LITMIR.BIZ

       Prologue

      Glittering with moonlight and sweat, Thorn and Anne Joy were lying naked in Thorn’s bed when she launched into the story of her turbulent childhood in Kentucky. Her parents murdered. Lunacy and violence. Pirates, pirates, pirates.

      Until that night, they’d shared nothing about their pasts. A breathless fever possessed them for their monthlong affair. An unquenchable horniness. Bruises from the clash of hipbones, flushed and tender tissue, their heat rekindled with the slightest rasp of skin on skin. For hours at a time they barely spoke, and when they did it was increasingly clear the chief thing they had in common was this agitated lust.

      Then that night in a calm moment she told the vivid story of her youth, details she claimed to have never shared with anyone before. Saying she had no idea why she was confessing this to him but blundering ahead anyway.

      Struck by the oddity of this tight-lipped woman opening up in such detail, Thorn lay quiet, listening intently. At the time, of course, he had no inkling that lurking in that account of Anne’s youth was a foretelling of the torture and torment of Thorn’s own loved ones, the kidnapping of a child, the murders of many others. But even though there was no way in hell he could have known, no way he could have heard in her gaudy tale the dark rumbles of his own future, that didn’t keep him from blaming himself forever after.

      It was a raw afternoon in eastern Kentucky. The winter sky had turned the brittle gray of old ice, but Anne’s outlaw father and her older brother, Vic, were shirtless in the cold, hammering together the rickety frame under her mother’s watchful gaze. As Anne described it, the Joys’ yard was treeless and mangy, their property perched on a bluff overlooking the grim, defeated town of Harlan.

      Anne stood at her bedroom window watching her family work in the front yard. For an hour she’d ignored her mother’s calls to join in. Only seven years old, Anne already knew she wanted nothing to do with this foolishness.

      By

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