Shattered Hopes (Letters of Ruin #2)

Prologue

People judged others by what they saw. I learned that quick and hard. I was once a girl people were eager to please, with nice clothes, no dangling threads to be pulled, soft-brushed pigtails, and a beaming smile that spoke of a happy, safe, respectable homelife.

You see, wealth is in everything. It shows in your attitude, your clothing, and your well-being.

I had that. My parents were well off. Both were doctors, and my brother was studying to follow in their footsteps.

I wanted to as well. I was forever proud to stand up on the first day of each elementary school year and tell my classmates and teachers about my cardiothoracic surgeon mother, my pediatric surgeon father, and then my valedictorian brother accepted into Harvard Medical.

Life was good, and back then, I didn’t have a care in the world.

Then the accident happened. You never think it’s going to be the last time you see a loved one until they are gone.

I was ten when my parents’ car was T-boned in a hit-and-run on their way home from date night.

My brother, Noah, became my guardian after that.

I was eleven when the stock market crashed and knocked our parents’ savings down by more than half.

I didn’t get it back then. All I knew was that Noah decided we couldn’t afford the tuition of his last two years at the subpar medical school he transferred to after their deaths, pay the high upkeep on our parents’ home, and keep me enrolled at my private school if he wanted to promise me any kind of future.

He had student loan debt—another concept I didn’t grasp.

If I had known then what I know now, I would have fought harder for him to finish his degree.

I would have pushed for us to live in the smallest dump in the world if it meant we were safe and happy together, but I was ignorant, grieving, and downright selfish.

I wanted the house I grew up in and the life my parents had promised me.

When I was fourteen, Noah was gunned down while working to give me the future I thought I wanted. From that day on, whatever veil of innocence that used to shroud me disintegrated into ash.

Being an orphan became more than just a part of who I was. It became how people defined me. I was no longer my father’s daughter, or my brother’s sister, the girl with a promising future. I wasn’t the vibrant, polished child my ambitious mother had inspired me to be.

Now, I was just another statistic, nothing more.

From then on, I was judged not on merit but because I was part of the system.

No one wanted to know more about me once they learned that little fact, and they certainly no longer expected much of me either.

No one except him cared at all. Renzo Iannelli might have been the monster in the dark that my parents always warned me about, but he was also the nightmare that let me thrive.

Within days of Noah’s death, I stopped dreaming of following in my parents’ footsteps.

It was so easy for others to tear my spirit down, especially when it was hanging on by only a thread.

It wasn’t as if I could afford much of anything anymore, had anyone to make proud, or had a reason to look to the future among all the regular teenage angst. I was angry—at the world, at myself.

I wanted revenge. I needed someone tangible to blame.

It was so easy to do with him before I even knew him at all.