Cameron Casey and Annabeth Taylor are about to find out just how deep a burn can hurt you. Together, they're being trained to take over the family business. Neither of them want the lives their fathers have planned out and they realize that sometim...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Cameron. 15 years old.
I was covered in blood when I lit the match.
Gasoline doused the kitchen. Red splattered the tiles. A body laid motionless on the floor with a hole in its chest.
"I'm sorry," was whispered.
The match dropped out of my fingers and I ran toward the front door as the small flame grew into something monstrous.
My dad's car was the only one that remained outside, waiting for me. The others had already left. I hid my limp as I ran to the car and got in.
It had been a few months since I was released from juvie and my dad took me on as many jobs as he could. I argued with him a lot of the time and he only took me on more as a result. I didn't go to school anymore. He said I'd missed two years and he didn't want to wait for me to catch up. He said the only things I needed to know in life, I could learn from the gang.
An important thing to know about the Caseys was that we distributed a lot of illegal things. Drugs and guns, mostly. That's how we made our money. We received shipments from suppliers and then we would distribute it to groups of Caseys or people who didn't know any better, to sell it for us. If we didn't get the money, or the money was short, Lucky was usually sent in to find the rest of the cash. He was good at that. Occasionally, we would loan out money to people and they would have to pay it back to us within a certain time frame, with interest. If they didn't pay it back, my dad would send Lucky or Scully, my dad's right hand men, to go collect them. And then we would have a new member of the gang. Scully was good at bashing things. And because of Scully and a few other member's skill sets, on the rare occasion someone offered us enough money, we would go take care of whatever problem they were having for them.
The latest thing the gang and I learned that one couldn't learn in school, was that one of the Caseys that was supposed to be selling product for us kept shorting us money. There was a tortuously long meeting with him about where the money was going. He said he was being threatened by the Dacostas to give them half of the product he was in charge of selling and half of the money he was making. We learned the Dacosta's name and then found his shack of a house.
