by Nikki Ashton
Contents
Prologue
1. Sarah
2. Adam
3. Sarah
4. Adam
5. Sarah
6. Adam
7. Sarah
8. Adam
9. Sarah
10. Adam
11. Sarah
12. Adam
13. Sarah
14. Sarah
15. Adam
16. Sarah
17. Adam
18. Sarah
19. Adam
20. Sarah
21. Adam
22. Sarah
23. Sarah
24. Adam
25. Sarah
26. Adam
27. Sarah
28. Adam
29. Sarah
30. Adam
Acknowledgments
Nikki’s links
Book Links
Copyright © Nikki Ashton 2020
All Rights Reserved ©
Hate Struck
Published by Bubble Books Ltd
The right of Nikki Ashton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A reviewer may quote brief passages for review purposes only
This book may not be resold or given away to other people for resale. Please purchase this book from a recognised retailer. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Hate Struck
First published February 2020
All Rights Reserved ©
Cover design – LJ Stock of LJ Designs
Edited by – Anna Bloom
Formatted by – Tammy Clarke of The Graphics Shed
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For Chloe Walsh who persuaded me that I was the little engine that could
Prologue
The eyes of the blonde-haired girl in the bed, fluttered open and then closed again. Her Mum held her breath, a hand pressed against the ache in her chest as she waited for her daughter to wake up. When the girl’s eyelids closed again, purple against pale skin, her Mum blew out a shaky breath.
“Please wake up, sweetheart,” she whispered. Taking her daughter’s small hand between both her own, she rubbed it gently. “Please.”
The girl whimpered and stirred; her free hand clutched at the bed covers, but she still didn’t wake. Her arms were thin and bare in the hospital gown, all except for the bandage at her wrist. Bound tightly it covered a failed attempt to escape her nightmare that had only resulted in a jagged scar.
The girl’s mum thought back to the night before. She’d found her passed out on the bathroom floor, sticky with blood and a sharp kitchen knife next to her limp upturned hand. Her other arm had lain across her waist, as if she were hugging herself to hold in the pain. That hand had been wrapped around her middle constantly the last few months, a desperate bid to stop herself from falling apart, but her mum hadn’t noticed. The girl had thought she was all alone.
Grief had swallowed them both whole and then spat them out as broken pieces of heartache, misery and pain; they’d become pieces of a jigsaw that could never be put back together.
As the girl became more withdrawn the more their lives became separated neither noticed the other was struggling and moreover the girl’s mother didn’t notice her daughter was frightened and hurt. She didn’t notice the anger that had built inside the girl or the fact that she was withdrawing from everything and everyone. She no longer danced, and she started to hate going to school, but the girl’s mother didn’t see what was happening; she was barely surviving her own daily pain.
If she hadn’t been doing the washing, she would never have found the torn and bloodied knickers in the back of her daughter’s underwear drawer. When she did, an immediate cold shiver of dread clutched at her throat and realisation began to dawn.
The moods, the silence, the anger.
She’d thought it had been the grief of losing the man they both loved, but now she realised her daughter was filled with fear over something else.
She searched frantically through her daughter’s things, desperate for anything to prove her right, but anxious to find something to prove her wrong. With drawers upturned, books on the floor and the cupboards emptied, she finally found the words that would shatter her already splintered heart.
Tuesday 9th March
Mr M asked for some help to clean the art room after school today, so I offered, and it was actually quite fun. We chatted about lots of things, even Real Housewives! I talked about Mum too about how she’s never home since Dad died – since he was murdered. I miss her but she doesn’t seem to care and would rather work which was why it was good to talk to an adult. It was nice and I felt safe again.
Thursday 11th March
The art room is still a mess, but we’ve nearly finished. One more night after school and I think it’ll be done. I’ll be sad in some ways I’ve enjoyed having something to do and someone to talk to. Mr M even got us pizza and Diet Coke delivered
Tuesday 16th March
I feel sick to my stomach over what he’s made me do. I didn’t want to, I told him no, but he kept saying he’d be gentle with me and that he was the only person who cared. He wasn’t gentle with me though. I couldn’t do it, I kept fighting him and he got angry and tore my knickers off me, ripping them down one side. In the end he forced me, and it hurt, really bad. He kept saying it was because it was my first time and next time it would be better, next time I’d enjoy it more. I don’t want there to be a next time. He tried to kiss me afterwards and told me that I was his special girl. He said I should keep it quiet because people wouldn’t understand. People would think my mum was a bad Mum for letting us be together. He said they’d take me away from her and even though she doesn’t care about me anymore, I care about her. She’s all I have left since Dad was killed.
