Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
Her mom gasped and stood, walking away with her hand over her mouth. Aunt Erin caught her, holding her hand and giving her strength.
“I didn’t train you because you are fucking fifteen years old and I want you to have fun. I want you to complain about school and have the kind of life your mother and I didn’t have, but trust me, that changes now. You want me to train you, I’m here. You won’t have anything else to do since you’re grounded for at least six months.”
Three days ago she would have been thrilled. Now she wanted him to leave her alone. She was pathetic. Always begging some guy to pick her. Her father. Cooper. The asshole martial arts instructor. “I think I’ll pass.”
“Not your choice anymore,” her father said. “Nor do you get out of this debrief. I ask again. Did they try anything? Did they succeed? I need to know what they did to you not because I want revenge. I already had that and it’s meaningless. I need to know because I have to fix you. I have to take the parts they broke and put them back together because I will shatter into a thousand pieces if I don’t try.”
She felt the world tilt because her father was crying.
Her father. The strongest man in the world. Her father, who joked about shoving everything deep. Her father, who she tried so hard to be like because she knew she could never be her mom.
What was she doing? She was letting that woman in her head, letting her burrow into her soul and making her question the strong ground her world was built on.
“I don’t know.” She said the words quietly, her head down, unable to look at him when she said it.
“What?” her father asked. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
She forced her face up. Those tears rolled down his cheeks, proof that he wasn’t some larger-than-life hero. He was her dad, and she couldn’t scare him away or manipulate him out of this. She couldn’t keep secrets from him, not ones he worried would wreck her.
She kind of wanted them to wreck her. If she split from everyone, she didn’t ever have to be here again. Didn’t ever have to feel again.
Isn’t that what Julia had told her? If she didn’t care, she could be free.
Did she want to be free? Maybe Julia Ennis wouldn’t have been such a psychotic murderous asswipe if her father had loved her. If she’d taken all that nasty energy and turned it toward protecting the people she loved.
“Kala, I can’t leave this. I can’t leave you. I know where you are.” His voice had gone low, and she heard the emotion behind it. “Your mother might think I’m a monster, but you have to break now or you’ll hold those walls up forever, and I can’t leave you there. Tell me what happened.”
It all rushed in. A wave that truly threatened to drown her. Or maybe she only now noticed she’d been in the water all along. Her father was offering her a way out of the river of misery she found herself in. It wasn’t the same shore she’d known before, but it was something. It was a place.
She could love her friends and family and use her darkness only to protect them. She could be the dragon only a few would ever know wanted to be something else. Something softer.
“I don’t know, Daddy.” She could let the river take her someplace infinitely cold. Or she could let her father teach her. She could shut her heart away completely and become what everyone thought she would. Or she could guard it and only open it to those she was closest to. She could keep her parents. She could keep her sisters. She could keep Lou. “I don’t know.” Tears began, fat and filled with toxin, rolling down her cheeks. She let them because it suddenly felt so damn good. “I don’t know what happened because they drugged me and now I don’t know…I don’t know…”
A deep sob heaved from her body, the feeling so overwhelming she couldn’t hold herself up. It didn’t matter because her father was there, wrapping himself around her. Holding her so tight that for a moment she couldn’t breathe.
Then her mom was there, too, wrapping around the other side and completely encircling her, and she found herself telling them everything.
She found herself utterly broken, but now with hope that she could put herself back together.
She wasn’t Julia Ennis and she never would be.
Kala held on to her parents as she tried to ride out the storm.
* * * *
“Have you seen her?” Cooper hustled to catch up with TJ. Kala had been home a full week, and he’d heard nothing more than she was fine and she would be back at school today.