marie. She was meaner than a witch on a good day. When she got mad, it was better to stay in your room than risk her wrath.
“Penny, do you not remember the rules of this house? My house?”
Penny tensed beside me. “I remember, Marie. It won’t happen again.”
The throbbing vein in Marie’s thick neck pulsated. The thing looked like it needed its own food supply.
“Blake,” she hissed. “Go and help the others clean the kitchen, please.”
I risked a sideways glance at Penny. If she was scared, she didn’t show it, but I still didn’t want to leave her.
“I can stay,” I said. “I was late, too.”
“Blake,” Marie’s voice said in that way grown-ups did when something was final.
When I’d first arrived at the house, Marie terrified me. She was short and stocky with eyes that burned right through you.
Over the last two years, my fear had lessened, but it didn’t mean I went around breaking the rules willy-nilly. If you did, Marie liked to dole out punishment to everyone. It was her way of exercising her power because she had it all… and we had none.
“What’s going on back here, Marie?” Derek stomped into the kitchen.
Unlike his wife, who was short and round, Derek Freeman was as tall as he was wide. His round stomach hung over his baggy dress pants, and his thick arms stuck out of his creased white shirt. Lucas thought he must only own two shirts. One for Sundays and one for the rest of the week because, by Friday, it was usually a dirty shade of gray and covered in stains.
The smell alone was enough to make you puke whenever he was near.
“Penny here was just telling me how she wanted to stay outside instead of coming inside to do her chores.”
Derek pushed Marie aside and stood right in front of Penny, bending down slightly to come level with her face. “That right, Penny?”
“Yes,” she said, the color draining from her face.
“Yes, what?”
My fists clenched at my sides. I hated the way Derek thought he could speak to the girls. Talking to us—the boys—like that was one thing, but intimidating the girls was just plain wrong. My daddy might have been a bad seed, but he always taught me that a man should never make a woman feel scared.
Derek was nothing like my daddy; he got off on making the girls scared.
Penny sucked in a harsh breath and said, “Yes, sir.”
“There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Derek stepped closer to Penny, putting only a sliver of space between them.
His smell wafted over to me, and I gagged, trying not to make a sound. I could only imagine how bad it was for Penny, who was literally breathing in his stench.
“Now, what are we going to do with a pretty little thing like you?”
His words punched me in the gut. I’d seen the way he acted around Jessica, but she was older. She looked more like a young woman. Penny was just a girl. A kid—like me. It wasn’t right for him to be talking to her in that slimy tone of his and leering at her.
“There’s a toilet in our room that needs cleaning up real nice.” Marie laughed.
The sound was like nails grating on a blackboard. It went right through me causing my hair to bristle.
Derek didn’t reply. He just stood there staring at Penny, beads of sweat forming atop of his almost bald head while his chest rattled with his labored breaths.
“Well, don’t just stand there, girl,” Marie sneered. “Get in the bathroom and make a start.”
Her orders seemed to snap Derek out of his fixation, and he muttered something under his breath before leaving the room. Marie followed him but not before reminding Penny that she was to clean the whole bathroom.
