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was stabbed just once with a shiv made from a toothbrush. It punctured his heart, and no one rushes to get you help in prison, so he bled out outside his cell. Hard man Moore, offed by a teenager sent in for grand theft auto. My Dad had a lot to prove and recover from when he took over his father’s business, but the criminal world was in his blood, he’d been groomed from an early age to take on that world and he did it well. My Mom was his downfall. He was obsessed with her. She was only seventeen when he first met her. She came to my uncle’s with my cousin, and my Dad was there sorting some business, and that was it. He claimed her. She dropped out of school and moved in with him, took a liking to his money and power, and before she knew it he’d knocked her up. She couldn’t cope with being a parent or a wife. My Dad wasn’t the gentlest of creatures and what once was infatuation turned to resentment and hate. His attention didn’t stay with her either. He fucked anything in a skirt and would spend days away from home. Mom got high to escape the life she’d ended up in.
    I spent a lot of my time with my uncles, but they were no better. It’s like they didn’t have a parenting gene to share between them. Once I reached eleven, I was classed as a man in their eyes.
    My uncles and cousins didn’t mind using drugs and fucking whores in front of me, and encouraging me to do the same. I lost my virginity by being tied to a chair by my cousins, and a whore sucking my dick without permission until it grew, and then getting one of her whore friends to sit on it. She was easily in her thirties and it was my fourteenth birthday. I’d been living with my uncle for eleven months, six days. They clapped and toasted to my manhood, and any guy friend of theirs they told thought it was the best thing ever, but I cried that night once I was alone. For the first time since watching my mother die and my father go to prison with a life sentence, I just cried.
    I would have disappeared into the darkness, letting the dark side of my blood swallow me into its hue, but soft, nimble fingers stroked over my shoulder and Alex’s warm, small body buffed up behind me and she held me while I cried in my bed. That was the first night she managed to climb the big tree up to my window on her own. I’d been coaxing her to climb it for almost a year but I’d always have to help her until now. She always smelled like home- my idea of an ideal home, anyway. The ones you see on TV in those Christmas commercials.

T EN Y EARS A GO
     
    My bedroom door crashing open drew my attention. Alex stood in the doorframe, her hair messy and sticking up all over the place. Her shirt was ripped from the collar down to beneath her tits, exposing a lilac bra. My eyes scanned over her in slow motion, trying to grab on to reality because this couldn’t be it. Her legs were shaking, pulling my attention to the red welts on her inner thigh. Her skirt was higher around her waist than it should have been. My fists clenched, panic rioting inside my chest. I needed to go to her but I couldn’t move.
    I managed to choke out, “Alex? What the hell happened?”
    Her gaze was unfocused and my feet carried me to her. I snatched her body up into mine, my hands holding her so tight I wasn’t sure if either of us were breathing.
    “Jonah’s in trouble,” she said. I pulled back and scanned her face but she couldn’t look me in the eye. “Please help him, Dalton. Please do something. I don’t recognize him. He needs help. You have to help him for me… please.”
    I pulled back from her, needing the distance.
    “Do you know what you’re asking of me?” I spat, angry that she asked. She knew how hard I’d worked to stay away from that life.
    “I’m frightened.” She quivered.
    “What happened, Alex? Tell me what the hell happened.”
    The phone rang and our eyes darted to the receiver. I knew it was him, and no matter what I did to better my life I was dragged