PROLOGUE – RAVEN (16)
The night in the trailer park was like so many before it—cold, loud, and unbearably heavy. The wind pressed against the thin walls of our rusting metal box, and the flickering light of the lone streetlamp cast shifting shadows across my ceiling, shaped like torn hands reaching for me. I had been awake for hours, half dressed, half ready to run, my small backpack beside the bed. It had been packed for months, just in case that “someday” finally arrived.
The muffled murmur of two men drifted in from the living room, accompanied by the scrape of a lighter and my mother’s dry, slurred laughter. Her tone said everything: she had taken too much again—far too much to notice who walked through her door or where her daughter disappeared at night. For years I had been the only person in this house who looked out for me, and tonight confirmed exactly why.
I rolled onto my side and pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders. Sleep would have been nice. Just once. But I had never slept deeply here—not with all the men who came and went, laughing, whispering, mistaking one door for another. That was why I locked my room every night, before I even took off my shoes. Safety wasn’t a state of being here, only an illusion that shattered the second someone made the wrong sound.
And I heard exactly that sound.
A soft click. Metal. The doorknob.
I froze. I had locked it. I was sure—I always was.
My own breathing felt foreign, too loud, too fast. I pushed myself upright and reached for my backpack, clutching it to my chest on instinct. The door opened a sliver, one inch, then two. The light from the hallway cut across the room like a thin blade.
A man slipped inside. The smell of his clothes—smoke, stale alcohol, sweat—hit me like a cold hand to the face. His gaze roamed the room, lingered on the bed, then on me. The smile tugging at his lips was the ugliest thing I had ever seen.
“Well,” he muttered, bracing himself against the doorframe, “if your mother can’t pay, someone else will have to, huh?”
He took a step toward me.
There was no thought—only instinct. My body knew faster than my mind what I had to do. I jumped off the bed, trying to dart past him, but his hand shot out and closed around my arm. His grip was strong, painful, full of entitlement. I tore myself free, kicked out reflexively, hard and without hesitation, hitting him where it instantly weakened him. He doubled over with a strangled curse, and in that brief, trembling moment of freedom, I grabbed my backpack and ran for the window.
From the living room came another voice, deeper, more alert, irritated. “What’s going on? Where is she?” A chair scraped across the floor. The clink of a bottle. Footsteps.
I shoved the window up, the metal screeching in protest, and the freezing night air rushed in. Without shoes, without a plan, with only a heart pounding far too loud, I climbed out and dropped into the wet grass behind the trailer. The ground burned beneath my bare feet, but I ran anyway.
I sprinted across the yard, past the overturned trash cans, the gutted car no one had bothered to fix in months, past the shadows of other trailers standing like silent witnesses to things no one voiced after dark. Behind me a door slammed open, voices grew sharper, someone shouted my name, but I didn’t look back. I was terrified that if I did, I would stop, and if I stopped, it would all be over.
The street ahead glistened in the weak glow of the streetlamp. A car rounded the corner, its headlights slicing through the dark and forcing me to squint. I ducked into the shadows, stumbled, caught myself, and kept running until my legs burned and my breath tore out of my throat in ragged bursts.
Only when I was far enough that no one could see me did I stop. My hands trembled. My lips stung from the cold. My heart beat like a frantic bird in my chest, knowing only one thing: freedom.
I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and looked back once, toward the place I had come from. There was no home there. Only a place I would never return to.
“I can do this,” I whispered into the darkness, and though my voice barely carried, I heard the strength in it. I pulled the backpack tighter against me, took a slow breath, and kept walking.
Nobody had ever saved me in this life.
So I would save myself.
