Redemption Read online

  Redemption

  Nicole dykes

  Copyright © 2019 by Nicole dykes

  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.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Playlist

  Prologue

  1. Logan

  2. Logan

  3. Logan

  4. Logan

  5. Quinn

  6. Logan

  7. Quinn

  8. Logan

  9. Quinn

  10. Logan

  11. Quinn

  12. Logan

  13. Quinn

  14. Logan

  15. Quinn

  16. Logan

  17. Quinn

  18. Logan

  19. Logan

  20. Quinn

  21. Logan

  22. Quinn

  23. Logan

  24. Quinn

  25. Logan

  26. Quinn

  27. Logan

  28. Quinn

  29. Logan

  30. Quinn

  31. Logan

  32. Quinn

  33. Logan

  34. Quinn

  35. Logan

  36. Logan

  37. Logan

  38. Logan

  39. Quinn

  40. Logan

  41. Quinn

  42. Logan

  43. Quinn

  44. Logan

  Epilogue

  Note From the Author

  Also by Nicole dykes

  Prologue from Misled

  This book is dedicated to my family and my friends. Thank you all for reading and for the incredible support and love. I don’t know what I would do without any of you and I sure don’t ever want to find out what that would be like. Mom, you’re the best mom I could ever ask for. I don’t know how I come up with all of these broken characters without an amazing mom, because I sure had one from day one. Thank you to all of the Novelties for being fiercely supportive and there for me. Thank you to my beta readers for helping make each book better! Thank you to my editor, Dena, my cover designer, Veronique, and my formatter, Elizabeth, for making my books beautiful! I truly love you all! Message me any time and enjoy this crazy ride!

  (This is something I’ve never done before, but since music is such a huge part of this story, I felt I absolutely needed to include it! I don’t have any legal rights to any of these songs, but each one was picked to fit this story.)

  Love Me Anyway

  Pink featuring Chris Stapleton

  Ends of the Earth

  Lord Huron

  Shallow

  Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper

  Unsteady

  X Ambassadors

  Landslide

  Fleetwood Mac

  You Were Meant for Me

  Jewel

  16 [Explicit]

  Highly Suspect

  Patience

  Guns N’ Roses

  The Joker

  The Steve Miller Band

  I’ll Be There

  Walk Off the Earth

  Have A Little Faith In Me

  John Hiatt

  Prologue

  Thirteen years old

  What the hell was that?

  I jump up from my twin mattress tucked away in the dining room of the one-bedroom, rundown, raggedy-ass apartment my mom is renting. She is currently “entertaining” a guest in the only bedroom, but at least there’s a closed door between us. I’ll take it.

  I rip the earbuds from my ears that I’m using to block out the godawful sounds coming from my mom’s room and listen for what I thought I heard.

  I look out the window, yellowed from age and the elements, and jump back when I see a small hand grasp the top rung of the fire escape. I sigh a breath of relief when my best friend Quinn’s face appears next until I notice the state of her beautiful features.

  Not again.

  I slide the window up, letting her climb in the window like she’s done so many times before. It’s bitterly cold out, and Quinn is clad only in a ratty, old hoodie she’s pulled over her long blonde hair and a pair of ripped jeans.

  “Quinn.” I close the window and stand in front of her, waiting for her sapphire eyes to meet mine. This is nothing new.

  I’ve known Quinn since I was four and wound up in a temporary foster home after my mom was arrested for soliciting an undercover police officer for a blowjob in exchange for her choice of drug, meth with a hint of danger.

  Good ole’ mom.

  I was only in foster care for a few days that time, for as long as it took my mom to wiggle her way out on a technicality. But in the short time I was there, a bond was made with Quinn that I’m sure can never be broken.

  She offered me her Goldfish crackers when she noticed me sitting alone in the corner, skinny and shivering with fear, crying to go home. Her big, blue eyes were the first thing I saw as her little face poked into my space, and then she held the small pouch of crackers out and told me, and I quote, “toughen up, Buttercup.” And that was it. I wiped my pathetic tears, straightened my back and acted like she was crazy before taking some of the crackers to satisfy my growling stomach.

  Quinn, it turned out, had been in foster care since she was two, when her junkie mother overdosed, and Quinn became a ward of the state of Kansas. She was in the temporary foster home because she set off a couple of fire alarms in a store and ran away from her last foster mom, and they needed a place to stash her until they could find a place for the little hell-raiser.

  After that, she and I couldn’t escape one another. On my first day of kindergarten, the little girl in pigtails sitting at the desk next to mine was none other than the Goldfish-eating, devilish angel herself, Quinn Foster.

  Ironic last name, right? It was destiny. This girl was set up to live her life in the system. And after that, our paths have been nearly identical, along with Rhys and Sean, two other lifers we met along the way.

  All of us had the same thing in common, shitty parents who couldn’t care less about us or more about getting high.

