Page 6 of The Venom We Bleed

I thought nothing could make this night worse.

I was wrong.

As Morpheus opens his mouth again, all of the emotions I’d been feeling crash towards me at once. The hurt. The regret. The pain. The loss. The confusion. The anger. They hit me and that’s it. I step away from him and my mother. My heartbeat slows down until it’s a slug squeezing through my arteries. A distant ringing echoes against my eardrum, growing louder and softer … louder and softer. Tingles race up my arms and down my legs as goosebumps rise up on my skin. It’s gone. All of it. The money. The protection. I cut my gaze to Morpheus and then my mother before they slide back to the blue and red flashing lights of the cop cars situated outside of my family’s home.

It’s the end of May. It should be warm. Yet, all I taste is the burn of ice on the back of my tongue.

Suddenly, I don’t feel anything anymore. I don’t want to. Not agoddamnthing.

3

JULIET

2 months later…

“Damn, girl, here again?” The sound of Cory’s deep voice pulls me to a halt. Sweat drips down the side of my face, making the faded blue tendrils of hair that have slipped out of my ponytail cling to my cheeks and neck. “Why’d you come in so early? Ain’t you in school yet?”

“School starts today,” I answer the gruff older man, bending as I catch my breath without looking his way. One look at my expression and there’s no doubt in my mind that Cory will guess the reason I decided to drag myself out of bed at five a.m. on a Monday morning for a workout before school. Hell, he probably doesn’t even need to see my face to know why, but I keep my face averted regardless.

“Ahh, right.” Cory’s voice drifts off and the only sound that can be heard in the responding silence is the drip of my sweat on one of the plentiful faded blue mats or the churning cough of the fifteen-year-old air conditioner.

I slam my carefully taped knuckles into the punching bag once more as Cory speaks again. “You’re going to Public now, I heard.”

I immediately reach out, catching the swinging bag as it jerks away before coming straight back. Holding it with both hands, I’ve never been more grateful for the lack of an early morning crowd in Cory’s gym than I am now. His continued words, though, mean he’s not intending to give me the stress relief I’m craving. He wants answers, and as one of the few people left in Silverwood who’ll actually treat me like a human being, I owe him at least my respect and consideration.

I lift my head and give the gym owner a bland look. “Yeah,” I tell him. “I transferred over the summer.” He already knows that, but I don’t point it out. As if he senses my inner thoughts, Cory shakes his head. The black dreads hanging down his back hardly move.

Turning away from Cory’s dark and insightful gaze, I reach for one of the towels and spray bottles that are stationed around the gym for people to wipe off the equipment they use. Presenting the nozzle to the outside of the punching bag, I douse it.

“Can’t says I blame you for coming here ‘stead of getting ready for school,” Cory mutters before lifting his voice a bit, “but you know you can’t be coming around as often now, right? No slacking on your school work.”

“I won’t slack,” I promise as I wipe down the equipment and replace the items in their rightful box. “I want out of this fucking town.”

Any other adult might have chastised me for cursing. Then again, most of the adults of Silverwood would’ve turned me away at the door—membership or not—simply because of my last name. Three months ago, being a Donovan had meantsomething good and powerful here in Silverwood. Now, it’s the name of a criminal. A pariah.

If anyone knows what’s going to happen the second I step into Silverwood Public, it’s Cory. He might have graduated over a decade ago, but he knows this town and its residents as well as anybody. He knows the tracks that divide the economic classes from obscenely wealthy to dirt poor, and even if he can’t understand every nuance of my sudden downfall in such a short time, Cory knows that someone like me won’t be accepted in Silverwood Public.

A fallen elite and the daughter of the man who wrecked half of this town by embezzling millions from the factories and businesses that keep most of them employed in some way or another. Those on the north side of Silverwood—other wealthy business investors and their prep school kids—managed to muddle through unscathed. Here, though, in the section of Silverwood where I now live because it’s all I can afford, they didn’t. Houses were lost. Life savings. Some of the more destitute even ended their lives when they realized how much they’d sunk into my father’s businesses and how much they’d been scammed.

In the last three months, there have been more suicides in Silverwood than homicides. Considering the violence of the criminal organizations that run rampant on the southside, that, more than anything else, was the wake-up call to make me realize how bad it is going to be when I show up at Silverwood Public.

“I don’t have a choice,” I say, half to myself and half to Cory. “If I want to leave Silverwood behind, I need a scholarship.” I put the spray bottle and paper towel roll back, glancing over at the gym’s owner briefly. He arches a brow at me. “I think this year is going to be my best academic year by far.”

Because I won’t accept another outcome. Failure is not an option.

Cory sighs and his shoulders droop as he nods towards the front of the gym. “Go on home,” he says. “Get properly cleaned up ‘fore the bus come ‘round.”

Even though I’d been about to do just that, I check the old digital clock hanging on the wall above the entrance. “Bus doesn’t come for at least another hour,” I tell him.

“Ain’t you a girl?” Cory asks.

I cast him a confused look. “Has it taken you this long to notice?”

He snorts. “No, ‘course not. It’s just that girls need more time to get ready. Women always do.”

I shake my head and don’t offer a reply. Before? He would’ve been right. Before I wouldn’t have even bothered to glance at this podunk little hole-in-the-wall gym as I drove by in the cherry red BMW my parents had bought me for my seventeenth birthday—after I’d crashed the white convertible that they’d gotten me for my sixteenth.

A lot can change in twelve weeks.I’vechanged and there is no going back.

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