Page 5 of Empower

His face paled a few times, but then I watched as red crept over his features. He was getting pissed.

And I mean fucking pissed.

I debated about taking the phone from him and handling it, however, he said, “We’ll be there in four and a half hours,” " I rallied the brothers.

We were on the road in ten minutes.

And there was no way I could have known that my entire world was going to change with that single phone call to Red.

Chapter 1

Lena

Yes, I had one of those epiphanies.

The epiphany where you thought you had met the one.

The keyword in that statement... thought.

And when you met the one, you wondered what the hell happened and what the bloody hell you were thinking.

That all started when I was six years old.

Apparently, you should never trust a boy who looks like a Ken doll – life lesson.

My story begins when I was six years old… that lovely ever-present girl meets a cute boy.

For my birthday that year, I begged for a sparkly pink bike with black tassels, and I wanted a hot pink helmet with a black sugar skull on it.

Thankfully, I got it, it was also the only thing I wanted.

It just so happened that while on that bike in the cul-de-sac where we lived, I saw him for the first time.

The day I fell hard for him makes me wonder what in the world happened to him in the following eight years.

I was riding my bike without a helmet. Yeah, I know. I’m a rebel. But really, it’s because the strap broke. But shh.

I tried to dodge a big boy who was coming too fast behind me on his skateboard. I oversteered and fell while the boy on the skateboard laughed at me.

My knees were scraped, and bleeding, and my hands had little black pebbles in them.

I didn’t know where the cute blonde-haired boy came from, but he got to that boy and knocked him off his skateboard with his body.

He then dragged that boy back to me by the back of his shirt and made him say sorry.

The cute blonde-haired boy lifted me and helped me walk to my house where he then proceeded to put my sparkly pink band-aids on my knees and hands.

When I noticed his knuckles were bleeding, I did the same in return. He just smiled and walked away.

Little did I know he was only doing that to impress my half-sister Karly, who was three years older than me.

I soon found out the boy’s name was Byron Adams, and he was ten years old.

So, this boy who looked just like a Ken doll, you know the perfect side-swept blonde hair, the perfect smile, the perfect name-brand clothes, and the perfect parents?

And as I grew older so did he. I often found myself trying to butt into whatever he was doing.

It never registered in my brain that he only let me play with him and his friends when a certain someone was with me.