  Quinn’s chin tilts up and her eyes meet mine, confirming what I thought I’d seen when she was climbing up the fire escape. Her right eye is swollen and watery, the impact from a fist more than evident.

  “I’ll kill him.”

  She shakes her head sadly, not saying a word. Not having to. We’ve been through this so many times.

  Her foster father is a mean drunk. Well, he’s a mean sober person, but he unleashes holy hell when he’s had a few. And his target is always Quinn.

  She walks to my mattress, scooting to the corner and leaning back against the hard wall, lifting one of my earbuds and placing it in her ear, listening to my playlist before tossing it back down. “I need to teach you what real music is.”

  Quinn loves the classics and doesn’t have much tolerance for newer music of any kind. I lay down on the bed, my head next to her legs that are pulled up to her chest as I look up at the dingy ceiling. “School me, oh wise one.”

  I grab the old, battered acoustic guitar next to my bed and hand it to her. It was a gift from me, Sean, and Rhys for her thirteenth birthday, and we may have obtained it in a not so legal way. Okay, a totally illegal, risky, stupid way, but we’re street kids, right? Who among us doesn’t have one or two shoplifting escapades under their belt?

  Besides the owner of that pawn shop has been ripping people off for decades, and this guitar belongs to Quinn. The asshole was going to throw it out until he realized Quinn wanted it and then tried to charge her two hundred dollars for it.

 
Fuck him.

  The strings were busted, and the body was cracked, but Sean is really handy with that kind of stuff. He’s a savant in fixing and tuning instruments. His grandmother taught him before she died, and for whatever reason, it stuck with him.

  Not the best skill to have when you literally come from nothing, but in this case, it came in handy.

  She loves this guitar and keeps it here with me because she knows I’ll protect it with my life. We all know to keep as little with us as we can when we go into the system because the chances of coming out with any of it are slim.

  Quinn strums the strings with fingers that are still blue from being out in the cold winter night. She stops, shaking her fingers in front of her. “Too cold. My fingers won’t work when they’re freezing.”

  It’s not much warmer in the apartment than it is outside. Getting high is a hell of a lot more important to my mother than paying the gas bill. I sit up and take Quinn’s small soft hands in my mine, cupping them and pulling them to my mouth. Her eyebrow quirks up, but she doesn’t pull away as I blow hot air between my hands that are encompassing hers.

  I lift my eyes, meeting hers. A strange expression is playing on her pretty face that I can’t decipher as our gazes lock while my breath warms her icy hands. “Better?” My voice is low and husky.

  She nods her head, but still doesn’t pull away. “Thank you.”

  I pull back from the weird trance I was in with my best friend and slowly release her before lying back down.

  A few beats later her magical fingers are making that rundown guitar her bitch. The sounds she can pull from that beat-up old thing is beyond me, but that’s Quinn. The girl is pure magic. Her soft, raspy voice fills the room as she plays an old Fleetwood Mac song, her version of “Landslide” causing honest to God goosebumps to form across my cool skin under my hoodie.

  When she’s finished, she hands me the guitar, and as I place it back in its spot next to my bed, she slides down next to me, staring up at the ceiling, her right hand slipping into my left one.

  “You can’t keep letting him get away with this, Quinn. You deserve so much better.”

  “Clearly, I don’t. This is my life, Logan.” She turns her head to look at me, the brightness and size of her dark, blue eyes not outshined by the gnarly purple bruise encompassing her right one. “Besides, he’s not that bad.”

  “Tell that to your fucking face.” The word “fuck” doesn’t bother Quinn. We aren’t typical adolescents. Our middle school has armed guards and metal detectors. We’ve witnessed drive-by shootings and police chases in our backyards, prostitutes in the hallways sucking dick for money as we walk to our apartments after school. A little “bad” language is nothing new to either of us.

  “I’m serious, Logan. So, he gets a little pissy on Friday nights after losing money at the casino. This one actually has a job rather than collecting the government check. I share a room with only two other girls.” She shifts uncomfortably next to me. “And other than a couple of beatings, he pretty much keeps his hands to himself.”

  I roll to my side, propping my head up on my elbow. “A little pissy? Quinn, your face is battered all to hell.”

  She rolls to her side, unbothered. “Bull, I’m perfect.”

  I smile, tucking a long strand of her straw-colored hair back into her hoodie. She really is. “True, but you need to tell someone so it doesn’t happen again.”

  She snorts. “What world do you live in? Who exactly am I going to tell, Wally?” I don’t even blink at her outdated Leave it to Beaver reference. There weren’t a ton of television channels available to us over the years. No one we know can afford anything but basic cable or an antenna. “The cops who hate my ass and would love nothing better than to send me to juvie because they’re convinced I’ll end up like my mom? Or the social workers who I have done nothing but give extra work to since I was two?”

