Page 26 of Rebel
She shook her head, and he worried that Blitz had driven his kid sister all that way for nothing. “Mom’s not coming back,” she whispered. “She told me that she wasn’t ever going to see me again, and I believe her.”
“Do you know why she left, Josie?” Drifter asked.
“Nope, and I really don’t care why she left. Just like I don’t care why you left. I’m just here because I don’t want to go into a group home.” Geez, she wasn’t shy at all about giving him the truth.
“Fair enough,” he mumbled. “You hungry?” Drifter asked, wanting to change the topic.
“Starving,” she said.
“I just fed you an hour ago,” Blitz reminded.
“Well, I didn’t like the shitty healthy food you forced on me. Can I get a burger?” Josie asked him.
“Sure, kid, and I don’t blame you for not wanting to eat healthy shit—it’s the worst.” Drifter walked past her and Blitz,straight back to the kitchen, where he knew for sure that Monster was listening to their whole conversation. He was going to get his little sister some food, and then he was going to ask his buddy for advice, because Drifter had no idea what to do about Josie or the sexy CPS woman who brought her to town.
Blitz
Blitz had grown up in the system. Her birth mother had given her up for adoption when she was only two days old, and there was no birth father listed on her birth certificate. She didn’t remember her adoptive parents because they both died in a car crash when she was about six months old. They had left her with a babysitter, and when no other family came forward to take Blitz in, she ended up in foster care. At least, that’s what her case worker told her on her eighteenth birthday, when she was released from the system and left on her own.
Honestly, Blitz had no idea what to do out in the world with no one telling her what to do. She had lived with five families over the eighteen years that she was in foster care, and most of those families loved to bark orders at her. They had more rules for her to follow than she could count, and when she left the system, she had the freedom that she had always wanted, but never thought that she’d have.
She learned to survive on the streets long enough to get a waitressing job and save up enough money to get a shitty apartment in the city. Some of the kids who had gotten out offoster care before her had let her sleep on their sofas, but she never stayed too long. She didn’t want them to think that she was taking advantage of their generosity, so she’d stay at each place for a few nights and then move on. Sometimes, Blitz slept on a street bench, but for the most part, she usually had warm, safe places to sleep thanks to her former foster siblings.
She had kept her nose clean, and Blitz was pretty proud of herself for that. A lot of her old friends weren’t so lucky, and they lived hard lives that Blitz wanted nothing to do with. When she had enough to rent her first place, she was pretty damn proud of herself. She had found a secondhand bed and sofa that fit perfectly in the efficiency apartment that she found. She had all the comforts of home and couldn’t ask for anything more. Well, that was a lie. She was working her ass off, spending all her time at the diner and even picking up shifts because when she sat in her tiny apartment feeling alone and that usually led to her feeling sorry for herself. That was something that she usually tried to avoid—feeling sorry for herself. She had plenty of reason to feel that way after losing two sets of parents in the first six months of her life. But Blitz learned at a young age that throwing herself a pity party usually didn’t end well for her.
Blitz lived her lonely existence, not able to balance work and personal time very well. And then, one Thursday in October, she met the man who was supposed to be the one. Maybe she was naïve, thinking that her first real boyfriend would be the man that she’d spend the rest of her life with, but she did. She was sure that he felt the same way, too, but when he started acting strangely, she had second thoughts. Reed told her that he loved her after just two weeks, and she wasn’t to that point yet. They had only been on a handful of dates by that point, and while having dinner at her favorite Italian restaurant, he blurted out the three little words that she had never been told before. Maybe that’s why she was so thrown off by his declaration. No fosterfamilies worried about making her feel loved. They thought that it was enough that they had given her a roof over her head and food in her belly. They didn’t do feelings, and she wasn’t sure of her own, even with Reed.
She didn’t say it back to him, and although he told her that he understood, his anger told her a different story. Of course, Blitz felt horrible for hurting him that way, and before she could stop herself, she asked him if he wanted to move in with her. How the hell she was going to fit another person into her small space was beyond her. She wasn’t really thinking when she asked him. For some reason, she wanted to make him feel better since she was the one who put the scowl on his face. That should have been her first red flag, but it wasn’t. Reed agreed to move in with her right away, and within just four short days, he had practically moved all his stuff into her place.
She had finally gotten what she wanted, and she felt far from alone, but Reed’s strange behavior just got worse with time. He started dropping by the diner to check on her, saying that he missed her and needed to see her. At first, Blitz thought that was cute—even romantic. But then, he started popping up at other places she was, like the grocery store, or even the hair salon. He would always have a good excuse as to why he was there. Sometimes he told her that it was a coincidence, which she didn’t believe. Other times, he said that she told him that she was going to the grocery store, and he thought that he’d stop by to help her. She hadn’t told him about going on a trip to the grocery store because it was a spur-of-the-moment decision to stop by and pick up a few things for dinner. And every time she’d call him out for lying, he’d become irate. He was furious at her for not believing him, and she’s usually back down, not wanting to cause a fight with Reed that would leave him pouting for days.
The biggest red flag was when he asked her to marry him after just a few months of living together. She laughed whenhe first popped the question. Blitz was sure that he was joking, but the look on his face told her otherwise. She turned him down flat, and that was when he grew violent. His anger was something that she had witnessed firsthand, but he had never hit her before. She told him to get out of her apartment, and he hit her again. The only reason that he stopped smacking her around was because her neighbor, Mr. Higgins, knocked on her door, shouting that he had called the police.
