 by Lani Lynn Vale.jpg)
Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 68500 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68500 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
CHAPTER 1
My pain is chronic, but my ass is iconic.
-text from Simi to Val
VAL
As the eldest female Singh—although a Singh no longer after coming to the realization that our father was a child predator running a circus—now Valhalla Drew, I rarely ever got to be coddled.
But my sisters were coddling me.
“I’m fine!” I cried out, throwing my hands in the air.
My sisters, all of them—Hades, Crimson, Tony, Simi, and Zip—stared at me with knowing looks.
I blew out a breath. “Okay, I’m not fine.”
Hades laughed. “We know. That’s why you dyed your hair again.”
I did dye my hair when I was having issues. It was my form of therapy.
When I’d moved back to the circus, the first thing to go was my natural white-blonde hair. In its place was black. I’d even gotten a spray tan to even out my new appearance, started wearing makeup that accentuated my eyes, and said ‘fuck you’ to everything my ex-boyfriend left behind.
Upon learning about my dad, I’d stopped tanning, changed my hair back to its original color, and stopped wearing makeup.
It was just how I was.
I glared. Hades’s husband was rubbing off on her. No longer the quiet one of the bunch, she boldly stated her opinion, and I loved it.
Simi, one of her daughters strapped to her chest in the baby wearing contraption I’d purchased for her that I’d seen on a new mother last month at my preceptor appointment, looked at me with a speculative eye. “Are you wearing those scrubs?”
I looked down at them.
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked. “I have to wear them per hospital regulations.”
She scrunched up her nose. “Nobody said you had to wear the baggiest ones you could find. I got you those new Figs brand last week.”
She had.
They were tighter than the pants I wore to workout in.
They were cute, though.
Especially paired with the top, which was almost a tucked in number that made me look like I was wearing a bodysuit.
“Go change,” Simi ordered.
“But…”
I started to argue, but it was Zip who said, “Absolutely not, Val. Go change. We’ll get your shoes.”
I grudgingly went to my room and changed, knowing I could only wear the set of clothes once this week seeing as I only had the one pair.
When I changed, I tucked my shirt in, which actually hooked to a button inside the pants to stay in place, and headed right back out.
I’d just gotten back to the living room when Tony pointed at me. “Absolutely not. Your hair is coming out of that bun.”
I threw my hands up in the air. “I’m not putting my hair down! I’m a goddamn doctor. I’m working in the godforsaken ER. I can’t have my hair down getting in stuff that is gonna mess it up!”
Nor did I want any blood, guts, pus, piss, or shit in it.
I did okay with almost all things medicine, but getting stuff on me I couldn’t wash off wasn’t one of them.
“Okay, well get it out of the bun, then,” she compromised.
I sighed and did just that.
“You’re the prettiest of us all, you know.” Hades sighed. “Your skin, and hair, and face. It’s all so pretty and perfect that you really could go in wearing those baggy ass scrubs—which are going in the trash when you leave, FYI—and get away with it.”
“You can’t throw them away,” I said. “I just bought them.”
“You bought them from a woman who’d lost a significant amount of weight and was getting rid of them at a song,” My brother,Keene, said. “Go buy some more of what you’re wearing.”
I squinted at him. “What are you doing here?”
He gestured toward the donuts on the counter. “Heard there were going to be donuts.”
My sisters, knowing how nervous I was to go back, had planned an intervention that was supposed to relax me before I went into my first shift as an ER doctor.
I had exactly three to seven years—once I picked my specialty—before I became what I’d truly always wanted to be—despite my father’s almost blind promise that I wouldn’t accomplish it.
The day he’d died, it was like he’d set his plans into motion, and I couldn’t break free of them.
But sometime last year, when we’d decided that the circus life wasn’t what we all wanted to do for the rest of our lives, I’d finally started to consider something more than just being a fortune teller in the circus.
I could be what I wanted to be.
You can do anything you want to do, Valhalla. You’re your own worst enemy. Stop living life for others, and live life for yourself.
The words of an ex-boyfriend, one that I still very much loved with all my heart, felt like a cold hard slap in the face each time I considered how I’d left things with him.
It’d been years, and the heartache I felt in my chest when I thought of him felt like someone had rammed a fire poker deep into my chest and twisted it.