  “Some of the social workers aren’t so bad.”

  She tilts her head in astonishment. “Logan. No. Besides I could end up somewhere way worse than this one. No. Way.”

  I lay my head back down flat on the pillow in a huff. “Fuck, Quinn. I can’t stand to see you like this. What if it goes further next time?”

  “It won’t.” I feel her shrug next to me even if I can’t actually see it. “Or it will. Fate, Logan. It’s a motherfucker.”

  I scoff but can’t fight the laugh. I’ve never actually heard her say “motherfucker” before, and it sounded strange coming from her beautiful lips. “True.”

  “Look at me.”

  Her voice is low and raspy, and for whatever reason, it sends an inexplicable chill through my body, and it takes me a moment to actually turn my head to look at her. Her large, doe-eyes gaze into mine with something I’ve never seen before.

  Vulnerability.

  We never show it. Not even to each other. It’s too dangerous for kids like us to show weakness of any kind.

  “Kiss me.”

  It’s half command and half question, and I’m almost completely positive my eyeballs just leapt from their sockets in shock, leaving the rest of me completely immobile. “What? No.”

  She doesn’t look surprised or hurt. She’s completely calm and unaffected. “Logan, don’t be a baby. We are best friends, right?”

  “Right. That’s why there’s no way in hell I’m going to kiss you.”

  She turns more to her side, allowing her to face me. “That’s why you have to kiss me.”

  I shake my head like a psycho, still stunned by her request. Quinn is one of the guys. Granted, a smaller, feminine, pretty guy, but still. No matter what toll puberty has started to take on our bodies and unholy hormones, I can’t see her as anything other than that. It’s not right. “No fucking way. Drop it.”

  Her face, which I realize has somehow overnight started to morph into high cheekbones, long eyelashes, and pouty, incredibly luscious full lips, moves near my own as a gulp catches in my throat. “I need this. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important to me.”

  My words are caught in my throat for what seems like an eternity before I finally croak out a lame, “Why?”

  She’s deadly serious, her voice quiet, yet still confident. “I have five years left in foster care. Five. I’m not stupid, I know this isn’t the last home I’ll be in, not by a longshot.” She shakes her head, seemingly brushing off a chilling thought, her eyes locking on mine. “I just want to make certain that I have all control of whose lips touch mine first.”

  I swallow hard as I stare at her, knowing what she means, and it sends fury through my body. “If anyone ever puts their lips or anything else on you without you wanting it, I’ll kill the motherfucker.” I’ve never meant any words more than I mean these.

  Her hand brushes my cheek, the contact sparking something deep inside me. “I know. Just do this for me. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. You’re the only person who’s ever made me feel safe. Do this for me.”

  I can’t believe I’m even considering this. I’ve never kissed a girl. I’ve never wanted to, but . . . Shit. No. I can’t do this. “Quinn.”

  “Don’t make me ask Rhys. Who knows where that asshat has been, and Sean is too sweet.”

  My blood boils at the thought and my hand lands on her hip, pulling her closer to me. “Don’t you fucking dare.” It’s an intense growl that comes deep from my chest. I’ve never felt so possessive over anything in my life.

  “Then toughen up, Buttercup and kiss me.” My eyes search hers, and I know she’s serious. I give in, starting to lean in, but her small hand pushes my chest back. I start to panic, thinking maybe she was just messing with me. “Wait. You haven’t kissed someone yet and just not told me, right?”

  “What? No.” I tell Quinn everything.

  “Okay, good. If I kiss you, I’ll be kissing everyone you have, or so they say. And I just wanted to know what kind of nasty skank I’d be kissing.”

  “You’re kinda messing with the mood, Quinn.”

>   She rights her shoulders and nods her head. “Right. Sorry. Kiss me.” She looks right into my eyes, focused and determined.

  This is my best friend. The girl I’ve known practically my whole life. Those eyes. I know those eyes better than anyone’s. Solid blue. No flecks of any other color in them. Dark and stormy, beautiful eyes. “Fuck.” I run a hand over my face in frustration. “Close your eyes.”

  “What?” She looks at me like I’m completely ridiculous, which, I admit, I am.

  “Just do it.”

  She huffs, but closes her eyes, and I do the same, leaning forward slowly until my nose brushes hers. My heart is racing, and I’m convinced it’s going to jump out of my mouth and run the hell away from this insane situation, but when Quinn puffs out a frustrated breath and is about to bitch at me again for being a wuss, I mash my lips against her full ones.

  She lets out a surprised yelp because the pressure was far too much and my inexperience is showing. But as I pull back, she presses forward, her soft lips fusing with mine, and her arms lacing around my neck.

  Her lips part only slightly, and I grow bolder using my tongue to explore her mouth. It’s sloppy, but something in that kiss gives me something I’ve never had.