Page 1 of His Collateral Wife

Prologue

Asmall island town whose residents have been either murdered or enslaved by a local gang.

Fast forward years later, and the town is now the armed fortress of a drug lord and his evil henchmen.

All that's missing is the hero meant to save the day.

I'm sure these things sound familiar to you.

The minor details may change, but the story beats the same.

You've seen this happen in movies. Read this in books. Maybe even heard it in podcasts.

It sounds oh-so-comfortably familiar, and so you can't help but think.

Surely...

Surely a hero will come.

One day.

But I never believed that.

Pure B.S., that's what I think of it.

Because that story is the life I've been living, and there is no hero in sight.

I knew that since I was seven years old, and my father thought it was time I learned the truth.

So yeah.

There's no such thing as heroes.

Or so I continued to believe.

Until He came to save me from the pages of a book.

I was eighteen years old then.

Cynical and nearly suicidal.

If not for the stray cats that I was feeding around the island, I think I'd have long killed myself.

But they kept me alive.

Because I knew they needed me.

They kept me going and made me take things one day at a time.

But with every passing day, the struggle to get out of bed just got harder, and a heaviness I could only feel but not see just kept growing until I could barely breathe under its weight.

I wanted to die.

To the point that I started losing my mind.

And started contemplating that maybe...

Just maybe it would be better to kill the cats and take them with me to the grave.