Thursday 18th March
How could I have let it happen again? How could I let him do that to me? I feel so ashamed. I didn’t go to art class, I hid in the library and waited for the end of school bell to ring, but when I was sneaking out he saw me and he told me that I needed to go with him to the Head, but he didn’t take me there he took me back to the art room. This time he was angry and told me I was stupid and would definitely be taken away for skipping class as well as being in a relationship with him. We’re not in a relationship - I hate him. He raped me in the storeroom with the smell of paint and turpentine clawing at my throat and nose and all the time whispered how special I was. I know I have to tell someone but what if he’s right, what if they take me away from my mum? I’m so scared and I don’t know what to do.
The girl’s mother read more entries from the diary. Tears dripped from her chin and landed on the pages below with a splash. Each entry was the same until the last one, from only the day before.
Thursday 10th April
I finally gave in today. I didn’t struggle and I didn’t cry. I lay there and blanked him and the smell from my mind and sang a song in my head, one that Dad taught me when I was a little girl and somehow it gave me comfort. I still didn’t let him kiss me, I moved my
head away and that made him mad. He said I’d have to kiss him soon, everyone who was in love kissed each other. I don’t know if I can take much more. I hate myself for being weak and needing my mum because if I didn’t, I’d say no and I’d tell someone, but the truth is I have no one to tell.
The girl’s mum fell to her knees and screamed, the pain she felt at not realising what had been happening to her baby was like a dagger being twisted in her guts – twisted and twisted before it was pulled out and then stabbed back in.
With rasping cries retching from her lungs, she called her daughter, but she didn’t answer. She sent her a text, but it didn’t even look as though it had been read. She even called her daughter’s friends but none of them knew where she was and hadn’t really seen much of her anyway.
She was still sobbing when she called the police and told them her daughter was missing and she knew why. Her face was sticky and wet when two officers arrived to talk to her and get any information that they could about her daughter to help find her. She remembered her heart thudding at the sight of the police car, because last time one of those had turned up at their home it had been with the news that would change their lives forever.
When her daughter arrived home, while she was still crying and talking to the police, she finally noticed how thin she was. She saw that the light had gone from her eyes, even more than the grief had robbed her of. She saw how her daughter flinched when the male officer touched her shoulder and she recognised hatred in her daughter’s eyes when she looked at her.
It had taken almost an hour for her daughter to open up and to tell them she had been raped, more than once, starting on the day after her seventeenth birthday, and it took her another forty minutes to tell them who the man was who had taken something so precious from her without permission or care.
The police did everything they could but when it went to trial, he told everyone she’d lied, and the sex was consensual. He said they’d had sex twice and then he’d ended it, and this was her trying to get back at him. He was a good liar, convincing, whereas she got flustered and got her dates wrong and told them she liked talking to him.
In the end the jury didn’t believe her, no one believed her, not even her schoolfriends; they believed him, and called her a whore.
He lost his job at her school for having sex with her, but he was allowed to go home exonerated of the rape he’d been accused of. She went home branded a liar and had already stopped going to school weeks before because of the gossip and the whispers. She had no one on her side, but it didn’t matter she hated herself anyway and couldn’t see a future for herself without the pain of memories. That was the night her mum found her on the bathroom floor with a pool of sticky blood next to her.
“Mum,” she groaned as she finally opened her eyes.
“I’m here, sweetheart and it’s going to be all right.”
1
Sarah
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy when skies are grey
You’ll never know dear; how much I love you
Please don’t take my sunshine away…
I sang the song over and over in my head to drown out my mum’s voice as she told me all about the school and how great it would be.
“It has a very good languages department, sweetheart, you’ll love it.”
That made me sing louder.
I'll always love you and make you happy
If you will only say the same
But if you leave me and love another
You'll regret it all some day
“Sarah.” Mum slammed her hand on the steering wheel and her perfect mother mask slipped for just a second. I shuddered impulsively, and she raised the same hand to her mouth as tears crept toward her lashes. “I’m sorry sweetheart, I didn’t mean to shout, I…”
“Mum, it’s fine.” My voice sounded so small I doubted if she’d even heard me. She grabbed for my hand but must have felt me tense, because she pulled it back like I’d sunk a fanged snake bite into her.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come in and help you fill the forms out? I can if you’d like.”
