Volume I: Forged

Chapter 13: The Godfather

Puffy bit her lip, trying to keep from crying.

Crying never helped anyone. C'mon, girl, don't cry. Don't cry, don't cry—

The tears came anyway.

She staunchly ignored them as they stubbornly slid down her face and dripped off her chin.

The paper held in her trembling hands was soon damp and ineligible.

Not that it was important anymore. It had already delivered its crushing message.

Puffy's father was dead, swallowed by the very sea that he had loved more than his wife and child.

All that had been left was his hat and cutlass, recovered by a friend and sent to the dead man's family.

Or what was left of it.

Puffy's mother had succumbed to the addiction just four days ago. Her corpse was already in the ground—buried in the debtor's plot.

Puffy hitched back a gasp and let the paper fall from limp fingers and buried her face in her palms. The old house creaked around her as the wind bustled by, as if mourning with her.

Or mocking her.

Biting her lip so fiercely she tasted blood, Puffy smeared the tears away and marched to the only other room in the tiny hovel.

She grabbed the ratted carpet bag from the dresser and quickly in threw the few changes of clothes she had. She left her mother's—she couldn't bear to look at them, most stained by blood she had coughed up when the addiction had worn a hole in her stomach.

It hurt, but Puffy forced herself to move, and to keep moving.

She wasn't stupid.

She knew the creditors would be coming.

She knew they would take the house and everything in it.

What she didn't know was if they knew she was a hybrid.

They can't, they can't, they can't—she thought over and over to herself as she grabbed the last of her mother's soap and wrapped it in wax paper. The lingering smell of cocoa butter and shea oil nearly brought her to her knees, but she kept going, moving on to the main room. A few books, the cheap jewelry box with nothing in it, the three pieces of pottery that had definitely seen better days, the dulled ax by the door, and the two ratted blankets.

There was only a few loaves of dry bread and some shriveled apples left—they wouldn't last long, but they were all she had. The bag was a big, and Puffy didn't have much.

It easily fit everything she wanted to bring and she looked around for anything she might need.

There was nothing.

Except—

Puffy worried her lip between her teeth, then darted back to the bedroom. The brick moved easily, and sheer relief washed over her as she pulled out the stack of papers.

Her birth certificate, proof she was a free-born. A few wrinkled photos, two deeds to lands in some far away country Puffy's mother had insisted was a joke, the original receipt for her father's ship. A package of papers that Puffy had never opened. But there was something else she was looking for.

"Please, please—"

The relief deepened when she saw it. A small piece of paper, so yellow and fragile Puffy was afraid it'd crumble when she touched it.

The will her father had written up some years ago, the memory now a drifting haze at the back of Puffy's mind. It had been a joke, she knew—there had been laughter and drinks—but it bore his signature nonetheless.