Theater: MotoNovel | Language: English | NEW
Synopsis
My brain has always worked a little slower than everyone else’s. They called me "delayed."
But the year I turned twelve—the year I was supposedly at my most foolish—I took a pair of kitchen shears to my hair, chopped it all off, and appointed myself the personal knight to Gideon Roth.
Gideon was the illegitimate boy next door. The one who absorbed every ounce of the neighborhood's cruelty.
When his vicious older brother locked him in the estate’s dog kennels, I threw myself at the chain-link gate to drag him out. The scars from where the guard dogs bit my arm are still there today.
When someone intentionally shoved a heavy terracotta planter off a balcony, aiming right for his head, I tackled him to the concrete. The impact of the clay shattering against my skull is the reason my words still get tangled up on my tongue when I speak.
Gideon used to look at me, his eyes dead and hollow, and ask, "What do you even want out of this, Ruby?"
I didn't want anything.
"I just want you to grow up safe," I’d tell him. "That’s enough."
Because a child with no one to love them is the saddest thing in the world.
He would stare at me in heavy silence, then mutter that I was an idiot.
I let him say it. My parents called me an idiot, too, right before they dumped me with a cruel nanny and stopped coming home.
But on the nights when that nanny locked me in the pantry, when I was curled up on the linoleum, clutching my cramping, empty stomach—it was Gideon who would sneak over. He would push half of his own meager dinner through the dog door, his voice barely a whisper in the dark.
"Ruby Carmichael, you’re so stupid," he’d say. "I guess I’m just going to have to look after you for the rest of your life."
Years bled into years.
Gideon clawed his way up. He stepped on the throats of everyone who had ever tormented him, taking over the Roth empire and becoming a man people feared and respected.
I was so happy. I sat around, buzzing with a quiet joy, waiting for Gideon to fina
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