Taming Blade (Kings Reapers MC Book 5), Nicola Jane [books for 7th graders TXT] 📗

good memories of when I was probably around three. They’re not clear, but I remember laying my head on her lap while she read a story to me. She’d twiddle my hair and it would stay sticking out.” I close my eyes and try to picture her laughing, her shoulder-length hair blowing in front of her face while we ran in a field. I haven’t pictured her like this for so long, it’s a fuzzy memory. “She was eighteen when she had me,” I continue. “Everyone told her she wouldn’t make it. She was too young and my dad didn’t want to know, so it was just me and her.”

Tillie edges closer, crossing her legs as I go on. “I don’t talk about her because I chose a long time ago to put it to bed. Those memories were haunting me day and night, and one day, I woke up from another fucking nightmare and I thought, no more. I won’t let her haunt me for the rest of my life. So I hid it all. I laughed and I made jokes and clowned around to hide it. It works because no one asks about my childhood. They assume I had a great upbringing because I laugh all the time. I’m happy.”

“Are you happy?” she asks.

I nod. “When I’m with you,” I say seriously, looking hard into her eyes. “When you ask about her, I want to tell you, but I hate the sad look it puts on your pretty little face, Sunshine. She was an evil woman in the end. I don’t know why it changed or what flipped her, but one day, she stopped putting good food on the table. I was hunting in the empty cupboards from the age of four. She didn’t get me up in the morning with kisses on my face like she used to. She just stopped being my mum.” I pause, remembering her face the last time I saw her. “It was like she went to sleep one night and then stopped caring. Angel one day and devil the next. Maybe it wasn’t like that, maybe the change was gradual, but as a kid, that’s how it seemed. She used to pinch me. It was over silly things to begin with. I hurt another kid at school and the teacher rang home. I was about five. She did it to teach me a lesson, to show me it hurt. It became every day—if I spilled a drink, if the house was messy, if I left a crumb of the non-existent food on the ground. Then she’d hit me around the head or across the body. It went from pokes to pinching to slapping to punching. I’d curl into a ball until she tired herself out.”

“Didn’t anyone know, like a teacher?”

I shake my head. “I wasn’t a good kid. I acted out, and I was violent and aggressive.”

“That’s not surprising,” she says quietly.

“She put on a good show to the teachers, played the struggling single mum. They’d tell me to be better for her, to be good. It made no sense to me, I was good for her, but she’d hurt me anyway. I got older and learned to keep my head down because at least if I was in school, I wasn’t with her. She drank herself into oblivion and I hid out at school. Once I hit thirteen, I started working out and keeping myself clean and well kept. The teachers never suspected a thing and girls distracted me.”

“What happened to her?”

I shrug. “She tried to get in touch when I was in the Forces. I burnt the letters. She has nothing to say that I want to hear. I don’t have a mum and I’m okay with that.”

Tillie stands and wraps her arms around my waist, kissing me gently. “Thanks for telling me.”

“I never got a chance to say, but I’m over the moon about the baby. You’ll be an amazing mum.”

“I don’t think I’ve processed it yet. How could you not tell me?” she asks.

“I focussed on preventing this,” I say, looking around the barn. “I wanted to make sure this didn’t happen and then I planned on a romantic announcement,” I say, grinning.

“You don’t do romance, remember?”

“Apparently, I don’t prevent bad situations either,” I say, and she smiles.

“You were mad, I was mad, I decided to come back to London without you, knowing you had no way of getting home until at least the morning. I was planning to call you before then and explain everything once we were both calm. It made sense to me but I should have known your stubborn arse would come back.”

The door opens again, and this time, it’s an older man in a suit. He opens a laptop. “Ms. Edwards, I’m Richard, Mr. Petrova’s accountant. We’re depositing some money into Mr. Petrova’s business account.”

Tillie points to her back pocket and he takes out the book her mum gave her. He opens it and nods in approval. He taps away on his laptop and within two minutes, he closes it again and leaves. Once the door is shut, Tillie smiles and holds up a pen. “I got this,” she whispers, and I smile. She’s learning quickly.

TILLIE

Hunger becomes a real struggle at some point in the middle of the night. I have no idea what time it is, but it’s dark outside. My body shakes from cold and hunger and I’m seriously looking at the pigs and wondering how much effort it would take to overpower one of those huge hunks of meat. Blade jumps, his chains clanking. He keeps dropping to sleep and waking with a start. He takes a deep breath, and when his eyes land on me, he smiles weakly.

“Tell me about Cobra,” I mumble. I need a distraction.

“I share one thing and now you want it all,” he says, smiling.

“It’s either talk about the bastard who put us here or eat a pig. I’m easy with either,” I say, shrugging,