Page 85 of My Heartless Soul

I take a shaky breath from his words. The words that need to stop because I am too raw for them. I will do something I can’t take back. But maybe he needs to hear it. Needs to know my story to understand that a person like me has no room in his life and his family.

I slip off his lap, fighting the urge to crawl right back in as I level him with one of my well-practiced cold looks. The mask has been put on.

“You think you need to hear this? Need to know my story? You think you can change me? You think these sweet words will do anything to bring that heart back into my chest? Sorry to disappoint.” My voice drips with venom. “I will never change. Because this is who I am. This is who my mother created when she beat me for the smallest things since I was born, and once I became a woman, she sold me as a teen prostitute to anyone with deep pockets.”

I see his posture change, his chest rise and fall harder. Vassar’s brown eyes watch me, unblinking. “Yes, you may have also heard something about a baby while I was screaming in my sleep. Yes, I got pregnant at fifteen from a boy at the neighborhood grocery store because I wanted to make my own decision about who could be my first. I tried to run away with him, and when she found out, she beat me until my lungs were punctured and collapsing from the five broken ribs digging into them. I had a fractured femur, broken clavicle and nose, and a bad concussion.She kicked my stomach enough times to rupture my spleen and definitely kill the life inside of me.”

Silence. Vassar is silent and unmoving, just like I knew he’d be.

“I couldn’t protect my baby. I couldn’t do one thing right and run away.”

“Kira, that wasn’t your—”

“Please don’t say it wasn’t my fault because it was. I should have run well before then. Living in the streets would be a whole lot better than in that house.”

“What happened?” He swallows hard. “What happened then? How did you end up in foster care?”

“Jonny—that was the name of the grocery store boy—he was waiting for me outside and when I never came down, he decided to come up and heard my wails. He immediately called nine-one-one, and I was taken to a hospital while my parents were sentenced to ten years in prison for child prostitution and fifteen years for recklessly causing great bodily harm to a child. My father was a raging alcoholic and didn’t last even two years in there before he died. My mother, on the other hand, is still serving her sentence and probably prays for my painful death every day.”

“Fuck me, Kira.” Vas reaches for me again, but I evade his arms. “Baby, I am so sorry.”

“You’d think I would have learned a thing or two from my mistakes. But I didn’t. Because that’s not all…”

Chapter thirty-nine

The Past

Thirteen years ago…

“Kira, I don’t like your boyfriend,” my overprotective foster brother, Julius, growls next to me.

“Yes, you made that quite clear.” I level him with an annoyed look. “Multiple times over the past four months.”

“And I will say it again and again. He is not good. He won’t take care of you guys.”

My hand reaches to the small bump on my stomach, rubbing it as if I can somehow prevent my daughter from hearing her uncle’s words about her father. She probably can’t even hear it, and she definitely wouldn’t understand them but sue me for being overprotective.

Julius is the best thing that has happened to me since I was placed in the same foster home as he was. Somehow, he could read all the demons swirling in my eyes, and I saw his plain as a day, and that was that. I became his little sister despite the fact that we are the same age.

We don’t do warm and fuzzies, but we’re always there for each other, and we protect one another in here. But I’d like it so much better if my brother liked my boyfriend.

“Jules, he said he will be here to take me to his parents’ house where they have a room for me, and they will help with the baby when she comes,” I grid out because we have been over this conversation a million times in the past few days since I told him Kevin was stepping up.

We didn’t know I was pregnant until I was fourteen weeks along. Ever since that night two years ago, my periods have been wacky and super irregular, and I wasn’t nauseous at all, so it wasn’t until I had my routine checkup that my doctor told me I was expecting. Sure, it was a shock for me and Kevin. We just started dating about two months before that. He is a year older than me and is about to graduate from the high school we both go to, but we came to terms with it. Especially since abortion was never an option for me.

Not since I went through that nightmare two years ago. I want to be a mom. Every night, I dreamt of holding my baby, the one that never had a chance to survive, and now I’m blessed with this one.

Yes, I’m only seventeen, but I almost feel thirty-five. So, I’m ready, and now Kevin is on board as well.

As if I conjured him up from my thoughts, he rounds the corner sending me a small smile and a glare to my brother. Yeah, the hate is very much mutual between those two, and Jules hasn’t even tried to hide it ever since Kevin told me he’s taking me to live with his family. I am almost eighteen, so my foster family won’t be responsible for me that much longer anyway.

“Are you ready, doll?” Kevin takes my bag from my hands.

“Yes,” I turn to Julius. “Well, I’ll come visit as much as I can, and you do the same, okay?” We don’t do tears, but my hormones don’t care about our rules right now, and I start crying. Jules curses under his breath but wraps me in his hands, giving me one of those amazing big brother hugs.

“If you hurt her, I will kill you,” he deadpans Kevin, and I lightly punch him.

“Stop it.”

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