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Prologue
SHAY
“I feel like shit,” I groaned, looking up at my older brother, Alister, as he paced back and forth in front of me. We’d been sitting in the mall parking lot for hours, and it was almost ninety degrees out, but I couldn’t stop shaking, this icy sensation crawling up my spine.
I rubbed my hands up and down my arms to try and keep the cold from taking over.
Ah, my old-friend withdrawal.
How I haven’t missed you.
The chills, the nausea, the anxiety.
“I know, Shay. I don’t feel good either,” Ali snapped, rolling his eyes and throwing his hands in the air. “But do you want to go home and spend another night lying awake, watching the damn clock tick? I sure as hell don’t.” My older brother’s sharp tone hit me like a punch to the gut, and I quickly pressed my lips together and turned away.
He was right.
We couldn’t go home without any money. No money meant no pills. No pills meant no sleep.
And I’d already been awake for almost forty-eight hours. My body needed to rest, but my mind wouldn’t let it. Not without a little help. That resulted from years on the run, literally being hunted by a man who most would call a monster.
But who Ali and I, many years ago, called Dad.
I’m not sure what haunted me the most. The sound of him banging on the doors and smashing windows as he stalked us, showing up time and time again, threatening to kill my mom.
Or the night he showed up in absolute silence and finally followed through on the threat.
He butchered her, then ran, leaving Ali and me covered in her blood, fighting to put pressure on the stab wounds that decorated her body.
We were already battling the odds when he lit the fire. He didn’t want us to make it out.
Since then, it didn’t matter where we slept or which foster home we were shipped off to, I swore I still heard Dad banging on the doors and windows at night and the sounds of my mom screaming as she tried to keep him from breaking them down.
Then there was the silence. I think that was what haunted me the most.
It was relentless.
You think the yelling and screaming are bad, but in the silence and the darkness, you can’t hear or see him coming, so you don’t know which way to run or where it is safe to hide.
The fear he might one day come back for me had me looking over my shoulder constantly, and at night, it was almost paralyzing. I couldn’t even close my eyes, petrified that when I opened them, he’d be there, looming over me.
The only reprieve came from a couple of tiny pills.
Oxycodone.
On the street, they were anywhere from thirty to fifty dollars a pill, and because neither Ali nor I had a job, there was only one way to get the money for them.
Only one way for us to get some kind of peace.
Lie, cheat, or steal.
“This one, she’s it,” Ali’s friend, Jason, announced as he weaved toward us through a handful of parked cars. His blond hair fell into his face as he nodded toward an elderly lady across the lot who’d stopped at the rear of a sparkling blue BMW and popped the trunk. Her dress was conservative, but her shoes were designer, and the rings that decorated her hands were the kind that would be passed down to her grandkids for generations to come. “The plates are from out of state, and there was a Coach luggage bag in the back seat.”
Ali slammed his hand against Jason’s back and grinned. “Good looking out, man.”
Jason had been Ali’s best friend since we were dumped in this new town by Child Protective Services over a year ago.
He lived differently than us, his family’s home on the right side of the tracks, though you’d never guess given the chaos this kid thrived on.
