AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Iwasalreadyimaginingexcuses I could use to see Mila again tomorrow. Brothers were only supposed to show up every other night for breeding, so it would look suspicious if I showed up again the day after, but I needed to see her again for my own sanity.
I just needed to figure out what kind of excuse Luke or any of the other brothers would buy. Really, I needed more than an excuse. I needed to buy time.
Because I had made up my mind, and no matter what else this world or the Kingsnakes threw my way, my decision was made. I was going to get my sisters and Mila out of the city, to safety. To freedom. To the rest of our lives.
If I didn’t bear Mila’s scratch marks on my chest and back, I could’ve convinced myself it was a dream. All of it. Her presence in the motel, the night we had just spent together. All of it could’ve been chalked up to some kind of sick fever dream, designed to torment and drive me crazy.
I stuffed my hands into my jean pockets as I walked the streets toward my apartment. Mila was sleeping soundly when I left. I didn’t want to leave her, especially not in the hands of a bunch of degenerates.
But I also knew, in a twisted sort of way, that she was relatively safe there.
The majority of the brothers kept to the code and wouldn’t lay a hand on another brother’s girl. Dogberry was another matter, but he had also left the motel before I had, so she would be safe from him for the day.
Thankfully my building had been built in the era of exterior fire escapes. We were able to use it to enter the window of our second floor “suite.” All suite meant was we had a bedroom separate from the kitchen, and a bathroom we didn’t have to share with our neighbors.
It was a luxury, really, especially in a time when the indoor stairwell was unusable because it had been transformed into another apartment. This building had been my university apartment before the Collapse, and I had stubbornly managed to hang onto it thanks to my job at the mill.
I wouldn’t – couldn’t – subject the girls to other living conditions out on the streets of this new world.
Our suite cost me most of my Kingsnake cut, and my soul, but at least we had a locking door.
Water, most days. The girls were safe, for the most part.
I knocked on the door, my heart tightening with the late hour, but I knew Avery would be awake.
She always was until I got home. And then she collapsed in bed next to her younger sister, curling around her protectively the same way I did to Mila tonight.
Sure enough, a sliver of Avery’s face peeked out between the faded curtains, before she unlocked and unlatched the door. She yawned as she let me in, pushing her tangle of blonde curls away from her face in a motion I found all too familiar. “You’re late tonight,” she muttered.
“I know. I’m sorry.” I pulled my sleeves lower over my wrists, as if that could hide my nightly transgressions. I stepped over the threshold and fastened the series of locks. “I got caught up at work.”Caught up with Mila.
I turned around to see Avery looking at me with crossed arms, every inch the scolding mother instead of the preteen sister she should’ve been. My heart ached for the childhood she was missing. “I know what you do at night, Ray. I’m not a baby like Ella. I know where you go.”
Well, shit. I collapsed onto the sofa, the springs complaining from my weight. “Don’t call your sister a baby. You know she hates it.” I was exhausted, and this was not a conversation I wanted to have with my younger sister, regardless of my mental state.
Avery scoffed before sitting next to me. I turned to look at her, a miniature replica of our mother. I had been a teenage pregnancy, my father long gone before the Collapse was even a bad rumor. Avery and Ella’s father had left too, but not until after the Collapse. He had been the only dad I’d ever known. He’d felt responsible for all of us.
Responsible enough that one day, when food got short, he shouldered up a backpack and kissed us all goodbye.
There was word of work in the next state over, and the payment would keep us all fed for months. But he never returned, and we never found out what happened to him.
Ella took after him, all dark hair and long limbs. But Avery and I looked like our mother. We both had the personality too – stubborn, sometimes too brash for our own good.
“Ella isn’t awake. And are you really going to pretend like I didn’t just call you out?”
“Jesus, Avery. Do we need to have this talk now?”
She narrowed her gray eyes at me, so like my own. “Yes. Because if Ella is awake, you’ll just use her as an excuse. I think I deserve to know the truth about where you go every night.”
I closed my eyes, beating my head against the back of the couch. I wanted to shower. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to go back in time, before the Collapse, and take my family somewhere safe. I hoped the beaches were still a respite from the real world, a hidden sanctuary. It was a fool’s dream. Even the beaches wouldn’t be safer. “If you already know where I go, why are you asking?”
“Because I want to hear you say it,” she whispered. Whispering was unlike Avery, and I opened my eyes to stare at her once more. She sat still, a question written all over her face. “Mrs. Mullins from downstairs said you stole her granddaughter from her bed when she was sleeping. I told her she was a liar.” Mrs. Mullins was the neighbor directly beneath us.
She was a gossip, and I wished I could keep her and her big mouth away from my sisters.
But Avery still shouldn’t provoke her. Gossips were dangerous people in the city. One wrong word to the wrong person… “You shouldn’t aggravate her. She’s nothing but a bored old woman.”
“So you’re not a Kingsnake who steals unsuspecting girls from their beds?” Avery cocked her head, giving me an out. But she wanted honesty. I had to give it to her.
