CHAPTER ONE
Age Sixteen
“What the hell is he doing?”
Shawn was freaking out, but that wasn’t anything new.
It was par for the course after we’d finally made the decision to run away from the foster home we were in.
He was always worried that the cops would be called, that we’d be found and thrown back where we’d come from … and he had good reason to be freaked out.
Every single time, without fail, that was exactly what happened.
Different houses, different families, but that didn’t matter.
Same shit, different faces—that was how we always put it—and every single time, when we’d finally had enough, we’d run with the hope that this time, we’d get lucky.
This time, we’d get away. This time, we wouldn’t get caught.
And right now, from the sound of Shawn’s panicked voice, there’d be no such luck this time around either.
With a groan, I pulled my cigarette away from my lips and turned to peer through the trees at the little mom-and-pop corner store we’d just robbed.
Smokes and snacks—that was all we were supposed to go in for.
Whatever we could fit into our pockets and the backpack we’d taken from the house.
Nothing crazy. Just enough until we had the chance to hit another store—maybe tomorrow or the day after.
And Shawn followed the rules—he always did. He and I were always on the same page.
But then, of course, there was Isaac.
“Fucking hell, Ike,” I growled under my breath as I watched my little brother attempt to walk out the shop door with a six-pack of beer before getting stopped by the owner.
The little shit didn’t even like beer.
“I’m gonna kill him,” Shawn said, stabbing his fingers through his dark blond hair and pulling. “They’re gonna call the cops. They’re gonna send us back. I can’t go back there, Bram. Oh fuck, I’m gonna kill that fucking asshole. Fuck!”
“Will you just relax?” I muttered, stamping out my cigarette beneath the heel of my beat-up work boot.
“Relax?! How the hell am I supposed to relax?! I can’t go back there, and he’s gonna be the reason why we have to!”
I slid my unamused gaze toward him to find his eyes rounded with terror.
Fuck, could I blame him? At the foster home we’d just left, the guy had a thing for sneaking into Shawn’s bed at night.
He said Shawn looked enough like a little girl with his long hair to satisfy him, but it didn’t seem to help matters much when Shawn had me chop it off a couple of days ago.
We’d only been there for two weeks before we made our escape.
That was the second home this year, and it was only April.
It was getting harder to find new homes to be placed in, especially ones that would take the three of us—and we were a package deal. It didn’t matter that Shawn wasn’t blood-related. He was just as much my brother as that little asshole across the street.
I had lost enough. I wasn’t losing either of them too.
“I’ll be right back,” I grumbled. “Stay here.”
“Oh God,” I could hear Shawn groan as I slipped away from the cover of the trees and sauntered across the street with my hands tucked deep in my pockets.
The shop owner had Ike by the collar of his jacket—some ugly-ass windbreaker Ike had swiped from the house—and he was picking up the phone from behind the counter.
I hurried faster and pushed the door open, and soon after the little bell above announced my arrival with a happy little jingle, I grabbed Isaac’s arm and yanked him toward me out of the shop owner’s grasp.
“Where the hell have you been?” I hissed, pulling him within inches of my face. “Mom is going crazy, looking all over for you.”
Ike was slow to pick up the ruse I was laying down. He narrowed his eyes and raised a brow in confusion, but at least he was smart enough to keep his dumb mouth shut.
“Is this kid your brother?” the owner asked, cautiously lowering the phone back onto the countertop.
“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “Our mom is furious.”
He peered at me from beneath bushy eyebrows, his eyes skeptical. “Weren’t you in here earlier?”
Without skipping a beat, I nodded. “Our mom sent us to grab a couple of things before school, but I realized she never gave us any money. So, I ran back home, thinking he was behind me.”
Ike started to laugh, and I gave him a quick jerk to snap him out of it.
“You think this is funny?” I barked at him. “Mom was pissed that I left you alone, you stupid jerk.”
The shop owner sighed and removed his hand from the cordless phone. He waved a hand toward the door. “Go. Get yourselves back home. I don’t wanna see him back in here though, you understand? Kid’s a thief. Tried to run away with some beer.”
I nodded like a good boy. “No, sir. He’s not ever coming back here, I swear.”
Then I headed toward the door, dragging my little brother behind me.
He protested and whined as we left the shop and headed across the street, but I continued to pull him along, not giving a single crap that I was moving faster than his feet could carry him.
