Chapter 1

1

"Oh, and Chase?" Vega didn't hide the venom icing her tone. He looked up from the floor, tears streaming down his face, skin blotchy from crying. "Go fuck yourself."

Vega slammed the door in her husband's face. The worn building rattled with the force. Vega ignored Old Man Morris's irritated banging on the wall from the commotion and Chase's shouting as she stormed into the rain-soaked night.

The image of another woman's bare ass on her clean kitchen table would be burned into her memory for as long as she lived.

It was a wet walk to the bar a few blocks away, and the entire time, Vega squeezed her hands so tight, little crescent moons formed in her palms. The world spun around her, nausea causing her stomach to churn like Lake Michigan on a cold winter's day.

She'd gotten off work earlier than anticipated tonight, the rain affecting the traffic at the scummy diner where she worked. Vega had stopped by her and Chase's favorite Thai place to surprise him with dinner.

But she was the one who got the surprise instead…

When the door chimed, announcing her entrance into the raggedy dive bar, Vega's leggings were soaked with cold rainwater. No one looked up from their drinks or the pool tables, and the staff didn't welcome her. She wiggled out of her coat, hung it on the rack by the door to dry, and then found a seat at the bar.

"What can I get ya?" The woman behind the fading counter looked like she hadn't slept for weeks, and her voice was rough with the sound of someone who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day.

"A shot of your cheapest whiskey, please." Vega passed a damp twenty-dollar bill across the counter and snatched her phone from her pocket while she waited.

Ten missed calls and twenty-eight texts.

Before he could show up here and persuade her to listen, Vega turned her location off and imagined what Chase's face would look like when he got the notification that she'd revoked his right to know where she was at all times.

She hoped his sorry ass sobbed a little harder.

The bartender returned with her change and the small glass of amber liquid. Vega tipped the shot back, ignored the burn in her throat, and slid the rest of the money back. "Another," she blurted.

The bartender cocked her head. Question marks seemed to float above her head while her eyebrows scrunched in the middle. Maybe she wasn't used to girls Vega's age coming in and slamming shots of cheap whiskey, or she saw Vega needed to get something off her chest. Whatever it was, Vega took the bait. "I just walked in on my husband cheating on me."

Right after fucking me before I left for work. She didn't say that last part out loud to protect what little dignity she had left. She'd worried about this the day he asked her to marry him because nothing in her life ever stayed good for long. Vega vividly remembered when he got down on one knee just months into their relationship, the smell of the salty water wafting off the Pacific Ocean, the way the sun made his sandy-colored hair glisten, and the way his round face lit up with excitement when the single word, "yes," slipped through her lips. But behind her excitement hid the doubt she would always have when it came to any bit of happiness life allowed her to have.

"This one's on me," the bartender said. Vega's eyes welled with tears, but she forced them away, blinking rapidly. "I hope you clocked him right in the nose." The woman's response made Vega chuckle, but it didn't heal her hurt.

"I should've, huh?" Vega asked. The bartender only nodded in response before walking away to tend to her other patrons. Her thoughts wandered back to Chase and Jessica . What did she look like? Did she hear Chase snort when he laughed so hard he couldn't breathe? Vega hadn't heard it in so long. Did she come from a good family? Had Chase met them? Did he love her?

She bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste blood.

Vega wasn't destined for greatness. She'd known that from a young age. She was destined to be the girl everyone always compared themselves to when they were having a bad day. They would think things could always be worse because look at poor Vega, she couldn't ever catch a break! "At least we aren't Vega," they would say.

In six short months, Vega would turn thirty.

By fifteen, she'd lost her mother to cancer after watching her suffer for nearly a year.

By seventeen, she'd been kicked out of the home she'd been adopted into when they found weed in her backpack.

By twenty-one, her scholarship money ran dry.

By twenty-seven, she'd been fired from her big girl job at Chicago's most prominent marketing firm after it sold to a Fortune 500 company.

And now, before she turned thirty, her life was being flipped upside down by an unfaithful husband.

Her life had always felt like a long string of bad luck, as if someone above got off on watching her struggle. There weren't many moments in her life Vega could look back on and smile, none that made her feel warm and fuzzy .

That was until she met Chase.

Chase came from a good family who went to Colorado every winter for ski trips. A family with lots of siblings and Sunday FaceTime calls. A family with enough money to invest in their children's futures—they were the all-American dream.

