Prologue
Luke
Who knew a f**king phone call could be so complicated. It should have been a piece of cake for me. All these years spent hating my mother—this is what I’ve been waiting for. Finally, I’d get some form of revenge for all the years of torment, drug injections, the f**king mind games she loved to play with me, and all the other shittiness that made up my childhood. To this day, I still haven’t even begun to fully accept or admit all the stuff she did to me. This should be the moment when I let it all go. Move on. Start over. Except I feel guilty, like I’m a child doing something wrong.
I feel sick to my stomach.
All twisted inside.
And I know it’s because of her. Everything she engrained into my head is surfacing, all the stuff she said to me when I was a child that kept my lips shut. The shame. The embarrassment, not just because she’s my mother, but for myself—because of what she turned me into.
“You always need to listen to me Lukey,” my mother used to say. “I know what’s best for you, more than anyone else does. You always need to do what I say, otherwise you won’t survive this life. And you can’t tell anyone what we do in our house. It’s no one else’s business.” She’d pause and pet my head like I was her dog. “Besides, if they found out the things you’ve done, you’d be in a lot of trouble too.”
I was about eight years old the first time she said this to me and even then it didn’t feel right. The things she made me do… the way she would hold me for hours, murmuring high, incoherent song lines and f**ked up ballads, smoothing her hand over my head, kissing my cheek, begging me to shoot her up again. Wrong. It all felt wrong and disgusting. But the more she said it was my fault, the more it seemed like maybe it was true. How could it not be? She was my mother after all and mothers aren’t supposed to lie to their children.
So I listened to her. Day in and day out, I kept my lips sealed. Sometimes I would try to run away from the house, because I couldn’t take it anymore. But she’d always find me and I started wondering if it was her I needed to survive against. Eventually, I found a way to cope. Drinking and sex, they helped me forget and let me get the control I craved over my life.
I sigh with the phone clutched in my hand, thinking, thinking, thinking. Yeah, I know that my mother’s insane, that she ruined my childhood, f**ked up my head. So turning her into the police should be easier than this and I’m angry with myself that it’s not.
But still, in the end, I picture Violet, beautiful green eyes, full lips, long waves of red and black hair, a sexy tattooed body, a diamond stud in her nose, and the sadness and pain in her expression the last time I held her in my arms. That’s what helps me dial the police station.
“Hello, Albany County Police Department,” the secretary answers. When I hesitate she adds, “Is anyone there?”
I clear my throat again and again, my throat constricting, but I force myself to be strong and fight through my nerves, each one connected to something that happened to me when I was younger. “Yeah, I’d like to report some information about the Hayes’ murder.” As soon as the words leave my lips, I feel twenty times better, the guilt becoming lighter. I just wish doing this could erase the past, but nothing will do that. Nothing will ever get me Violet back. What’s done is done and I can’t ever change it.
Violet
Life. I hate it. More than ever. And destiny, it can go to hell. I f**king hate destiny.
As his calloused hands are on me, feeling my skin, making me internally cringe, I wish I’d never met the bastard known as destiny. Then maybe I’d never gotten a taste of the other side of life, the good side. Then maybe this wouldn’t be so hard.
As much as I’m panicking on the inside, on the outside I am the calm, collected Violet. The one that can fake smile at the drop of a hat. The one that can charm anyone. Even when the pain comes, when my legs bump into side of the bed as I’m forced down onto my knees, I don’t so much as flinch. I’m dead on the outside, stone cold, while on the inside my heart is racing so fast, I feel light headed and woozy. Everything’s moving so quickly, so blurry, I can’t sort through my emotions. Which is a good thing. It makes it impossible to tell what I’m feeling and makes this moment bearable, less painful, less shameful.
Still, as hands continue to wander over me, whispers of owing for messing up, this is the cost, I’m all you got fills my ears and kills my soul, bit by bit, piece by piece. As my head is forced downward, I find myself wishing there was a pause button where I could freeze time, step out of this place and erase what’s about to happen to me.
Yes, there are a shitload of moments in my life that I wish I could do over. That time I didn’t study for my Calculus test, because Preston needed me to deal for him for the first time. The time I went downstairs in the middle of the night and my parents were murdered, while I survived. The night I ran from Luke. This one.
Each has had consequences, some more severe than others. And unfortunately I painfully understand that do-overs don’t exist, at least one’s where you can erase the past and start over. And for the most part, excluding my parent’s death, I’ve never put too much thought into do-overs, placing most of the blame for the shit fest known as my life onto destiny.
But it’s been two months since I left Luke and the apartment that felt more like a home to me than any other place I ever lived. And even though it still makes me sick thinking about how our pasts are tangled together, long before we even met, part of me wishes I’d done things differently. Two months of pure hell with moments packed with whispered threats and calloused hands where I’ve lost track of Violet Hayes, the version Luke Price brought out. She died the second she chose to come back to Preston’s house, because she was hurting and couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. And I’m not sure if she’ll ever live again.
This time I can’t blame what’s happening to me on destiny. Only my pride, my wounded heart, and the choice I made that led me to countless bad choices, all of which can never be erased.
None of this can.
Chapter 1
Violet
I’m on the brink of losing consciousness, fading in and out as two months of bad decisions weigh me down and push me further into the water. My entire body is drenched, my lungs about to combust, yet I don’t come up for air. I freely accept the lack of life inside me and allow myself to stay there, going further and further, until I feel light and weightless. A second or two longer. That’s all I need. I can do it. Feel the comfort for just one more moment before I have to return to the painful reality of my life and what I am.