He tripped and cursed and tripped some more until I shoved him between the trees, knocking him into Shawn.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” I hissed angrily, looking down my nose at his smug face.
“I wanted something to drink,” he said with a casual shrug.
“Beer? You hate beer, you little shit!”
“No, I don’t.”
Shawn rounded to stand in front of Ike and raised his fist. “I should just fucking kill you now.”
I shot my hand out and held it against his chest, stopping him from getting any closer. “Back up.”
“I’m not going back there!” he cried, his eyes wild and crazed.
“Nobody is going back,” I promised, knowing damn well it was an empty one. “Now, come on. Let’s grab our shit and get moving.”
It was early morning still—sometime around seven o’clock—and the world had barely begun to wake up.
But we needed to find somewhere to go and fast before someone spotted three teenagers roaming the streets and not in school.
At sixteen, it would be easy enough for me to pass for an eighteen-year-old high school graduate, but I couldn’t do jack about Shawn’s baby face or the fact that Ike didn’t look any older than thirteen … because he wasn’t.
No, there would be too many questions. We needed to find shelter, we needed to sleep, and we needed to hide.
They did as I’d said, collecting the few things we'd taken from the house. Then they huddled behind me, waiting for the word to move.
That was how it always went. The two of them constantly looked to me for permission, assurance, or whatever the hell was necessary in any given moment. Shit, sometimes, it seemed like they couldn't breathe without me reminding them that they needed air to survive.
I watched the sidewalks and the street. I kept an eye on the shop across the road, waited for the world around us to grow quiet and for the owner who'd almost called the cops to divert his attention to something else.
Then I waved my hand, signaling Shawn and Ike to walk ahead of me.
I could keep my eyes on everything, but I needed them to keep theirs down and not make anyone overly suspicious of the three kids walking around in the early light of dawn.
Then we made our way down the sidewalk. I held my head high and faced forward while moving my gaze from side to side, scoping the area out in search of a good place for us to take cover.
We could find a payphone, I thought, peering down an alley. Give Dad a call.
A snicker was quick to rumble from my throat as my lip curled in a sneer.
Call Dad. Sure, like the dick had ever given a shit about us before.
Why the hell would he start now? Did I seriously think I could lay some sob story on him about the beatings, the hunger, and the late-night bedroom visits the three of us had suffered through most of our lives?
Did I think he’d listen now when he never gave a shit to listen before?
Besides, how the hell would I even reach him if I wanted to? Gerald Crowley found you, not the other way around. He’d made that perfectly clear from the beginning.
“Bram,” Ike whined after we’d been walking for twenty, thirty minutes.
“Shh,” I hissed.
“I’m tired,” he complained, ignoring my insistence that he stay quiet.
“We’re all tired,” Shawn said, reaching out to smack Ike on the side of his head.
“Knock it off,” I snapped at my best friend. Then I turned my eyes back on Ike. “And you, shut up. We have to keep walking.”
Ike sighed but hung his head, gripped the straps of the backpack, and kept moving. Shawn, on the other hand, fell back a few steps to walk in time with me.
“We have to sleep, dude,” he said, keeping his voice low. “We can’t keep walking forever.”
“I didn’t say we were walking forever,” I muttered.
“Okay, so what’s the plan then?”
“You know the plan.”
“Yeah, the plan was to get the hell out of that house, grab some food, and find a place to crash for the night. But we’ve been going for, like, two hours, man. The sun’s already up. We need to lay low.”
The idea was to get as far from where we’d come from as we possibly could.
The farther we were, the less likely they’d find us—hell, if they cared to find us at all.
But Shawn was right. We had to sleep. Being exhausted wouldn’t help us to think clearly, and we were gonna need our wits about us if we were going to survive on the streets—or wherever we happened to end up.
Anywhere was better than being in the system.
And it wasn’t that every house we’d been placed in was bad.
Not all of them got off on hurting the unsuspecting kids put in their care.
But there was no telling who we could trust and who we couldn’t.
Sometimes, just the expectation of things going wrong was enough to fuck it all up, even in the nicest of families, and honestly, those were the ones that hurt the most. Those were the ones that made us feel like we were the problem when they gave us up for being too much, too difficult, and never stopping to understand why that might be.