Total pages in book: 59
Estimated words: 75754 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75754 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
He’d dwarf her five foot two inch frame.
And imagining hitting this woman with any force whatsoever made rage pour into my gut.
My mind drifted back to memories of my mother with each man she used to pick up on any given day.
Though a few of them weren’t what I would call ‘abusive,’ the vast majority of them were.
Seriously.
Although if there was one thing I could say about my mother, she always protected me.
Even when she gave me up for adoption at thirteen, she was protecting me.
Which had made the entire thing hurt even worse, knowing that she hadn’t wanted to give me up.
But she’d fallen in with a bad crowd, and couldn’t see a way out.
So she’d had a friend drop me off at a fire station.
I’d been coached for hours on what to say and not to say to the authorities.
It helped that I looked a lot younger than I actually was.
So I was put into the foster system, and haven’t seen my mother since that day fourteen years before.
Not that I hadn’t tried to look for her.
I’d looked a lot.
It was just that wherever she was at, she had protection now.
The little bit I’d gathered on her whereabouts indicated protection and not danger.
So I’d let her be, even though it broke my heart to do so.
“When I was around eight months pregnant, Bender beat me so badly that I couldn’t not go to the hospital. I had to make sure my baby was all right. And when I got there, they told me that my baby had suffered multiple traumas and was no longer alive,” she choked.
I snapped back out of my own head with a jarring yank, and I was just as mad now as I’d been earlier.
Child abuse was a hard limit for me.
I’d grown up protected from it until I’d gotten into the foster home with Cormac and Garrison, and there our supposed ‘foster parents’ took turns beating the shit out of us if we didn’t get our housework done on time.
Something that happened quite often seeing as they expected so much of us.
But right then, my focus was all on Ruthie and the tears that she was soaking into my shirt.
“I pressed charges on him. For the first time in seven months, I finally pressed charges…when it no longer counted,” she whispered brokenly.
Her sobs were tearing through my armor that I used to surround my heart.
To hold me back from this very sort of thing.
If you felt, you hurt.
There was no way around it.
If you cared, and trust me, it was something that I tried valiantly not to do, you always end up hurt.
“You weren’t too late,” I told her. “And the charges did count.”
She shook her head.
“He was arrested, and in jail for only an hour. An hour, Sterling,” she rasped. “And I knew, the moment he came up on the man that was changing our locks that he wasn’t going to stop. He didn’t care. He felt like I was the reason for his bad luck. That I was the reason he didn’t get Lily like he wanted.”
I held her tighter, knowing where this was going before the words even left her lips.
“He slapped me in passing, knocking me down and then went into the bathroom. So I went into the bedroom that we shared. Where I slept next to him night after night, scared as hell but knowing he’d accept nothing less from me, and picked up the gun he liked to wave in my face when he was feeling particularly feisty,” she choked. “And the moment he started to pee, I shot him. In the heart. Because I knew if I didn’t, he’d kill me.”
I ran my beard along her face, trying to help the emotions I knew were barreling away inside her.
“I don’t think I would have done a damn thing differently,” I whispered. “Not a single damn thing.”
Hell, I was in an abusive situation for some of the most pivotal years of my life.
I got away from it the moment I could safely do so.
I could’ve told somebody.
But I didn’t.
Why?
I couldn’t really tell you.
When you’re in a situation like that, you don’t see things the same as you do once you’re free and clear of it.
You see them with these glasses on.
It’s like you’re aware that what’s going on is bad, but you don’t think you can get away.
And in Ruthie’s situation, she knew that once she reported what was going on to the authorities, something would happen to her.
So she’d taken precautions.
Not everyone reaches that point.
I never reached that point.
But Ruthie lost something that I’d never had.
A child that she’d loved with all of her heart.
And who wouldn’t react the way Ruthie had?
“What are you doing to my employee?” A man barked.
I looked up to see the owner of the place there, staring at Ruthie in horror looking like he was about to do violence against me on her behalf.
“Dane, this is Sterling. You know him,” she said in exasperation.
Dane’s eyes narrowed.
“Is this the boy that you kept making me watch the news for?” He grumbled crossing his beefy arms over his chest.
She nodded, biting her lip and glaring quickly at me before turning back to Dane.
“Yeah, this is him. He’s okay, though,” she told Dane.
“I can see that. Very healthy…” he said, looking pointedly at my crotch.
I laughed.
Ruthie, however, missed the whole interaction.
“So I’m guessing you want the day off,” he grumbled, starting forward.
Ruthie shook her head. “Not really, no. I was just hoping you wouldn’t mind that he’s here with me. I need the money.”
“You have vacation, you know,” Dane informed her, taking a seat on the stool behind the counter.
Ruthie nodded. “Yeah, but I’m saving that up for something important.”
His brows rose. “What you got to do that’s important that you need a whole fourteen days for?”
She pursed her lips. “I don’t know. But something might come up.”
I could figure out something to do with fourteen days.
And it involved lots and lots of cardio.
“Take your man and get out of here. Have breakfast. Be here tomorrow at nine. I got you for today,” he said, standing up and offering his hand to me. “Glad you made it home, son. You would’ve had one upset girl on your hands had anything bad happened to you.”