“Something on your mind?” Gunter asks, running his fingers over the side of my neck.

I lean into his touch, trapping his fingers and stilling them. “I catch myself thinking sometimes, wondering what would it be like if I didn’t have you to look out for me.” It’s the honest truth, but I’m not as concerned about it as he’d like to think. If push came to shove I’m could look after myself, but it’s a situation I’d like to avoid if I can.

“Never letting you out of my sight, girl, so don’t waste your time thinking about the what ifs.” He pulls me down, tucking my head to his chest to signal the conversation is over, but as I close my eyes and listen to the steady beat of his heart, my mind refuses to part with the memories so quickly. I squint harder, trying to press the words into the darkest corner of my mind, but he’s there, talking, telling me things I still believe he meant. Even now.

“Go to your room, sweetheart.”

I look up to the face of a man I love like a father, a man I know would never hurt me. “Why?”

“I gotta talk to your parents for a while—adult stuff.”

I scowl at him, frustrated that he still treats me like a child. I’m a teenager now, a young adult. I’m almost a woman. Why can’t he see it? “You’re not being fair.”

“Life’s not fair, sugar. Now be a good girl and go to your room, and Ryan?”

I turn back to him, this big, bad man that my daddy tells me people are afraid of. Yet I can’t see it—I never do. “What?”

“No matter what you hear, you stay in your room. Don’t come out until I holler for you. And if I don’t, and you get scared, then you run. You don’t come in here, you don’t look back—you just run away, okay?”

I frown, confused. Why would he want me to run? But my questions are cut short, the words forever held in my throat as my parents re-enter the living room carrying beer and snacks. I look to my mom, my dad, and something twists in my chest, an emotion I’ve never felt before. I’m afraid—for them. But still, the man beside me loves me, and he treats me like his daughter. We’re safe with him; we always have been. “I think I might go to bed,” I announce to the room, looking the big, bad wolf right in the eye.

“Okay, honey. I’ll be up to see you soon.” My mother smiles, making me a promise she’ll never keep. Only she doesn’t know it yet. She’s ignorant to the danger staring us right in the eye.

I leave the room, aware I’m walking away from more than a simple family meeting, but what can I do?

After all, I’m just a kid.

Twelve years ago, I thought my life was over for good. I’d lost everything: my mother, my father, and any slim hope I’d had at ever living a ‘normal’ civilian life. The news reported it as a ‘home invasion’ gone wrong. What they didn’t know was that there was no invasion—that the man was welcomed into our house with open arms.

He was, after all, family—my Uncle Harris. He wasn’t a biological uncle, but my father had treated him as blood since before I was born. He would recount tales of the trouble him and Harris got up to in their youth: riding their dirt bikes illegally, stealing dollar sodas from the local grocer, and earning money by selling cigarettes Harris took to school to the other kids. The two of them spent every summer together, forming a friendship so tight it spanned through their adult years, even though their paths went in vastly different directions after graduation.

If you believed the spin the papers had on the home invasion story, Harris had come in to our house looking for cash, and when my parents failed to co-operate, he murdered the ‘working-class couple’ before setting fire to the place to cover his tracks. After all, why would a man who knew the inside of the local prison intimately be associating with people who didn’t have so much a speeding ticket to their name? Narrow minded doesn’t begin to explain what those reporters were.

But, when there’s only speculation and hearsay, it’s easy for the media to create the most obvious explanation for something so brutal and shocking. One thing I’ve learnt in my short life is that nothing is ever what it seems at face value. If the answers are too readily found, or the explanation too obvious, chances are there’s something else hidden in the corners that needs to be uncovered.

On that particular night, the thing in the corner of our yard was me. And the man who uncovered me barely surviving on the street three days later was a thug by the name of Hank the Shank—Tommy and Gunter’s father.

The public system had failed me. The investigators never bothered to follow up on my whereabouts when my body didn’t turn up in the ashes of the fire, because why bother when there was nobody asking for the answer? Aside from Harris, the only family I knew of was distant grandparents in Ireland. I still don’t know to this day why they never looked for me, or maybe they did? Perhaps they came too late, long after I’d fled into the night with nothing more than a bundle of questions resting on my shoulders.

Instead, it was the people I’d been raised to believe were the bad guys, the outlaws, who became my saving grace. Those spat on by society were the people who took me in when they didn’t have to and who gave me a new life. Hank picked me up, drove me home, and gave me something I hadn’t had for several nights—my own bed.

A family.

The court finally ruled that my parents weren’t the only victims, that I, their teenage daughter, had also been lost to the fire that night. Another gross error, but this time funded by the kind of people whose pockets are deep for that exact reason—so they can manipulate the facts to suit their purposes, their needs. People like the men Hank worked with. People who repaid loyalty with underhanded favors that meant I could move on creating a new life, if only for a little while before the old caught up to the new.

Because that guy who paid the courts off? His name was Mike—Big Mike if you weren’t on close terms with him. And according to Eddie, he knew a thing or two about me, and about Harris. Small world, huh? Problem is, Big Mike’s now six feet under, and the answers to my past? Well, they’re locked away in Eddie’s head, and Eddie doesn’t like sharing, no matter what you offer him in return. No matter what.

“Why won’t you tell me, Eddie?” I kneel down before his chair, begging with my eyes. “I just want to know why he did it.”

“’Cause if I told you, love, I’d be lettin’ on more than I’m willing to share.”

“Then tell me, is Harris still alive? Is he still a part of that club?”

His hard eyes scrutinize my every move, tracking my hand as I place it on his leg and run my palm up the inside of his thigh. My gut coils at what I’m doing, how desperate I am, but I need to know. “You go near that club, sweet’eart,” he warns, “and they’ll bloody well take their fill of ya. Use you up good an’ proper before they stick a bullet through your head.”

“Is he alive?” I press.

“No, love. That much I’ll give ya.” He reaches out and gently removes my hand, dropping it past his knee as though it were no more than a piece of trash. “Now stop tryin’ to make promises you won’t fulfill. I ain’t tellin’ you nuthin’.”

A pair of steel-toed boots knock me in the leg, snapping me from my daze. Two of Gunter’s friends take up the previously vacant sofa beside us, falling into the seat cushions with that casual arrogance only men like them have. They’re feral, unrestrained by social custom or the law, and totally governed by their own rules. The arm around me tightens—even Gunter doesn’t trust the people he runs with. What a life we lead.

“Much going on?” Taylor asks in his British accent, beady eyes looking past us to the people outside. The guy creeps me out, from his crooked teeth courtesy of one too many fights, to his hard set jaw, right down to his jeans that never see the inside of a washing machine until they’ve damn near changed color.