AllFreeNovel
Share Us
{ Prologue }
1809 Belize Town
He stared at her. Her light blond hair—what he’d always thought was sunshine caught and woven—now pulled back into a tight bun. Green eyes wide as she looked at him. Tiny mouth ajar as she panted from running through the streets to find him.
She looked fed. Strong.
Far better than she ever looked when it was just the two of them and it had only been three months she’d been with them. Even if they beat Pen, she had food in her belly now. The black rings about her eyes had disappeared. The ones that had lined her big eyes for nearly a year because she could never sleep for the pain in her stomach—pain that had sent her small hands clutching her belly deep into every night.
He'd watched it for too long. Longer than he should have.
In the nine years he’d had with them, his parents had raised him better than that. For a year Pen had always made him eat more of what little they could scrounge from the streets. She’d stopped growing while he hadn’t. And she’d never once complained about the food she didn’t have. She would keep her mouth closed, the pain in, until her dying breath, if it was up to her.
She stayed with him and she would die.
For as much as he wanted—needed—the first, he couldn’t have the second.
It was time to do what his parents would have wanted. Valor. Honor. Courage. Everything his father had ever taught him.
Strider pulled his shoulders back, trying to make himself far bigger than her. Far older than his ten years. Far wiser. Never mind that they were the same age, born just days apart. “You need to go, Pen. They beat you every time you do this. Go back before they do it again.”
She shook her head, her arms clasping across her chest and the ugly black dress she wore. “You don’t know that.”
“I do. I sit outside the Flagtons’ house. I can hear you crying. I can hear the snap of that leather.”
“So?” Her chin jutted out. “I’ll run away every time, no matter how they beat me. I can’t leave you, Strider. Mama June said we were to stay together. So we do.”
“You don’t get it, Pen, I don’t want you.”
Her arms unthreaded and jutted out at him, ready to grab him. “Strider, don’t say that, don’t—”
“Don’t what?” He pulled his top lip into a sneer. “Pretend I want you as a burden any longer?”
Her head snapped back, her arms dropping to her sides. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do. I know what it’s like now to not have you around.”
She bent over, her hands going down to the bottom of her black skirts, searching along the hem. “But I have to give you—”
“Give me what? You’ve got nothing—nothing I need or want, Pen.”
She dropped her skirt, her body jerking upright as her voice pitched high. “What are you doing—you—you do not mean what you’re saying, Strider. You don’t.”
“I do mean it. You’re not my family. Mama always tried to make it so, but you’re not my sister. You are charity my mama saw fit to save, that is all. And I can’t save you anymore. Her burden isn’t my burden.”
Instant tears spilled out of her eyes, streaming down her face. Rivers he refused to reach out and touch, quell.
“I am—I am your family.” She reached out, grabbing his forearm and shaking it. “You said it yourself, Strider. We have to stay together—stay a family for Mama June. She said that—stay together. We have to stay together.”
He sloughed her grip off his arm. “I was in shock after the fire. But it’s too much. You’re too much. I can’t have you weighing me down anymore. You’re just as worthless as when they handed you over to my mama.”
Her face crumpled, the words striking deep, wounding her down to her soul. Her head started to swing back and forth, her hand across her mouth holding back a sob as her feet shuffled backward.
She stumbled away from him and ran.
The breath he’d been holding deep in his lungs wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t exhale.
He wondered if it ever would.
