Page 1 of Dirty Love

PROLOGUE

NICKY

Fourteen years old…

I’ve never seen my brother cry.

Not once in eleven years.

He’s only a few months older than me, but he’s always been the stronger one. He’s the one who protects me from the bullies at school, the one who holds my ears in the dark when the screaming gets too loud, the one who takes the daily beatings so I don’t have to.

He’s one of the only two people in the world who have ever given a damn about me.

And now he’s the only one I have left.

My tears stream over my face and I look down at the small, faded scar on the inside of my left hand, slowly trailing my thumbnail over the spot. I cut myself on a tree in the woods when I was ten and it hurt like hell. My brother brought me home to clean it up and held me while I cried, then he took a knife from the kitchen drawer and cut himself with it, gave himself the exact same scar as mine just to make me feel better.

Remembering that usually helps me cope at times like these, but it’s not working right now.

Nothing is working.

My heart feels like it’s stuck in my throat and I can’t—

“Breathe, Nicky,” Kade whispers in my ear, his arms wrapped around me in a tight grip that would probably hurt if I didn’t need him so much. “In and out, long and deep, over and over, remember? Copy me.”

I nod and fist his hoodie with both hands, desperately trying not to have a panic attack in front of all these people. It’s the middle of the night and our house is full of police officers, the blue and red flashing lights blinding us through the windows on the other side of the small living room. There’s a picture of our mom on the side table in the corner, taken by our dad the last time we went to the cabin for the weekend. She was pale and thin like me, with long black hair she used to let me play with when Dad wasn’t home. Her smile looks fake in the picture—just like it was a lot of the time—but I know she always did her best to pretend for us.

She made us dinner and watched a movie with us before we went to bed tonight, only to be wheeled outside in a body bag a few hours later.

Dead.

Here one minute and gone the next.

Our dad’s telling them she was killed by a man in a mask, one who broke into our house and bashed her head against the kitchen counter while he was on his way home from work. He’s saying he walked in on him attacking her and chased him out, but then he let him run away so he could try to save his wife from bleeding out on the floor.

I think he’s a liar.

Kade thinks so, too, but we don’t say anything.

We know better than to do something stupid like that.

I swallow the lump in my throat and look up at Kade, not surprised to find him glaring at the picture in the corner, his jaw tight, his eyes glassy and bloodshot. He looks angry and devastated and wrecked by the loss of our mother, but still, he doesn’t cry. He doesn’t have a panic attack. He doesn’t do anything but hold me tight against his chest, gently running his thumb over my hip beneath my hoodie. I focus on that and try to match his breathing like he told me to, in and out, long and deep, over and over…

“Kade. Nicky,” someone says quietly, crouching down in front of us to place her hands on our knees. “My name’s Veronica. Do you remember m—”

Kade snatches my leg away from her and I lift my feet up to his lap, twisting in his grip to try and get closer to him. She smiles sadly and lifts her hands up in surrender, careful not to touch us this time. She’s a police officer like our dad, a blonde haired woman with brown eyes and thin lips. She looks nice enough, I guess, but just because it’s her job to protect people doesn’t mean she actually does it.

We know that better than anyone.

“I’m so sorry about your mom,” she says, but I can’t tell if she means it or not. “I can’t even imagine what you two are going through right now, but I need you to talk to me about what you saw here tonigh—”

“They didn’t see anything, Ronnie,” Dad cuts in, standing over us with his arms folded across his chest, his dark eyes bouncing between me and Kade. “They were upstairs the whole time. Only came down after I chased the bastard out the front door. Right, boys?”

His question makes me flinch and I drop my attention to my lap, remembering what Kade said to me before the cops showed up earlier tonight.

We have to lie, Nicky.

Partly because there’s a good chance they won’t believe us over one of their own, but also because there’s a small chance they will believe us, send our dad to jail and split us up in the foster system.

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