Fragile Things (Folkestone Sins Book 1) Read online

  Fragile Things

  Folkestone Sins Book One

  Samantha Lovelock

  Copyright © 2020 by Samantha Lovelock, Folkestone Publishing

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Opulent Designs

  Editing by Brandi Zelenka

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-7772534-1-7

  Print ISBN 978-1-7772534-0-0

  Created with Vellum

  For Mum. You’re my hero. Thank you for being there every single day, even when things got dark. I love you more than I can ever express.

  and

  For Brad, my very own second chance romance. Seventeen seems like forever ago, but somehow I always knew it was you. Thank you for changing my life.

  Playlists

  Stella - Stream on Spotify

  ‘West Coast’ - Lana Del Rey

  ‘Never’ - Terranova

  ‘Waiting for the Night’ - Depeche Mode

  ‘Drama Free’ - deadmau5 feat. Lights

  ‘Renegade’ - The Anix

  ‘Take Me Down’ - The Pretty Reckless

  ‘We Don’t Have to Dance’ - ACTORS

  ‘Teach Me To Fight’ - YONAKA

  ‘Closer’ - Kings of Leon

  ‘Feral Roots’ - Rival Sons

  ‘Last Resort & Spa’ - Battle Tapes

  ‘Change My Mind’ - Silent Rival

  ‘After Night’ - MXMS

  ’Saturnalia’ - Marilyn Manson

  ‘Demon’ - Tusks

  ‘Gravedigger’ - MXMS

  ‘I Will Stay’ - Flux Pavillion, Turin Brakes

  ‘Feel Nothing’ - HEALTH

  Poe - Stream on Spotify

  ‘Just Got Wicked’ - Cold

  ‘Nutshell’ - Alice In Chains

  ‘Riot!’ - Arrested Youth

  ‘Careless’ - The Blue Stones

  ‘Stupid Girl’ - Cold

  ‘My Name Is Human’ - Highly Suspect

  ‘MANTRA’ - Bring Me The Horizon

  ‘Summertime’ - Yellow Claw, San Holo

  ‘Lips Like Morphine’ - Kill Hannah

  ‘Blurry’ - Puddle of Mud

  ‘Lay’ - The Blue Stones

  ‘Pain’ - Bilmuri

  ‘Antisocialist’ - Asking Alexandria

  ‘Bloodline’ - Northlane

  ‘Yellowbox’ - The Neighbourhood

  ‘Alibi’ - Mansionair

  ‘Can Your Hear Me’ - Korn

  ‘Youngest Daughter’ - Superheaven

  ‘Limbo’ - Salem

  ‘Heavier’ - Slaves

  ‘Pariah’ - alt.

  Contents

  Playlists

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  I was innocent once, but I didn’t get to stay that way for long. Raised by a single mother somewhere in the vicinity of upper-lower class, day-to-day life was always a struggle. My mom tried to cover it with her flowing Bohemian skirts and shimmery laughter, but even my youngest self knew something wasn’t right. Secrets haunted her like misty ghosts; she carried them in the slump of her shoulders and the depths of her sea glass colored eyes.

  Over the years, her boyfriends would come and go, but none of them were around for longer than a few months. Her parents were gone, and my father was nothing more than a one-night stand. The only constant was us, and in my tiny world, she was my best friend, my safe harbor, and my favorite person. I would have done anything, given anything, to keep her with me forever.

  Right up until the day the darkness swallowed her whole, and she left me all alone.

  Chapter One

  The constant banging echoes with a heavy foreboding that drags me awake. Cursing under my breath, my legs tangle in the sheets in my hurry to get up and I fall back onto the bed, setting the less than sturdy frame shaking and squeaking.

  It is far too early for this.

  Lying flat on my back, I squeeze my eyes shut and count to ten, willing whoever is at my door to go away. When that doesn’t work, I grind my teeth in frustration and roll off my slightly swaybacked mattress. Thoroughly annoyed now and my eyes still blurry with sleep, I stumble my way toward the noise while yanking my T-shirt and sleep shorts out of the cracks and crevices they crawled into while I slept.

  “There’d better be something on fire, asshole!” I yell toward the locked and dead-bolted door from the middle of my puny living room. At the sound of my voice, the banging starts in earnest. "For fuck's sake, I'm coming!" Peering through the scuffed up peephole, I’m not exactly overjoyed to see the lecherous leer of my infinitely skeevy landlord on the other side. Flicking the locks and opening the door just wide enough with one hand, I instinctively cross the other arm over my thin shirt to keep him from eye-groping my tits.

  "What the hell do you want at six o'clock in the morning, Todd?" A sizable yawn escapes me, and since I'm more concerned with covering my chest than covering my mouth, he winces as my breath floats in his direction. I don’t even try to stifle my satisfied grin; this fucker's roving eyes and grabby hands deserve far worse than a little dragon breath.

  He doesn’t say a word, just stands there, staring at me.

