Page 4 of Ren: Warlord Brides
There were bad days, and then there were no good, very bad, horrible days. Putting your underwear on backward was a sure sign that the day had already been ruined and the safest bet was to crawl back into bed and wait it out.
Emry dressed and hauled her butt out the door because the proverbial donuts would not make themselves. Her day started at four, and she rolled up to the bakery before the birds and anyone with sense was awake. In the summer, the early hours were cool and quiet. In the winter, she questioned her life choices that involved a bakery and letting her sister take the apartment above the shop. Gemma just rolled out of bed and she was ready for work.
When Emry found her twin sister bloodied and bruised outside the bakery’s back door, she knew she should have gone back to bed. This was a no good, very bad, horrible kind of day.
“Did they…” Emry’s mind blanked at the blood smeared across her sister’s mouth. So many bad things could happen to a woman, and she didn’t want anything like that ever happening to Gemma.
Gemma shook her head, tissue pressed to a corner of her mouth. “Sent a message with their fists this time.”
Emry fetched the first aid kit from the bakery. She set about cleaning up Gemma. Her hands shook with anger, but that was fine. Anger kept her focused because fear didn’t do her any good.
The blood smeared across her cheek looked terrible, but it cleaned up easily. She pressed the alcohol swab to Gemma’s split lip, dabbing at the mess. Gemma hissed but did not flinch. “What happened?”
“I went out with Charlie last night.”
Emry’s back went up. Gemma’s friend always had a smug grin that made her dislike him. “I hate Charlie.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I hate him if he hit you.”
“This wasn’t his fault. He got busted up, too.” She repeated a familiar story. She went out for drinks with her friend and ran into a bill collector. Not the respectable, works-in-a-call-center kind of bill collector. “I told Charlie to be chill, but he went all white knight on me, which made it worse. So, they had to slap us around to make their point.”
“Oh, Gemma. None of that is okay.”
“It’s just money. We’ll find it,” Gemma said.
Just money.
“Because we’re rolling in it, Gemmy-bean,” Emry said with no small amount of sarcasm.
She briefly had a fortune after her match to an alien, but she returned promptly to Earth and opened a bakery with Gemma. Before the Invasion, before their father had grown ill from cancer, the LeBeaux Bakery had been a neighborhood institution. Two generations of LeBeaux-baked bread and decorated cakes in a small storefront. Reopening the bakery had been Gemma’s dream for as long as Emry could remember.
When their father lay on the sofa, too tired to do anything more than nap, Gemma planned. When the aliens dropped bombs, Gemma held her hand and whispered about the delicacies they would make. Such beautiful and astounding pastries that they had to be magic, sprinkled with stardust. They concocted fantastic recipes, unicorn cookies, and pixie cupcakes.
The money paid to her as compensation for upending her life and shipping her off to a radioactive planet—even if her stay only lasted two days—was a windfall. While the bakery had always been Gemma’s dream, she was glad to bring unicorn cookies and pixie cupcakes to life.
The Draft hung over Gemma, as it did every woman on Earth. Some of Emry’s alien cash went to a fixer who made Gemma’s name vanish from the Mahdfel database. That cost a pretty penny, but hey, problem solved. Money well spent.
Illegal? Hella. Uncommon? Not really.
Understandable? Very.
Only those shady people now had dirt on Gemma and threatened to report her if she didn’t pay. The blackmail demands had been steadily increasing for the year, growing from something they could budget for into something that broke the bank.
But then people who removed Gemma from the Draft blackmailed her. A payment here, some money there, and no one would suggest that the Feds look closely at Gemmarae LeBeaux.
Why not blow the whistle on the greedy bastards? Because prison. Anyone caught manipulating the genetic tests—either via DNA, database hack, or plain old no-showing for testing—was sentenced to prison. The punishment far outweighed the crime, in Emry’s opinion. Policy left too many people vulnerable and afraid to call the authorities for help.
“You know what I think we should do,” Emry said.
“I’m not a snitch,” Gemma said.
“It’s not snitching when you’re being blackmailed.”
She knew they were codependent, and it wasn’t exactly a healthy coping mechanism. As kids, they survived an honest-to-goodness alien invasion after watching their father fade away from a cruel illness. But they survived and everything would be okay. And it was until one night, long after life had returned to normal, a drunk driver took their mother.
Welcome to the new normal.
