WICKED DESTINY
- THE WICKED SERIES-
Book 1
Tiffany Stevens
Copyright © 2013 Tiffany Stevens
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-To my family and friends
for putting up with me throughout this whole Wicked Destiny process. Without you I would have never made it this far.
Prologue
Sleep has become obsolete these past three months. I never dream anymore—only nightmares. Well, I consider them nightmares; memories from my darkest days are more like it. Things that I wish I could purge from my memory and never look back on. For months I have relived the same dream and it’s almost as if I can’t control it. So there are many nights that I stay up on coffee and Red Bulls. That’s until my body can’t fully function and sleep eventually wins. Tonight exhaustion has taken its toll and the nightmare has begun.
Standing on the balcony of my room back on the farm, I couldn’t help but stare at the cabin across the lake. I could see the light blazing in the bedroom window and, looking up at the sky, I noticed it was early morning. The sun was just starting to break. I watched his shadow moving around the room and the feeling of something being ripped from my chest washed over me. He is still there, I kept thinking to myself. With my aunt dead and she being the only family I had left, surely he wouldn’t abandon me right now.
Since the death of my aunt Dru, I’d become her beneficiary and had inherited her money and farm. I was only eighteen and freshly out of high school, so what could I have possibly known about running a farm? Yeah, I’d lived here since I was five years old, but there were so many things that my aunt did around the farm that it was impossible for me to follow with her same finesse. I needed help and I didn’t need someone to tell me what I already knew. I figured that Declan would want the job since he had been doing it for the past year. Declan was our laborer. He knew everything about our farm and everything about me. We grew very close over the year, and so close I actually loved him. This was rare because the only person I’d ever cared for other than my aunt was Shay. Shay had been my best friend since grade school and I consider her more like my sister than my friend.
Something was off this morning, though. I knew something bad was coming. I was still watching the shadow as it moved from room to room now that more lights were on. Should I go over there or should I just wait? If he left then, I would let him go. It would kill me, but trying to make someone stay when I knew they wanted to leave seemed like kidnapping to me. So begging was out of the question. Then suddenly the side door opened and I saw a bag being thrown into the bed of his truck. With the sun still not fully up, the sky was still somewhat dark and cast in shadows. Or maybe it was me. I didn’t know, but clouds started to roll in as I began to walk down the steps from my balcony. I couldn’t bare it any longer. I had to see what was going on. So, into the picnic area I walked until I found the trail that took me to the cabin. For some reason I avoided the trail and continued through the woods until I reached the cabin. Standing behind an old oak tree that had probably been around for a hundred years, I watched as he packed everything in the last remaining bag and threw it into the back of the truck. He then walked around and cleaned up his mess and I could hear the pieces of my heart chipping away every second that passed. I could hear my aunt’s voice in my head telling me, “He’s no good Sloane. He will leave you.”
Why hadn’t I listened to her? She knew he would break my heart. Before I knew it, without even realizing it, I was standing at the side door. He