Reed took that as his cue to leave, but he promised that he wouldn’t be far. He meant it, too, because he was always lurking around every corner, watching her. It was as though Reed didn’t care if she saw him in the shadows. He wasn’t even trying to hide the fact that he was stalking her, and that was the scariest part of all.
When Josie’s case popped up in her office, she couldn’t help but take it. At first, she took the case because the teenager reminded her so much of herself when she was that age. Her mother had just taken off on her, leaving her all alone in the world. Shoving the girl into a foster home didn’t feel right, so she did some extra digging. Josie’s grandmother offered to take her, but the poor woman was barely able to take care of herself. Josie would have to become the old woman’s caretaker, and that wasn’t a life for a teenage girl. When her grandmother told Blitz about Josie’s older brother, she knew that she had to convince him to take the teenager. She knew that some older siblings would balk at the idea of taking on a teen. He probably had his own life and maybe even a wife and kids of his own. But the last thing that she wanted to happen was to have to put Josie in a foster home.
After she convinced Drifter to take Josie, she started coming up with a plan to get out of town for a while. If she offered to drive Josie to his place, she’d come up with an excuse to stick around to keep an eye on her, wanting to make sure that she wasokay before heading back home. It was a total lie. Her duty was to get Josie to her brother, one way or another. Hell, she could have put Josie on a bus and delivered her to Drifter that way. But Blitz needed to get out of town. She needed time to think about what to do about Reed. She knew that going to the police wouldn’t have stopped him from stalking her. He was obsessed with her, and that had become perfectly clear every time she saw him lurking around a corner. She was going to use her time away from home to figure out her next move, and she was pretty sure that it didn’t involve going home again—ever.
When she walked into the bar to meet Drifter, she ran right into a solid wall of man—Monster. He was hot and exactly the type of guy that she was currently trying to avoid. She had fallen for the bad boy in Reed, and look where that had gotten her—on the run with no real plan in place. And when Drifter walked into the bar, she nearly swallowed her damn tongue. Keeping her composure was hard to do, but she hoped that neither man saw how she had reacted to either of them. Drifter looked like even more of a bad boy than Monster did, and she knew that gawking at either of them.
She needed to concentrate on Josie and getting her settled, and hopefully she’d be able to get her mind off the two hot bikers, but she was pretty sure that was going to be nearly impossible. Especially with the way that they were both watching her. It was almost the way that Reed looked at her, and there was no way that she’d get involved with anyone who reminded her of her ex. She didn’t need anyone else to worry about stalking her. With any luck, she’d find a little place to rent for a week or two so that she’d be able to figure out what to do next. Blitz was sure that Drifter wouldn’t want her sticking around to keep an eye on Josie forever—no matter how much she needed a place to lay low and possibly start over. She had to start over once, and she was sure that she’d be able to do itagain. And this time, she’d figure out another way to handle her loneliness when it crept back in.
Monster’s Madhouse (31 Days of Trick or Treat Collab) Universal Link-> https://books2read.com/u/mgxMEv
If you love K.L.’s Huntsville Royal Harlots series, you won’t want to miss the new RHMC Yonkers, NY chapter! Ember is out now!
Ember
Ember crouched in the corner of the abandoned church, hoping and praying that her gut was wrong. Maybe she was just overreacting or being paranoid, but her gut hadn’t been wrong yet, so she was going with it. Her ex-boyfriend had possibly found her again, and this time, she might not be able to get away from him. This time, he might just catch her and do the unspeakable things that he had promised to do to her.
His own mother had warned her about Marco, but did she listen—no. Really, she only had herself to blame, but that was something that she’d think about another day. Right now, she needed to figure out how Marco had found her again.
Ember had spent the last sixty-three days running and was no safer now than she was when she packed her bag and left Sarasota, Florida. She was careful, at least she thought that she had been. She even ditched the old pickup truck that she had made her escape in, trading it in for a rusted-out Ford Focus. She loved that fucking truck, and having to leave it behind nearly gutted her, but she knew that if Marco caught up with her, he’d do even worse than that to her. He had made her many promisesover the past two months, mostly leaving messages on her phone and texting her everything that he’d do to her once he caught up to her again. Ember ended up ditching her phone somewhere in Virginia, and giving up her only lifeline to her friends and family wasn’t easy. She was sure that her mom was worried about her, but contacting her would only put her in danger. If Marco hadn’t gone by her mom’s place yet, he would at some point, and the less her mother knew about where she was, the safer she’d be.
Marco wasn’t always a bad guy. When she first met him, he was charming, had a good job, and treated her like a princess. But then, he was attacked at work by the janitor with a crowbar, and he started to change. He spent almost a month in the hospital while his skull healed, and had two operations to close the wound, but he was finally cleared to come home. He had a half-inch wide scar that ran across his head from one ear to the next, and he said that he liked the way that it made him look like a badass. Ember was sure that the novelty of being a badass would wear off for him, but she was wrong. That was when she started seeing changes in him. They were subtle at first, but by the end, she was afraid for her life.
Marco took up the hobby of beating the shit out of her whenever he got the chance, and she begged him to go get help. Ember hoped that sooner or later, he’d either end up killing her or moving on from her, but she was wrong. Filing police reports never worked in her favor. He’d turn on the charm and convince the cops that she was being overly dramatic, and since he was careful never to leave marks on her face or arms, they believed him. When she finally realized that there would be no stopping him, she packed her meager belongings and took off. Where she was going was a mystery, but staying in Sarasota wasn’t possible. As a singer in a popular band in Florida, Marco had many friends around town. If she hid at one of her friends’ places, he’d find her, and she didn’t want to put them in danger, too. So, sheheaded north, hoping to never see Marco again, but Ember had never been lucky in life or love.