And Vega had holes in her memory no one had answers to. She couldn't remember going to elementary or middle school, couldn't remember what her childhood home looked like before her mom moved them to Seattle to start treatment. All she knew was nothing ever worked out.

A therapist once told her it was her brain trauma-blocking.

The bartender never cut her off. Vega didn't care how she was supposed to get home or if she even went home… Here we are again. Her thoughts started to run together. Gonna be just me, myself, and I. Again.

Her inner demons flooded her mind, stirring up another wave of nausea. Vega felt like she was seeing herself outside of her body, floating above in a haze as she reached across the bar to the new shot. Her stomach twirled at the sensation, and as much as she tried to push away the feeling, it sunk its talons in, taking hold.

Ringlet curls bounced in her vision before she blacked out entirely.

Lightning struck, and wind whipped around her. Her stomach lurched, the feeling of falling seizing her body while visions clouded her perception.

The out-of-body experience didn't let up. It only intensified when Vega realized what she was seeing. She and three others were circling a fire, their palms crusted with blood from matching cuts. Her voice rang over the crackle of the large flame.

"We fight for our realm, for our lands. We fight for our people and for those who can no longer fight for themselves. We fight together."

The girl with the pretty curls reached out and squeezed her hand. "Together."

The two men in the group looked at one another, the tallest nodding his head with a surety Vega had never seen before. "And we fight until our dying breaths."

For one split second, her eyes locked with his, and Vega felt like the world stopped. Those eyes. She knew those onyx eyes. The spinning feeling in her stomach shrank, and with a gasp, Vega was back in the Chicago bar.

Somehow, she was still sitting upright on the barstool. Vega turned to look around the bar, her black-painted fingernails digging into the bar top for support. Her knuckles were white from the grip she held as she hoped not to fall off of the stool and embarrass herself.

No one in the bar seemed fazed. At the billiard table, a man with peppered hair reracked the balls on the table, smoke spiraling above his head from the lit cigarette between his lips. The bar was as it was before she slipped into her mind.

What the fuck was that?

The bartender came over, noticing the shift in Vega's mood. "You okay?" Her dark eyebrow raised, almost touching her hairline.

"Fine. Where's your bathroom?" Vega spoke, her voice quivering. The woman pointed to the other end of the cramped room. The scrape of her stool against the floor caused looks from the other patrons, finally taking notice of the new face in their midst. Vega speed-walked to the bathroom and flung the door open with a bang.

A full-length mirror sat in the corner. Vega's long, dark brown hair was down, billowing around her shoulders in loose curls. The eyes staring back at her in the mirror were ice-colored. Her skin was as white as a piece of paper, and sweat glistened along her brow.

She braced herself against the wall, hands on either side of the mirror. "Jesus Christ." She'd stopped believing in God a long time ago. "Get yourself together."

Vega once had dreams like this that would keep her up at night— of herself in a life she couldn't remember, with people and places that weren't like anything she'd ever seen. It had taken years of therapy after opening up to Chase about them to realize it was just her mind playing tricks with her, trying to fill in the gaps she'd forced herself to forget from a childhood of trauma.

A woman in a biker jacket walked into the bathroom, and Vega shoved herself off the wall as swiftly as she could—no one needed to see her talking to herself. The woman stared at her before she slipped into a stall. Vega turned the sink water on cold and splashed her face.

Do not break down now.

The phrase had become a motto for Vega over the years. Anytime something happened where she felt like she might spiral out of control, she reminded herself that no one was going to pick her up if she crumbled.

If she closed her eyes and focused, she could hear the words floating through the air, as if they'd come from someone else and not her.

Vega turned the water off, dried her face with a scratchy paper towel, and toddled back to her seat at the bar. She smiled at the bartender when the woman looked her way, realizing that it seemed more like a grimace as she caught her reflection in the bottles across the bar.

Can't you be normal for one fucking minute?

Vega hung her head in her hands as the door chimed with a new arrival. Someone sat down on the empty stool next to her—as if there weren't plenty of empty seats elsewhere.

The voice next to her was melodic and smooth. "Can I get two of whatever she's been drinking?"

Vega never understood the saying "a voice smooth as butter" until now.

She locked gazes with the woman sitting beside her. Vega's stomach did that free fall thing again, and she steadied herself against the bar's edge for the second time tonight to keep from falling off the stool.

Vega knew that face, had seen those spiral curls too many times to count.

The muted smile on the girl's face was relaxed, and her shoulders dipped in relief as she took a large breath.

"It took me a lot longer to find you this time."