Page 9

Seven

— Inspirational words of encouragement

SEARCY

The sound of boots on the cracking linoleum outside my door had my heart pounding.

I’d just sat up, and was slinging my legs across the mattress to put them on the floor, when my door burst open and Koda came barreling in.

“Hey,” he spoke tentatively. “I’m about to head out.”

I frowned. “It’s a little late, isn’t it?”

He shrugged. “Not really, no.”

I felt my heart squeeze inside my chest. “I’m going to miss you.”

He hit the bed beside me and said, “Still no Mom?”

I rolled my eyes. “She does this a lot.”

“I know,” he sighed. “I wish that it would get better for you, C.”

I wished the same.

But, until all of my siblings were grown, that wouldn’t be in the cards for me.

I patted him on his thigh and said, “Get out of here. Let me know when you get there safely.”

He wrapped one arm around my neck and pulled me in, rubbing his scruffy jaw against the side of my face, knowing damn well and good that all beards made me itch.

“I love you, C.” He stood up and grabbed his massive army green bag off the floor. “I already said bye to the others.”

“How are you getting there?” I asked.

“Called for a ride,” he answered. “Take care of yourself. Don’t let Mom take advantage of you.”

Yeah, right.

We’d been letting Mom take advantage of us since before we could walk.

I watched him go and felt my heart pang for a solid ten minutes before I got back to reality.

Work didn’t wait for anyone.

Not even me and my emotions.

Hopping onto the call with the client, I immersed myself in work.

“What kind of look are you going for with this book cover?” I asked. “I can also reach out to some photographers and get a custom photo, that way you don’t get stuck with a stock photo that anyone can use on the covers of their books.”

The author, a USA Today Bestseller at that, laughed a bit.

“I actually was going to ask you about that. The last stock photo I used was awesome…at least I thought. And apparently, another author that writes monster romances thought the same. The only issue was that the author wasn’t very happy that I had the same cover photo on my book and took me to court over it.

Funny thing was, the judge dismissed the case before it could even be heard.

But she set her monster mobster fans on me, and now every book I release has one-star reviews before the book even comes out. ”

“She sounds like a fantastic human being,” I drawled.

“She gets better,” she said. “Last year, she tried to copyright the word ‘alpha’ for her books. She went to the copyright office and applied for the application. Then she goes and starts reporting every book that has the word ‘alpha’ in the title to our biggest retailer. And that retailer starts pulling books down left and right with no warning or even looking into the lady’s copyright ‘infringement.’ So then dozens of authors miss out on nearly two weeks of sales because of this chick.

One author in particular had just released her book and missed out on her entire first week of sales.

They canceled all of her pre-orders and everything.

It was insane. And then the Writer’s League gets involved with their clients and threatens to sue that retailer.

The retailer finally puts the books back up.

Then the Writer’s League sues that author and she’s forced to cease and desist.”

“That sounds messy,” I said.

The next ten minutes of our thirty-minute phone call consisted of what theme we were looking for, what the timeline was looking like for the series that she wanted done, and a few other things.

When we finally rang off, I looked at the clock and realized that I needed to go to bed soon or I’d be too tired to open the stupid diner in the morning.

Morning rush was my least favorite, and usually the one that my mother did because she knew I’d just as soon not come in if I had to open in the mornings.

But since my mother still wasn’t home—something that she did from time to time so I wasn’t too worried yet—I had to pay the bills. And paying the bills required me to get my ass up and get to work.

Unluckily for Kent, he’d seen how tired I was and had offered to work with me this summer. Which in turn meant that Anders had to be there, too.

Not that I felt too badly about it.

I’d spent my entire childhood in those four grimy walls, and I’d made it out okay.

Anders would survive spending her summer there, even if she didn’t like it.

Letting her control the TV above the windows helped.

Thoughts of my childhood followed me into sleep, where I stayed for a solid four hours before I woke up out of a dead sleep.

When I glanced at the clock, I realized that it was well past two in the morning and I hadn’t heard Calliope come back in for the night.

Stomach now in knots just thinking about my little sister, I sat up in bed and reached for my laptop, thinking that if I was going to be awake and worrying, I might as well spend my time wisely.

I didn’t bother to call her or check her location.

She’d disabled the location thing a long time ago when she’d caught me snooping on her whereabouts.

Calling her was just as useless because she sure the fuck wouldn’t answer the phone if I called.

That’d been something she stopped doing when she turned fifteen and decided that I was the worst person on the planet.

Teens were so much fun.

I was about halfway through the first layer, working on font and sizing for the title, when my phone rang on the bedside table.

I didn’t bother to look at the ID, knowing that it was her.

“Calliope,” I said quietly, hoping that my talking wouldn’t wake Kent and Anders.

My room split theirs, and the walls were paper thin.

“Can you come pick me up?” Calliope sounded pissed.

Whether it was because she was calling me for a ride or something else, I would probably never know.

