Page 1 of A Wreck, You Make Me (Bad Boys of Bardstown #3)

Nine Years Ago

He’s drunk again.

I can hear his footsteps. Loud and stumbling.

I can also hear his voice, muttering to himself as he opens and closes the cupboard in the kitchen.

I’d wonder why no one else in the house can hear him except me, but I already know why.

My younger sister, Snow, is sleeping in the room beside mine, and she can sleep through thunderstorms. And my mother probably took her sleeping pills before going to bed and I know from experience she won’t wake up until morning.

Sometimes she doesn’t wake up until the afternoon.

We sometimes see her stumbling around the kitchen with her coffee when we come back from school, my sister and I.

Which means I’m on my own.

If something happens, that is.

If he decides tonight’s the night he wants to do something.

Something more . Something like turning the doorknob and opening the door to get inside my room.

Because usually on nights like these, when he comes home drunk from God knows where and makes his way up the creaking stairs, he stops at my door.

He breathes, heavy and loud, sometimes frantic.

I hear rustling of clothes. I hear movements, fast and quick.

Of his chest maybe, his hands, I don’t know.

All I know is that I count the seconds until he moves on and goes to his own bedroom, passing out beside my mother.

Before waking up the following morning all fresh and chirpy, making pancakes for all of us, acting like last night never happened.

Like he never called home to say he was going to be late coming back from his job.

And that he never came home drunk and stood at my door for minutes on end while my heart raced and I gripped a baseball bat that I stole from school in my hands, just waiting for him to do more than stand outside my door.

Like he’s the best husband in the world, the best father.

He’s not.

He’s my step father, and he’s a very shitty one at that.

It’s not new knowledge; I’ve always known it.

I knew it when my mother brought him home and told us she was going to marry this man.

I was about six or so and Snow was only two.

I didn’t know why I thought he wasn’t a good man; I just did.

But when I told my mother, she didn’t listen to me.

She said I was making things up, that I was ruining things for her.

She said that my biological father was gone now and my stepdad was going to take care of us.

At the time I hadn’t understood why my biological dad went away.

But then years later I found out my mother had an affair with my stepfather while still being married to my biological dad.

My dad found out, and divorced my mother, leaving me and Snow alone.

Even though I made him promise that he’d visit, he never did.

And that’s because my mom’s betrayal had been bigger than an affair.

She also got pregnant from it and tried to pass Snow off as my dad’s daughter. So when Dad left, he left for good.

And now here I am.

Outsider in my own family. Abandoned by my real dad, hated by my mother and still hating my asshole stepfather and waiting for the said asshole to move on from my door that he’s started pausing at ever since I had my twelfth birthday, and make his drunken way to his bedroom.

I’m not afraid for myself though. I’m not afraid of him coming into my room in the middle of the night to do bad things.

Things that I’ve seen on TV and read about.

Things that girls talk about at my school that they do with boys behind the bleachers.

I’ve got a baseball bat, remember? I’m more worried about Snow.

She’s only eight, and what if he starts pausing at her door?

She doesn’t know how to protect herself.

She doesn’t even know about our stepdad’s drinking problem.

No one does, and even if I told my mom, she wouldn’t believe me.

Which is why I’ve taken to sneaking into Snow’s room after she’s fallen asleep and sleeping on the floor to keep watch.

Not tonight though.

Tonight, I have a mission. I’m going to change things.

As soon as I hear my stepfather’s footsteps receding, I break into action.

I jump out of bed and stow the baseball bat under it.

I head to my window and climb, grabbing hold of the tree branch before making my way down to the ground.

I do it with an ease that suggests I’ve been sneaking out of my second-story bedroom window for years.

I haven’t.

I’ve only been doing it for a few months, because we’re new in town. Apparently, my stepfather got a new job in town six months ago and my mother packed us up from Pennsylvania and moved us all to Bardstown.

It’s the most boring town in the world and I hate it.

I hate that it’s in the middle of nowhere and everyone here seems soccer crazy.

As in, that’s the town sport. Everyone loves Friday night soccer games at the high school.

Every restaurant and store and bar in town has soccer playing on their TV screens.

It’s nuts, and I can’t wait to get out of here and go back to Pennsylvania.

And tonight, I’m going to make it happen.

Because my stepfather hates this town too.

There was a huge fight between my mom and him, and I overheard him saying that he didn’t want to go ‘back’ to Bardstown.

And mom said she didn’t want to either, but we wouldn’t have to if he’d gotten a job anywhere else.

Turns out, there’s a reason why my stepdad didn’t want to move here.

I head to the bus stop. This town is still new to me but I’ve meticulously mapped out the route to my destination for the past week so I don’t get lost. Although from what I understand, even if I do get lost, I could ask anyone for directions, and they’d know what I was talking about.

The place I’m going to is pretty famous here.

The Thorne house.

It sounds like the name of a castle or a museum or whatever, but it’s not. It’s where the Thorne family lives, four Thorne brothers and their baby sister. More than the house though, it’s their story that’s famous in Bardstown.

Their father abandoned them when they were really young and never looked back.

He left them with their mother, who struggled to make ends meet.

But they were happy because the father was a monster.

He was abusive both physically and emotionally, and so they were better off without him.

For a few years it seemed like things were going good for them.

Yes, there had been struggles but they were managing.

But then their mother found out she had cancer, and after a long and painful fight, she passed away. At which point the oldest Thorne sibling gave up college and a very promising career in pro soccer to come back home and assume the guardianship of his younger siblings.

It’s been six years since then and they’ve managed to stay together, these four brothers and their sister.

People love them for their unity and tenacity.

Their saga is the first thing I heard when we moved here.

Not only because of their tragic life story, but also because the Thorne brothers are soccer legends.

Every single one of them is a great soccer player in the making.

In fact, one of them just got drafted to the pros, the first in his family after the oldest Thorne.

People whisper about him in school hallways.

Girls ooh and aah about him at lunch break, about how he’s the rising star of the New York City FC, the team he was drafted into.

They call him the Wrecking Thorn, his soccer nickname because once he has the possession of the ball, nothing and no one can stop him from scoring a goal.

He’s like a wrecking ball, destroying everyone in his path to victory.

They say he has a bright future in the European League and how, even though he stays in New York most of the time to play with the team, he always makes sure to visit Bardstown to be with his family.

It’s the stuff of fairy tales, the struggle of the Thorne siblings, how they overcame everything and stand united.

And I do feel bad that I’m going to ruin it for them tonight.

But I don’t want to think about that right now.

Not when I have to protect my sister. My mother too, from a monster, and hopefully get her love back.

Their street is quiet and dark. I use the moon to guide me to their house and when I get there, I pause and stare at it.

Made of red bricks and a slanting roof, it looks like all the other houses on the street.

Well, maybe a little more on the unkempt side, with the front lawn being wild and in need of mowing.

There’s a brick pathway in the middle of it that goes up to the wide stairs leading to the rickety-looking porch, and it looks cracked as well.

Something about that makes my heart clench.

I go around the house and notice their backyard is much the same, with long unkempt grass, a giant tree in the middle and a soccer net far back. There are stairs here too, which lead to the back porch, and the wood looks just as rickety.

It only manages to clench my heart harder.

It only makes it more difficult to do what I’m here to do.

I mean, they already have so much to deal with.

Even though I know most of the Thorne siblings are adults now, they’re still pretty much parentless.

They went through a really hard life—still going through it—and my presence may only make things more difficult.

Just because my life is hard, it doesn’t give me the right to make someone else’s hard too.