Prologue

Prologue

In line with the rest of the world’s population, some days were easier than others. Everyone had bad days, though the definition of bad was relative. Still, no matter how badly your day might be going, it was safe to say that there were people out there who had it worse.

Sure, no one could argue that I’d seen my fair share of evil, but as incredible as it sounded, it could have been a lot worse. I could have been poor with crappy medical insurance, instead of being wealthy with the best doctors on standby. I could have had long lasting physical injuries to accompany my emotional and mental scars, but I didn’t. My arms worked, my legs worked, my neck…everything vital worked, and I knew just how lucky I was that they did.

I also could have been left to deal with it all on my own, but I hadn’t. I’d had a support system that still astounded me sometimes, and ten years later, I still had that same support group.

All nineteen of them.

So, yeah, there were people out there who’d had it worse and still did. I understood that. I focused on that so much that it was my life’s coping mechanism, and I still wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. I just knew that it was imperative that I focus on the good and not the bad.

When I had first started working at the call center, everyone had been super concerned, and Lennon had even objected, worried about what this kind of job could do to me. However, after explaining that I needed this job just as much as the job needed me, everyone had relented, and any plans to work in environmental science had disappeared.

Now I worked a job that I loved, though it wasn’t easy, considering. While most of my days left me feeling like I’d made a difference, this last phone call was what had me holed up in the women’s restroom, doing my best to get my shit under control.

The caller wasn’t ready to do anything about her situation just yet, and those were the hardest calls to take. There was nothing tethering her to her abuser other than her low self-esteem, and I’d found myself wanting to reach through the phone and shake her.

After fifteen minutes into the call, I’d found out that she had a job, could afford to live on her own, had no children with the man, and that they weren’t married. It’d been on the tip of my tongue to ask her what the hell was she doing, and that’s when I knew that I’d needed a break from the phones. The call center wasn’t a place that you called to be judged. It wasn’t a place that you called to hand you all the answers. It wasn’t a place that you called to not feel safe.

The call center was a place that you called to not feel alone. People called us because we were the only hope that some of these callers had. We were here to show people that they weren’t alone.

Now, while some of us had psychology and sociology degrees, a lot of us were just normal people that understood what it meant to have your life turned upside down by abuse. Verbal, physical, psychological, sexual, emotional…we were here for it all.

The only thing that we didn’t do was take calls from minors. At least, not at this call center. There was another call center that had trained psychologists to take calls from minors. In all honesty, I wasn’t sure that I was even strong enough to take those kinds of calls. I knew that evil existed, and I knew what that evil could do to a child, and the very thought was nauseating.

Throwing some cold water on my face, I patted my face dry, then stared at the reflection looking back at me in the mirror. It had taken me two years to heal physically from what had happened to me, and four years for me to join the living again. Then, five years after therapy, I had found this job, and I’d been working here ever since. Four years later, there wasn’t much that I hadn’t already heard, and though all the stories were different, the evil was the same.

There were some days that I wished that I had the courage to hunt these abusers down and just kill them where they stood, but that wasn’t real life. All anyone cared about these days was the perfect selfie angle, or whether or not they could stretch their fifteen minutes of fame into twenty.

No one cared about real people anymore.

Taking a deep breath, I gave myself one final look in the mirror, then went to get back to doing my job; the job that I had signed up for willingly and had even fought for.

When I swung the door opened, I ran smack dab into a hard chest, and unfortunately, I knew exactly who that chest belonged to.

Killian Warrick.

Because my day hadn’t been crappy enough?