Locke 2 (Blackwater Boys #4)

The House

T he bangs were incessant.

They would not stop.

And we were trapped.

Where was our mother? She’d screamed at him through the door that she’d called the police. He was supposed to stop trying to break the door down. At school they always said the police would come and rescue you from trouble, but how long did they take?

I didn’t want to poke around downstairs to check on her. Fear had me frozen in place of my sister’s bedroom, feet from her our teacup party.

But I have a cake…

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

“What do we do?” Aurora cried.

My heart thudded against my chest. I held in my shakes. “It’s okay. The police are coming.”

“Kali, what do we do?” she begged, gripping me tightly. “He’s coming! He’s coming, Kali.”

I didn’t know what to do.

I didn’t know…

“The police are coming…” I kept saying. “They’ll be here.”

But he would be here first.

And Aurora knew this.

She looked at me with so much fear. Tears slid down her face, landing on her blue dress. She waited for my lead. She wanted me to save her. I saved her every time she was in trouble. Dragons from her fairytale games or bullies from her school or the spiders that stalked her in our beaten down house. They all faced my wrath.

But there was a monster I didn’t know how to vanquish. A monster who had haunted me my entire life, threatening and unravelling everything, transforming into a living, breathing dragon determined to burn us to ashes.

That monster was my father, and he was beating down our door.