There was only so much I’d ever get out of Calliope. She was overly protective of her privacy, and what little she did give me left me with more questions than answers.

I wasn’t sure if normal teenage girls were like this.

Hell, I remembered being mad at the world myself at that age. But I didn’t have the luxury of withdrawing like she did. I had three kids to help raise.

“Where?” I asked, forcing myself not to ask her what was wrong.

She’d clam up if I did that. Possibly tell me to fuck off and she didn’t need a ride after all.

“I’ll send you my location,” she muttered.

She did in the next moment, but I knew from experience that it would only be for an hour.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I said as I got a good look at her location.

A part of town that I’d never been to before. Hell, it likely wasn’t in Decatur at all, but all the app showed me was directions, not a specific address.

Sighing, I got up and slipped into my clothes from the night before—a white wife beater tank top, cutoff shorts from my favorite pair of jeans that I’d worn the inside of the thighs out on, and a pair of flip-flops that I’d gotten at Walgreens for a dollar in the clearance section—and headed out.

My anger only rose the further I had to drive to get her.

The houses went from shitty—ours—to not shitty in the blink of an eye.

The closer you got to suburbs surrounding Dallas, the better looking the houses got until you were in a subdivision that probably cost a cool million to own.

I slowed my car and pulled over when the streetlights started to turn on.

When one door that I’d stopped in front of actually opened, I turned the car around and parked at the entrance to the subdivision.

Then, I decided…fuck it.

Fuck these guys and their nice houses.

I’d pull my shitty ass car that was in serious need of a muffler right up to this house and they could kiss my ass.

I pulled another bitch and went back past the houses that I’d just woken, right to the house that my sister was now prissily standing in front of.

I barely had my door unlocked when she was yanking it open and fell into the car, her arms crossing defensively over her chest.

My sister was my sister, regardless of whether I liked her all the time or not.

That was why, when she called and told me she needed a ride in the middle of the night, I put everything that I was doing down and went to fetch her.

I was happy that Kent was old enough to be considered an almost-adult now, making it possible for me to leave Anders behind with him.

In the past if this happened, I’d have to get Anders and Kent out of bed and take them with me.

And trust me, it happened often.

Calliope Joe Hodges was hell on wheels, and there wasn’t anything that was going to stop her. Not police. Not lack of funds. And certainly not some guy that told her that she was easy.

The thing about Calliope was, she was easy.

Her self-worth was so low that she didn’t think that she was meant for anything more than what she was doing.

She had no aspirations in life.

Had no desire to go to college, or hell, even discover a trade that she was good at.

She’d told me once that there was no point in her trying, because most likely she’d be forced to work at the diner just like me, and ‘what was the fucking point of trying if you just kept getting sucked back into a shitty life?’

Anyway, my sister had issues, and I was very much aware that sometimes I helped her nurture those issues.

But how the hell was I supposed to say no to helping her out in the middle of the night when she was family?

I just couldn’t.

She’d been mine to protect and take care of for so long that it was near impossible to turn off the instinct.

“Hey,” I said carefully.

Her jaw worked, letting me know that she was fuming mad.

“What’s wrong?” I asked as I pulled yet another U-turn.

“Nothing,” she lied, turning her face away so that she was staring out the window at the nice ass houses that we were passing on our way out of the fancy-ass neighborhood.

I waited her out, knowing when to test her limits, until we were about a quarter of the way home and her shoulders had relaxed.

Her shoulders slumped even further, and I said, “Want to tell me what happened?”

She bit her lip, her expression wavering, and that’s when I knew that whatever had happened tonight had been bad.

She wouldn’t have considered telling me if it wasn’t.

That’s when my own stomach started to twist into knots.

Spotting a 7-Eleven, I pulled over into the nice, well-lit parking lot and turned the car off.

She remained silent for so long that I considered asking one more time, then she started to speak.

“Bryan asked me to go home with him, and I did. I didn’t agree to have sex with him, which he didn’t like. When I told him no, he tried to force me. I kicked him in the balls and called you,” she muttered.

Anger surged like a roiling storm inside of me, and it took everything that I had not to turn the car around and drive it straight through their front door.

The plan had merit.

It wasn’t like I had a great car.

Hell, it’d probably survive just fine.

And I could make it look like an accident.

However, the thought of my insurance going up any more than it had to was slightly devastating to think about.

But, just because I couldn’t drive my car through his front door didn’t mean that I couldn’t do other things.

I started the car and began driving again.

Calliope didn’t say anything until I missed the road that would lead home.

“Where are you going?” she asked, looking confused.

“There are some boxes of instant mashed potatoes at the diner that I was going to throw away because they spilled all over the ground in the kitchen. I was contemplating saving them and eating them at home, though. But then I decided that it was too gross for even my starving self to contemplate,” I explained.

“And what is a box of instant mashed potatoes going to do?” She rolled her eyes like the typical teenager that she was.

“Oh, Kemo Sabe,” I drawled. “You think you’re so smart. But you don’t know everything.”