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"Wanna die," I objected, my voice weak, tears somehow streaming down my face despite the way all my insides felt dry as sandpaper.
Her eyes closed on an exhale and she took a long minute before she spoke again. "I understand that. But I'm not going to let that happen. One day you will look back on this and be glad I didn't just walk away."
I was taken to Hailstorm and spent weeks in a bed in a makeshift hospital wing, attended only by Lo or other women. I was patched up. I was hooked up to IV antibiotics and fluids. I was force fed some awful smelling concoction which forced an early period.
I raged those first few weeks, when I was well enough. I hit and spat and lashed out at Lo with everything in my weak body. I had wanted to die! I told her. I cried to her. I wanted it to end. I didn't want to wake up and face what I had been through. I didn't want the memories to turn into nightmares that would never let me sleep. I didn't want to be a god damn victim anymore.
"You choose to be a victim," Lo said, swatting the book out of the air before it hit her. "You can be a lot of things right now. You can be a woman who went through some shit and came out of it. You can be a survivor. Or you can curl up and cradle your pain to your chest and choose to keep being a victim. But make no mistake my little Jstorm, that is a choice you make."
I fell back onto the bed, silently seething. But not because she was wrong. Because she was right. I had two things I could do with my life at that point: I could end it or I could move on.
So the next day, I got out of bed. I built up a wall. And I started training to be a woman who could never be made helpless again. I shot guns. I learned martial arts. I learned about pressure points and poison. I figured out how to make bombs.
But I didn't become a 'survivor'. I hated that term. That term was weak, meaningless to me. Plenty of people survived things. That didn't mean anything. You could live through something and crawl up in a ball on the floor and never rise again. "Survivor" meant nothing but breath in your lungs.
I didn't become a survivor.
I became a badass bitch.
That was the choice I made. That was the choice Lo gave to me when she picked me up off that street.
It wasn't for years that I heard the name Lex Keith again, that I knew he had set up his operation in the same town I lived on the outskirts of. I had become insulated at Hailstorm, training and hacking and making plans. I wasn't always in on the action. I had no reason to go back on the streets. I had nothing left out there in the real world.
When I was well enough, I had called home and told my parents I ran away. I told them it had nothing to do with them, that I would keep in touch.
I couldn't face them again. I would never be the daughter they knew. The daughter they knew wasn't covered in scars and living behind walls she was sure no one could break down. The daughter they loved didn't know she could put a bullet in someone's body, end their life, and do so without blinking.
So I sent them Christmas cards and anniversary cards and birthday presents and mother and father's day presents. But I wasn't theirs anymore.
I was mine and mine only.Until that night I found that forum, I thought I had moved on. As best I could. Not perfectly. There would always be scars. There would always be ghosts and demons. But I had moved on. I hadn't concocted plans of revenge. I did everything in my power to never consciously think about Lex Keith again.
Then I found that post. I connected with Alex. I saw my past staring me right in the face.
I helped Alex escape though she eventually did get caught again and dragged to Lex's. But it was okay. It was okay because I was already prepared. I had the bombs. I had the Molotov cocktails. So when they dragged her in, I started setting the bombs. Her man, Breaker, breezed in sometime later and though he was playing it cool like he didn't care that Lex had Alex, I knew his feelings for her would bide me time as I rushed around his property, setting up things for the most amount of damage possible.
I blew the gate.
I waited, watching everyone start to freak out. I needed to give Alex and Breaker a chance to get free before I risked collapsing the mansion. I saw them running from the side of the property with someone else trailing with them.
That someone else?
Yeah that was the tatted, pierced, post-punk looking, hot as all sin, sweet talking, panty dropper by the name of Shooter.
They caught sight of me by the gate.
My eyes locked with Shooter for a long minute before he got in the truck with his best friend and his best friend's girl and they tore out of there.
They were supposed to get out of town, disappear, get off the grid until things blew over. I was counting on that.
Once they drove away, I pressed the button, and I blew Lex's place to kingdom come.--Why was Lo talking to Shooter? I knew she knew of him. Lo knew of every major player in the game. But I didn't think they were on any kind of speaking terms.
"News. Channel five. Right now," Lo barked at me and I reached for the remote and turned it on.
"... Damian Crane, a decorated war hero, was shot dead in the doorway of his car early this morning..."
Well then. That answered that question. Cash must have called in Shooter and had him do the hit for them. Smart. Nothing could trace back to The Henchmen or Hailstorm.
