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Chapter One
Cadence
My brother isn’t a bad kid. He isn’t some wannabe gang-banger, or a thug out looking for trouble. Michael is still in high school, gets good grades, and never causes problems. He is a typical beta teenager in every way.
Which includes making bad decisions.
He got in over his head. An act of desperation by someone pushed to the edge.
Because weweredesperate.
Everything was crumbling around us, and we were running out of time.
It started when Daddy died. Even though he had been a soldier, we’d never thought it would happen to us. Sure, he had been in a war zone, but things like that happened to other people. Not us. Daddy wasn’t in real danger.
We were so wrong.
It was a rude awakening for me and Michael when Momma started screaming in the middle of the night, saying things we couldn’t make sense of. Our mother never was the same after those people showed up at the door the next morning and explained Daddy was gone, and Momma was suffering from a broken matebond. They were surprised she’d survived the loss at all, but one of the doctors mentioned it was probably because of us. We were still young, and we needed her.
It took a while for her to pull herself together, but Momma managed to keep going. She smiled and tried to pretend for us, but she was a ghost of the woman she had been before. Even at twelve years old, I could see it.
When Momma started having memory problems, I hated myself for thinking it was a blessing. Momma had days where she was laughing again like she used to, and the haunted look in her eyes faded.
Then she had days when she was screaming in pain, unable or unwilling to get out of bed. I wasn’t sure if those were better or worse than when she was silent, staring at nothing, not responding to anything we tried.
We didn’t realize what was going on at first. The good days started before the bad ones, and we’d thought enough time had finally passed for her grief to ease.
Until one day she stopped in the hallway and stared at the picture of Michael and I with Daddy. She hadn’t known who that man in the picture was, and once we’d reminded her, it was as if he’d just died again.
Half the time she forgot her own mate, the other half she couldn’t function she was so heartbroken by his loss.
The mood swings weren’t too bad at first, and it was chalked up to the broken bond causing long-term stress and depression. The memory loss was explained as her mind trying to protect itself from the trauma of the sudden loss of the matebond, but the episodes were infrequent. It was a couple more years before they came more often, and the bad days started to take over.
The outbursts affected her day-to-day life, and we finally had to admit it was more than depression due to painful memories. Momma was diagnosed with Bond Loss Syndrome. Usually an omega died if they lost their mate and didn’t establish a new bond to replace it, but Momma refused to take another mate. There wasn’t a lot known about Bond Loss Syndrome since it was so rare.
Momma had struggled to make ends meet on her own after Daddy was gone. She had done everything she could, working crazy hours which I assumed helped her bury the pain of the loss, but once she started having issues at work, they had to let her go. She’d been an administrator at a busy hospital downtown, and the job was too important and complicated for someone who would have days when she couldn’t get out of bed, much less go to work and deal with other people.
By the time I finished high school, we were in trouble. Bills were piling up, and Momma losing her job sent her on a downward spiral we couldn’t seem to stop.
I had picked up a waitressing job as soon as I was old enough to work, and once I graduated, I found a second one in the call center for an insurance office. Michael had tried to get a job too, but as Momma got worse, someone had to be home to look after her. I didn’t even like her being alone while Michael was in school. If no one came home to tell her to eat she would forget, and there had been a few times when she’d tried to fix dinner and almost caught the house on fire because she broke down and left food on the stove, or burners on.
We couldn’t afford to put her in a care home no matter how many times she’d begged us to so Michael and I couldhave a life.
“Sell the house, put me in nursing care, and go have fun! I’m not your responsibility. You can’t give up your life for me.”
Momma didn’t know we couldn’t sell the house because she didn’t remember taking out a second mortgage. One I was struggling to pay because the interest was so high and the house wasn’t worth enough after years of neglect and a falling market.
I got her the best care I could, signing her up for trials when we couldn’t afford the doctor’s visits. We got her on medications to stabilize her moods and try to keep her present, but it took a long time to find the right balance. I was barely holding things together.
And now I had to find a way to bail Michael out of the trouble he was in.
I didn’t know what he’d been thinking. Or how he even found these people to begin with. He was a nerdy kid who spent his time online or with his nose in a book whenever he wasn’t helping Momma.
He wasn’t a drug dealer.
Yet he’d managed to get himself tangled up with the local mafia. Or were they a gang? I didn’t know what they were, besides dangerous. I’d found out what I could once he admitted what he had done, and it was enough to scare anyone.
He’d told me he got the idea in his head that he could make some extra money running packages for the Galleons while still being able to keep an eye on Momma. It was what they called an entry-level position. He’d thought he could pick up whatever it was from point A, deliver it to point B at the designated time, and leave with enough cash to feed us for the week, with no one the wiser. He’d guessed what was in the package, but he’d wanted so much to help that he’d ignored it.
