The Safe Book

Chapter 1

A/N

Gosh, I'm so nervous about this! I hope you like the new story!

 dedicated to- DianaMendes5 for the amazing cover. Like oh my gosh, it's crazy!

God, she wished she hadn’t looked at the picture.

The picture that was the only earthly possession she had that always brought her to tears. The only possession she had that made her think of him. The only possession she owned that held her obligation to still use her surname.

Hemlock, Mercy Leon Hemlock, she thought to herself.

In the little town she used to call home, Hemlock was a powerful last name. Her own name was powerful.

“Power,” Mercy mutters to herself, running her fingers though her hair as she gazes around the sparse room she had been given. “It only goes to people’s heads.”

She stands, her joints aching from yesterday’s run. Mercy knew she shouldn’t have let it get to her, but she just couldn’t help it.

After the little brat of a neighbor David Ross cut her brakes, Mercy had enough. So her and one of her fellow orphans who were equally fed up with David, ran over to his temporary home and cut the electricity while locking him inside during the night. He’d be waking soon, trapped as a mouse in a hole.

Mercy had no plans to see David today.

She was to be leaving the small temporary home she’d been placed in for three months while her adoption papers went through the vigorous process of being approved. And they had been. After they were, Mercy was to be transferred with her new adoptive family into a new city, the windy city, they called it.

St. Louis, Chicago, a faraway land that Mercy hoped so badly would take away the last year of her life.

Stretching like a cat, luxuriously and savoring every pop of her knuckles as bent them, she shuffled into the bathroom. It was hard to believe that, after the unexpected extension of her time in a tiny house that was her shelter for the most vivid part of her life, she’d be finally free to experience the world as a regular teenage girl.

Okay, maybe girl wasn’t the right word to describe Mercy. As she brushed her long dark hair and washed her young but worn by tragedies face, Mercy looked more like a woman.

Her lean build was made for running, which only came in handy about three times a week as she avoided being arrested. Her warm brown eyes looked innocent, but in truth, they’d seen more misery than any teenager should have. Her hands, thin and scarred, have long since stopped trying to put her heart back together after him.

Mercy stared hard into the mirror, not for vanity, but for a last glimpse of this young woman of the age seventeen.

“Life’s all about those new beginnings, right?” she says to herself, but her head tilts to the side, and her voice rises in pitch to make it sound too doubtful to believe.

“I can do this,” she mutters, grasping onto the cold metal of a countertop. “I’m no longer a Hemlock, I’m a Johnston now.”

No, that can’t be right.

“I don’t have to hurt any longer, I don’t want to, so I won’t,” Mercy repeats the words her therapist told her. Which, as she thought was useless and just expensive as shit because here was no helping her psyche.

“When people ask me what’s wrong, I’ll say, it’s okay, because it is and I have to believe it for it to happen.”

“I hope you’re not having a mental breakdown,” a smooth voice says behind Mercy, and even though she’s looking at her shoes because she can’t look at herself when she tells such a fat lie, she knows who it is.