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The thought of the kids held captive being hurt evenmorethan usual filled her with nausea.
Right in front of her was a girl who was afraid. She took Nina’s hand and tugged her close to a shrub.
“Do you live around here?” Nina shook her head. “You need to get home. I...do you need help?”
It was easy to see the conflict on her face. Saving herself or saving a stranger.
“Why are you running from your father?”
“He-he’s trying to sell me. I-I don’t like him, the man my father calls my future husband, and this might be my last chance to run away.”
“Doesn’t your mom stand up for you?”
Tears filled her blue eyes. “I think h-he killed my mom. I haven’t seen her since my birthday last year. You have to get away from here. You don’t understand what he’s like.”
Suddenly, Nina was grabbed from behind and she realized the car had backed along the curb a lot closer to them.
Nina screamed, “Let me go! Let me fucking go!”
The dark-haired girl didn’t know who she was fighting but she didn’t hesitate to pick up a concrete driveway marker and bash the person trying to get Nina in the car at the base of his skull as he bent to throw her over his shoulder.
So focused on someone else, the fearless girl didn’t see the other man slip up behind her. He snatched the concrete from her hand.
“Fuck! We gotta get outta here! I think Bernie’s dead!” He looked around him frantically. “We can’t stay here!”
The driver got out of the car and barked orders. “Get Nina in the car. Dump Bernie in the trunk. Off that one. She saw our faces and she said somebody is lookin’ for her already. She knows too much.”
The girl was backhanded in the side of her head with the driveway marker and she went to her knees.
There was so much blood.
Nina fought with everything she had to get loose but she couldn’t. A huge hand crushed over her mouth as she tried to scream. Dragged into the car, she watched the girl on her hands and knees, blood pooling on the sidewalk.
Nina’s last sight was a dark head lifting and blue eyes staring at her through the window in a daze.
“Little bitch will bleed out. Go! Go!”
Shehadn’tbled out. Somehow, she’d survived and ended up at a home for girls in the middle of nowhere.
Nina was simultaneously relieved and terrified as the girl pulled her by the hand, talking a mile a minute.
“Come on. We have pancakes from breakfast. You look hungry. Fresh milk, too. You eat until you’re full. That’s what Miss Jeffries always says.” She released a tinkling laugh and called to the older woman talking to the women from the State, “We’ll be inside, Miss Jeffries!”
It didn’t take long for Nina to figure out that the girl had no memory of that day oranyday prior to being picked up wandering the streets.
It was a blessing and a curse to keep the secret.
One she buried inside herself for more than seventeen years as she fell in love with - and then helped break the heart of - her best friend.
A girl named Rowan Foxe because of a pendant in her pocket and a name scribbled on a piece of paper.
Nina’s sins began long before she intercepted Rowan on that sidewalk and continued year after year.
Until the day she met a man who wanted to wipe them clean.
Chapter One
1995 - Age 18
