𝚕𝚊𝚢 𝚖𝚎 𝚍𝚘𝚠𝚗 // 𝕁𝕁 𝕄𝕒𝕪𝕓𝕒𝕟𝕜

Chapter One // Old Debts

1. Old Debts

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"They want blood and they'll kill for it.
Drain me and they'll kneel for it.
Burn me at the stake.
Met the devil, made the deal for it."

~ 'Sell Your Soul' by Hollywood Undead

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Trigger Warnings: Mentions of domestic abuse (non-graphic), mentions of drug addiction/drug use, and mild unwanted sexual advancements. (Just trying to be thorough with the TW's for each chapter).

•••

The sun had set over the water and lightning crackled across the horizon as a summer storm rolled in. The wind was picking up and Valerie pulled her hoodie farther over her head to shield her face from the fat rain drops that had begun to fall.

She just wanted to make it home before the bottom fell out.

She picked up her pace, scurrying down one of the dark, backroads of The Cut. Her backpack nearly weighing her down as it was stuffed full of snacks and drinks she had stolen from the gas station.

If she'd had anyone who cared about her, they would have probably said she shouldn't be walking these roads at night. Being a teenage girl, alone, in a bad part of town, after dark.... Recipe for disaster, they would say.

But Valerie wasn't afraid. She'd walked these streets alone her entire life. Of course, she'd run into her fair share of trouble, but luckily for her, Val knew just how to handle trouble.

In fact, some would say it was her middle name.

When a girl's mother dies at the age of nine and she's left with an abusive older stepbrother and cracked out stepfather, she doesn't really have a choice other than learning to take care of herself.

So that's what Valerie did.

She toughed it out at home for a couple of years, but by the time she'd turned thirteen, she'd had enough. She'd become a runaway, living on the streets for nearly a year, before finally getting picked up by the police and returned home.

Needless to say, the welcome had not been warm.

If she had thought the abuse was bad before, she could never have dreamed how it would escalate after her return. And that's how the addiction had started.

Just a few months shy of her fourteenth birthday, Valerie did coke for the first time. At a sketchy drug dealer's house deep in The Cut, surrounded by a bunch of shady people a good deal older than her, she found her escape from the pain.

And she'd been running ever since.

The rain started to come down harder as she finally got close to home, she dipped off into the woods following the narrow dirt road toward the abandoned old Airstream.

She'd been calling the dilapidated camper trailer 'home' for the past two years of her life when she had finally decided to run away for good. She wasn't worried about being found, she knew exactly who the previous occupant had been, and she also knew they wouldn't be bothering her.