  “Earth to Todd. Make a damn sound already. Silently ogling me this early in the morning is more aggravating than usual." It’s repulsive to me that I have to be even marginally civil to this guy when all I want to do is junk punch him. Unfortunately, there aren’t many landlords in this town willing to rent to an underage girl with no credit history, so I have to play nice. Ish.

  His small, close-set eyes—somewhere between baby shit brown and dirty old mustard—lazily make their way from my shapely bare legs up to my heart-shaped, and currently very fucking irritated face. Licking his slimy lips, he half-chuckles, and it sounds like a death rattle.

  “This came for you. Ran into the delivery guy yesterday and told him I would make sure you got it." He lifts his scarecrow-thin arm, and, for the first time, I catch sight of the package gripped in his left hand. Wrapped in plain brown butchers’ paper and about the size of a family-sized cracker box, I can see his greasy fingerprints all over it. Shuddering involuntarily, I reach forward, doing my best to grab it without having to touch his fingers in the process.

  “How about you let the delivery guy do what he’s paid to do?” I suggest, shaking my head in a mix of frustration and disgust. Bored with his little game now, I slam and lock the door without another word. My need to make sure he actually leaves has me checking the peephole, just in time to see his usual constipated expression morph into something darker, likely at not being th
anked nicely.

  Big deal. The guy's a card-carrying creeper, and there’s only so much of him I can stomach.

  The pockmarked hallway mirror on the way to the kitchen reveals a grumpy raccoon; last night's mascara and eyeliner now smeared around a pair of tired, deep violet-blue eyes. Dumping the package on my scarred kitchen table, I run the broadside of my index fingers under my eyes to wipe the black away and park my ass in my single, wobbly kitchen chair.

  Pulling one leg up to my chest and resting my chin on my knee, I eyeball the package in front of me. The longer I sit staring at it, the more my nerves hum, and the stronger my strange sense of foreboding gets. Who would send me anything? With no family to speak of and my deeply ingrained distrust of pretty much the entire human race, I have exactly one friend and a handful of acquaintances. I can't think that a single one of them would spring for the price of postage.

  For two years, I've been on my own, ever since my mom up and disappeared the winter after I turned fifteen, and any small sense of normality in my life vanished with her. Now, two and a half years later, I have developed a finely honed sense of when things are about to go sideways.

  Today is starting to feel exceptionally sideways.

  With a resigned sigh, I slide the package toward me to get a closer look.

  I shake it a little.

  Give it a suspicious sniff.

  Set it back down.

  Nibbling on my left thumbnail, my go-to bad habit when I’m overthinking, I contemplate the grease-stained wrapping a little longer. Finally, curiosity overtakes wariness, so I pick up the package again and rip it open.

  To my utter surprise, nestled inside the cardboard shell is a wooden box, carved with a small cluster of vines and what looks like dainty sparkling stars. Polished to a warm cinnamon sheen, it’s just big enough to hold a large paperback novel. After turning it over a few times and running my hands over its understated beauty, my fingertips find the small latch on the front and press open the hinged lid. Honestly, I have no idea what I expect to see inside. I can say with utmost certainty, however, that the little ecru envelope with fancy black cursive script spelling out Stella Evangeline Bradleigh wasn't on the list of possibilities.

  Resisting the urge to drop the box like it bit me, I gingerly set it, still open, on the table with shaking hands. My wooden chair creaks in protest as I lean back, taking a few deep breaths to try to quiet the panic that surges through me like a rogue wave at the sight of my real name.

  The name nobody is supposed to know.

  Up until my fifteenth birthday, I was Evvie Ellis. Stubborn. Intelligent. Creative. I may have been from the wrong side of the proverbial tracks, but my mom and I did the best we could, and for the most part, I was happy.

  There have always been strange gaps in time that were dark voids in my mind, but Mom told me it was because I was too busy remembering the good things, so there was no room for anything else. She would get this weird deer in headlights look and start to cry when I would tell her I wanted to try to fill in some of the holes in my Swiss cheese memory, so I learned to shove my questions and fears down deep.

  Her tendency for avoidance decided to bite me in the ass the night I turned fifteen.

  Over store-bought chocolate birthday cake and melting vanilla ice cream, my mother lost her mind. At least that’s the only explanation I could think of at the time. Playing with a loose thread on the edge of her sleeve, and unable to meet my eyes, she told me a story about a baby named Stella Evangeline Bradleigh. A baby who was supposedly me, born in a town she refused to name, far from where we lived in Gloversville, NY. Grabbing my face desperately with both hands, she made me promise over and over to never tell anybody who I really was, not letting go until I said the actual words. Finally satisfied, she patted my cheek and told me I would always be safe as long as I kept my promise.

  Like flipping a switch, she went back to her cake and ice cream, smiling and humming softly to herself as she ate while I stared at her, bewildered, and wondering what just happened.

  She never spoke of it again. I was too afraid of what else she might say if I asked, so like everything else dark and scary in my life, I jammed it into a closet somewhere in the back of my mind.

  Looking back, that was a colossally stupid move. The fear and doubt she left with me that night have colored nearly every minute of the almost three years since. Had I known my mother would disappear on me a few months later, I would have pushed for answers, no matter how awful they might have been.

