Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 52851 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 264(@200wpm)___ 211(@250wpm)___ 176(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 52851 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 264(@200wpm)___ 211(@250wpm)___ 176(@300wpm)
That day, I’d felt proud, and like I had a purpose. Like I had something of him to hold on to. That feeling had fueled me. After that, I’d made it my mission to learn everything the guys did. By sixteen, I could shoot like a pro, ride my bike with my eyes shut, and my knife skills were scary. I made sure I was one of them, not just some girl hovering on the sidelines.
Jagger chuckled, his breath warm against my shoulder. “That you did.”
I laughed softly, but it faded quickly.
His voice turned more serious. “Sounds like things between you and your da—Preacher were good then. When did it change?”
The shift in my body must have told him everything, because his hands slowed slightly. I didn’t want to say it, but the memories came anyway. By seventeen, I was spending most of my time at the compound—anywhere but home because my mother had been unraveling.
The screaming had turned to fists, the slaps became kicks, and by then, she wasn’t holding back. Black eyes, stitches in my mouth, chunks of hair ripped from my scalp. The worst was the baseball bat.
I swallowed.
“She used to hit me, but I told you about the baseball bat, right?” I felt Jagger nod against my back.
I should stop talking, but something inside me needed this. Only a handful of people knew what had happened next.
I turned in his arms, wrapping myself around him, pressing my face to his chest, feeling the steady rise and fall of his breath.
And then I went for it.
“After the baseball bat, I started planning a way out. The things she told me about my dad, about the things he did—the women, the illegal shit, the warehouse full of girls—it was all too much. She made sure I knew that I wasn’t enough, that I should never have been born. That I was the biggest mistake she’d ever made.”
Jagger’s arms tightened, his lips moving against my hair, murmuring something I couldn’t quite make out.
I took a steady breath.
“One afternoon, I pulled up to the compound and she was there, running out, screaming, weaving around, drunk out of her fucking mind.” I squeezed my eyes shut, feeling the memory wrap around me like a vice. “I took her home and got her into bed. The whole time, she was spitting at me, clawing my arms. I gave up, went downstairs, sat on the couch—just sat there, wondering how my life had gotten this bad.” The words slowed, thickened. “I was counting down the days until I could leave when I heard the bang.”
A gunshot. I’d heard so many since then. But that one? That was the one I could still feel.
Jagger’s grip on me tightened. “You were in the house when it happened?”
I nodded against his chest. “I walked upstairs. Stood in front of the bedroom door for a while before I walked in.”
Blood. So much blood. The walls, and the sheets were covered with it. The gun still clutched in her lifeless hand.
And the letter beside her, with my name scrawled on the envelope.
“I knew what she was going to say in the letter she was clutching when I found her,” I whispered. “But knowing she used her last minutes alive to write it gave the words extra weight.”
Jagger pulled back slightly, gripping my shoulders, his eyes locked onto mine. “She wrote you a letter just before she killed herself?”
I nodded and shrugged. “Yeah.”
His jaw clenched. “Holy fuck, baby.”
I barely had time to react before he pulled me tight against him, his entire body shaking slightly. But he didn’t know the worst of it, he didn’t know what the letter said. Didn’t know that my mother had used her dying breath to rip my heart out.
That she had told me everything about Preacher. How she had walked in on him that day, screwing Store. How he had begged her to have a kid with him when they first met—only to abandon her the moment I was born because I was a girl. Because I wasn’t the son he had wanted.
How on the very day she put that gun to her head, he had told her to leave and to take me with her. Every word had carved into me like a blade, and I had run.
I’d finished reading the letter that day, turned and packed a bag. Once I had what I needed, I’d driven to the only person I knew I could trust—Uncle Duke. He was Preacher’s brother, but he had always been mine. He had always called, always visited, always cared. He was the only one who had ever made me feel safe.
Jagger reached past me, turning off the water, his movements careful, deliberate. Then he took a towel and started drying me off, his touch gentle in a way I didn’t know how to handle.