Free 11 Poison Promise by Jennifer Estep Page B

know?”
    Yeah, I knew all about the anger that came with losing a loved one, especially so suddenly, so senselessly.
    She drew in a breath. “My dad split when I was a kid. I never knew him. But my mom was great. Before she died and I . . . moved, we lived in Southtown. On Undertow Avenue.”
    I let out a low whistle. Undertow Avenue was one of the roughest streets in all of Southtown, the kind of place the cops wouldn’t even go, unless there were at least a dozen of them and it was broad daylight. Even then, they’d still be outnumbered by the gangbangers, dealers,and other violent folks. Undertow Avenue also happened to be in the heart of Benson’s territory. No wonder Catalina had known who he was. She’d spent her life living in his shadow.
    “Troy lived in the house next door to ours,” Catalina said. “His dad was a mean drunk who beat him and his mom, so he would always come over to my house to hide out. My mom would feed him cookies. Troy loved her chocolate-chip cookies so much.”
    She smiled, but tears streaked down her face. “Troy watched out for me, you know? Even when we were little, he’d walk me to school and keep the other kids from hassling me. When we got older, we were more than friends. I loved him. At least until . . .” Her voice trailed off.
    “Until he started dealing drugs for Benson,” I finished.
    She shrugged. “I can’t really blame him for it. In our neighborhood, that’s what a lot of people did to make money. It was just another job to them, and him too.”
    “So what happened?”
    Instead of looking at me, she traced her fingers over a black skid mark next to Troy’s hand. “Being part of Benson’s crew, there was always pressure to meet his weekly quotas. Troy was always stressing and scrambling to keep up. One day, we were arguing. He wanted me to start selling to help him out, but I didn’t want to. He hit me.”
    Her hand rose to her left cheek, as if she could still feel the sting of that long-ago blow. Maybe she could, deep down in her heart.
    “He said it would never happen again, but I’d seen that story too many times before, so I broke up with him. A month later, my mom died, and I . . . had the chance toget away, from the neighborhood, from Troy, from all the memories of my mom, so I took it. Maybe that was weak of me, but I took it, and I haven’t looked back since.”
    I wondered what she wasn’t saying, like exactly where she had gotten the money to escape from all the haints that haunted her in Southtown. But I stayed quiet, wanting to hear the rest of her story.
    Catalina’s hand fell back down to the concrete. “Everything was fine until the fall term started a few weeks ago. That’s when I saw Troy again. He’d started dealing on campus, and I ran into him on one of the quads. He begged me to give him a second chance. I told him the only way I’d do that was if he quit working for Benson and got a regular job.”
    She shook her head. “He didn’t like that at all. He said that I was a traitor, that I’d moved away and didn’t remember what life was like in our neighborhood. I told him that there were lots of good, honest, decent, hardworking folks where we came from. I told him that my mom had never dealt drugs to make money. He said that I didn’t have any loyalty to him, to everything we’d been through together, to how he’d protected me all those years.”
    Her gaze flicked to his bald head and sunken features. She shuddered and looked away. “I told him to leave me alone, but he kept following me around campus, trying to get me to go out with him. I could tell he was getting angrier and angrier, but I never thought that he’d actually hurt me. Last night, when he had those two vamps with him . . . that’s the first time he ever really scared me. And now he’s dead,” she finished in a faint, tired tone.
    “It’s not your fault. The choices Troy made, the path he followed, he did all of that himself. And you are