[b]Prologue[/b][right]1-2[/right]

Vera Woods was only thirteen years old when her mother, Becca, shot and killed her father in the middle of the night. The young, blonde girl was stirred from her fitful sleep by the sounds of her parents arguing. She’d lain in her bed across the room from her little sister’s for quite a while before she heard the sound of a gun being fired once. Motionless, she barely dared to breathe. She looked in the direction of Penelope, her sister, and saw two blue eyes staring back at her through the thin film of darkness. Both sisters jumped. A second gunshot had broken through the eerie silence.

At the end of the room, Matthew, the oldest son had long since woken and was now descending the top bunk of the bed that he shared with his little brother. As he passed the girls’ beds, he stopped when he saw that they were not asleep either.

“You two stay in here. Vera, don’t let Penny come out,” he whispered.

Vera nodded, sliding out of bed and crawling quietly across the floor over to Penelope’s bed. The seven year old girl was trembling with fear, and so Vera wrapped her arms tightly around her. Matthew opened the door softly, then disappeared into the living room. The sisters waited for their brother’s return. It was quiet in the house. The kind of quiet that makes a person’s stomach twist with knots of fear. The sisters, holding each other, flinched when Matthew came back into the bedroom.

He seemed to ignore Penelope and Vera both, instead walking straight to the bed that he came from. He shook his younger brother, Dillon, until he woke up. Dillon was only a year older than Vera, but seemed much more mature for his age. He woke with a grumble, and Vera wondered how he’d slept through such a violent cacophony of noise.

“What’s wrong?” asked he, looking up at Matthew.

Matthew bent down and spoke in a hushed voice to his brother while Vera tried to listen to what he was saying. She caught words like, “dead,” “neighbors,” and “phone.” What she was almost positive had happened was something that she wanted to escape her thoughts. As she held her sister tighter, her mind began thinking at a thousand words per second. Matthew passed by the bed again, exiting the room, and Vera looked in Dillon’s direction for answers. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at his hands.

“Dillon?” she whispered. “What’s going on?”

Dillon's eyes focused on Vera, staring at her and making her feel uneasy. It was as if he were in a trance, which only further confirmed Vera's fear and suspicion. Her heart was beating slow and hard. It drummed against her chest at a strangely steady pace. Her eyes cast downward, they began to fill with tears. She didn't know why she was crying. If her father was dead, that meant she no longer had to endure the abuse that he had been inflicting upon his wife and children for years. However, if her mother was dead, Vera knew that it would mean the only adult whose main concern was to nurture the Woods children despite the odds was gone. That was the reason she was teary-eyed with a lump in her throat and a knot in her stomach. Her mother, who had done her best to be a mother, was likely dead.

"Is mom...okay?" she finally asked, vision trained on her brother through the dark. She couldn't bear to ask the question she wanted to ask. She couldn’t bear to say the word.

"No," he replied almost immediately, in a blunt and almost harsh tone. He repeated, "No."

Penelope began to whimper beside Vera, who stroked her sister’s arm in a feeble attempt at comforting her. The next two years would be the hardest.
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[b]End Prologue[/b]