  When my friends found out she was gone, somebody’s parents called Child Protective Services. I was motherless, fatherless, and had no other relatives to speak of, so it all ended on a quiet Tuesday morning. With nobody stepping up to take me in, I said goodbye to everything I knew. Filling a black garbage bag with my things, I became just another cog in the foster system machine.

  I lasted four and a half months before I ran.

  Sleeping through the night is a trick I’ve never mastered, and being trapped in this hellhole of a group home doesn’t make me inclined to figure it out. The fears that whisper during my waking hours here are ten times louder in the dark of night.

  Lights out was hours ago, but I’d only managed to doze off fitfully, every car that passed outside my window and every dog that barked in the distance jarring me back to my shitty reality.

  Hearing the soft shuffling sounds too late to defend myself, I’m powerless to stop the hand that snakes out, gripping a handful of my long, thick hair by the roots and scraping short jagged nails roughly along my scalp. Dragged head-first out of bed, I land awkwardly on my back. Squinting through the near-perfect darkness and stinging pain in my scalp, my watering eyes can barely make out the doughy, round face of my latest nightmare before her fat fist lands, with full force, square in my stomach.

  With the wind knocked out of me, there is nothing I can do except curl into a tiny ball on the dirty floor in a vain attempt to protect myself as blows mercilessly rain down on my face and torso. Grabbing for my hair again, she yanks my head back with one hand, her other landing a shot to my nose with a sickening crunch that has hot coppery blood flooding down my face and into my gasping mouth. The metallic scent seems to appease the junior sociopath because she climbs off me and slowly backs away.

  Before my punch-drunk brain can figure out how to get up, I catch a hard kick to my mid-back that knocks the wind from my lungs again, and that's when I realize she must've brought friends. A few well-placed ratty sneaker kicks to my back and stomach later, they raise a collective snicker and slut-sneeze their way out of my room.

  Finally left alone, I lie on the peeling linoleum, listening to my nose gurgle, broken bits of time floating back to me.

  Pieces of me that don’t quite fit together anymore.

  With adrenaline still pumping through my veins, panic starts to follow, so I begin counting slowly backward from one hundred. Somewhere around thirty-five or so, my breathing returns to a more regular rhythm and my nose stops actively gushing. Heaving myself up, I stagger like a drunken prom queen to the windowless bathroom at the end of the hall. Not wanting to even glance at my mashed up face in the mirror, I bend over the small toilet and retch until there’s nothing left.

  After cleaning myself up as best I can and shutting off the bathroom light, I quietly shuffle my way back to my assigned room. Grabbing a handful of cheap tissues from the box beside my bed, I drop them on the blood-dotted floor and use my feet to wipe up as much as I can. Kicking the resulting reddened mess into the corner of the room, I tell myself I’ll clean it up properly in the morning.

  Gingerly, I arrange my bruised body into a bearable position on my small single bed and stare at the ceiling until morning.

  Fighting my way back to the present, I stand on rubbery knees and retrieve my relatively ancient iPhone from beside my bed. The catalog of music stored on it is extensive. I settle on Thom Yorke's 'Hearing Damage’, plopping the phone on the kitchen table in hopes of finding some calm
within the ebb and flow of notes.

  When I was tiny, my mom introduced me to music as if it were a living, breathing creature that twined around your ankles and crawled under your skin. I learned to hear in color, and every person I’ve met and every experience I’ve had has become a part of my soundtrack.

  The urge to crawl back under the covers is strong, but I force myself to sit down. Reluctantly, I reach into the open wooden box for the pristine envelope that bears my full birth name. My finger slides under the back flap, and with my stomach crawling up my throat, I pull out a matte black business card and a folded sheet of paper made of the same expensive-looking stock as the envelope.

  DEAREST STELLA,

  I HOPE THIS FINDS YOU. THIS BOX BELONGED TO YOUR MOTHER, AND I THOUGHT IT SHOULD BE YOURS NOW. THOUGH IT HAS TAKEN ME YEARS TO FIND YOU, PLEASE KNOW IT WASN’T FOR LACK OF TRYING. YOUR MOTHER MADE THE CHOICE A LONG TIME AGO TO LEAVE, AND SHE KEPT YOU BOTH VERY WELL HIDDEN. YOU AND I ARE ALL THAT’S LEFT OF OUR FAMILY NOW.

  I UNDERSTAND IF YOU WISH TO CONTINUE TO BE ON YOUR OWN, BUT I SINCERELY HOPE YOU WILL AT LEAST MEET WITH ME ONCE. SHOULD YOU WANT TO MEET ME AND SEE WHERE YOU COME FROM, PLEASE CALL THE NUMBER ON THE ENCLOSED CARD AND THEY WILL ARRANGE A PLANE TICKET TO THE WEST COAST FOR YOU.

  IF YOU CHOOSE NOT TO COME, KNOW THAT YOU ARE LOVED.

  ALWAYS, AUNT CECILY