I shook my head and reached to unbuckle my belt. “You have to go to work. You can’t be late on your second day.”
“I know, but Mr Henry would understand. You’re my daughter and I need to be sure you’re okay.”
The words ‘like you did for the last year?’ were on the tip of my tongue, but I knew it would do me no good watching her drive away in tears, and she would end up in tears. I had the ability to do that —make Mum cry. All I had to do was sing the song currently going around in my head out loud; the song my dad taught me as a little girl.
“Honestly, Mum, I’ll be fine. It’s just a few registration forms. My buddy Alannah will be waiting for me anyway.”
We were driving through Maddison Edge town centre, on the outskirts of Manchester, where we now lived. I looked out of the windscreen at the tired and neglected town as we drove down the high street, passing a few shops, a cinema and the Town Hall that lined the wide road. Above the street hung a banner that said ‘Maddison Edge Britain in Bloom Winners’. There were baskets hanging from lampposts and dozens of raised flower beds lining the street which, according to my mum, were all filled with Winter Jasmine and Crocus; but as we approached the huge, grey brick school building, which stood like a crown at the very top of the street, the displays got smaller until there it was, like a blot on the already murky landscape.
Maddison High School
It would be my place, my escape from home for the next six months. Miss Daniels the Head had arranged for me to have a buddy to settle in. Apparently, Alannah Fitzroy was a straight A student, talented artist and the head cheerleader of the newly formed football cheerleading squad. Miss Daniels had assured Mum she would be the ideal person to help me steer my way through the stormy waters of Maddison High School.
Yeah, she would be the perfect person to report back if I looked as though I was about to go crazy. There was a reason I was joining Maddison High School half-way through a school year.
And that reason was why I’d wanted to die.
2
Adam
When Alannah Fitzroy walked past me with her nose in the air, I couldn’t help but laugh to myself. She liked to make everyone think she was some innocent little virgin, but I knew different. I’d had her lips around my dick on more than one occasion and what she lacked in technique, she made up for in enthusiasm.
“Alannah,” I crooned, holding a hand against my chest. “You wound me.”
She flipped me the finger over her shoulder and the lads all fell about laughing.
“Shit, she’s hot,” Tyler said, spinning a football on his finger as he tilted his head to one side and watched her arse. “I need to fuck that sometime.”
He looked at me and winked, a silent request for me to share. I nodded my agreement. Alannah may say no at first, but I’d soon persuade her otherwise. Only when the time was right though, because my current plaything was Mackenna White, and I had no fucking intention of sharing or being rid of her just yet. Now she gave amazing head. Her technique and enthusiasm were second to none, especially as she liked to touch herself while she did it.
“Fuck,” Ellis groaned, looking down at his phone as it sounded out a message. “My dad has found the empty whisky bottle in my room.” His eyes shot up to mine and his lip curled. “I told you to fucking take it with you.”
I held my hands up in surrender. “It was you who fucking took it from your dad’s cabinet, not me.”
“Only because you wanted it.”
“And you do everything I say, right?” I snapped.
Tyler and Kirk snorted out laughs. They knew as well as me that everyone did everything I fucking said. Everything I told them to do. I ruled the damn school and God help anyone who forgot. Maddison High School was not what you’d call a polite and genteel establishment. I’d learned from my first day here that if
you wanted to have a half decent time, then you needed to be in charge. So, by my second day I was selling cheap cigs to the sixth formers, including Frankie Dawson who was my predecessor as ‘top dog’. I hung around Frankie and his mates, running errands for them or nicking chocolate from the shop at the end of the road on their whim, fighting and generally making sure the other kids either hated me or were scared of me until Frankie left and it was my turn to rule the school.
Ellis cursed again and smashed his fist into a locker. “How long until we can leave this fucking shit hole, anyway?”
“Five months, two weeks and three days,” Kirk answered. “Then we are out of here and I’ll be at Leeds starting on my path to a fortune.”
“I thought you already knew everything there was to know about computers, you fucking geek?” Ellis asked.
Kirk rolled his eyes. “I still need a degree, dickhead. Who the fuck would employ me just because I tell them I have mad hacking skills?”
“He’s got a point,” I said with one eye on Tyler as he did some tricks with the football that seemed permanently attached to him. “He’d more likely to end up in prison if he admitted to that.”
