Chapter 1

Jenny’s POV

ONE WEEK EARLIER

I wake up to the sound of my father screaming in rage, followed by something smashing on the floor.

It was such a typical way to wake up, like waking up to an alarm every morning. It became a daily routine in this house a long time ago.

I close my eyes and curse inwardly. Another day god didn’t answer my prayer to take that man’s life in his sleep.

There is always tomorrow, I thought with a sigh.

I used to hate myself for praying for my father’s death every night. It made me feel like a bad person. But as the days passed, as I became certain he will never change into a better person, that feeling went away.

I get up from the bed and head towards my bathroom.

I stare at myself in the mirror for a long time, trying to recognize the person staring back at me. It wasn’t me. Or it wasn’t who I wanted to be. Why? Well, there are so many reasons that I don’t even know from which one to begin.

First and foremost , I lived in this god forsaken deadbeat of a town.

God, how I hate this town. How I curse my damn luck for having the unfortunate fate of being born and raised here. Where is here you ask? I will tell you.

I live in an extremely small town called ‘Snow’. It is a town with a population of around 500 people, located in Alaska; more specifically, located within a collection of mountains that spread all the way across the border between America and Canada.

Yukon, Canada was about a half hour drive from here, through the mountain road.

This specific feature made it the perfect place for smuggling anything from and across the border.

What kinds of things? Anything.

Electronics, medications, goods, gold, alcohol, cigarettes, fabrics, the list can go on forever.

Guns and ammunitions are the number one products that are smuggled through this town. The most profitable one.

Illegal drugs such as heroine, are worth all those things I listed multiplied by ten. But, they were forbidden from entering or leaving through this town.

Who gets to decide all this?

The Snows.

They are the people who started this whole thing.

They are the ones I blame for being stuck here.

If it weren’t for their great great grand father, this place would have been just a pile of rocks and a massive stretch of empty land.

It was never meant to become an inhabited town.

But given its unique advantage, its unlimited source of incoming money, the original Snow family started the whole smuggling business.

They started building up the town with the money they received from smuggling, they moved in, brought and attracted other people from nearby towns; that’s where my family comes into the picture, and established this town. Its people called it ‘Snow’ honoring the original family for creating life into the town.

And because of their continuous contribution to the prosperity of ‘Snow’, their name was plastered everywhere in this place.

They owned pretty much the whole town. Snow school, Snow hospital, Snow supermarket, Snow anything you can think about.

Snow police department, now that sentence is a fucking joke on its own, you can imagine what kind of protecting and serving they were doing.

They are the alarm system for when the real police come for a random bust desperately trying; and failing, to stop the smuggling business. The SPD protected the Snows, just like everyone in this town.

While the whole town was in the smuggling business at the beginning; my family included, the more the town got built and established, people gradually started earning their money through the legal businesses established by the laundered money from smuggling, leaving the Snows solely in charge of the illegal activities of this town.

The Snows are about half our population now, they are a tight, loyal clan.

A criminal clan with a moral code, how fucking ironic.

They don’t allow addictive drugs or human trafficking to be smuggled through this town.

That is their number one rule.

Most of them are wanted outside the town for suspicion of unsolved crimes and illegal criminal activities.

They are safe inside the town, but not so much outside it.

While the Snows make up half of our population, the Walkers; my family, make up about a quarter of the population.

I only have one uncle and cousin, but there are a lot of other distant relatives living in the town with the last name Walker.

My father and uncle worked tightly with the Snows for the past thirty years, despite owning a legal trading business in the town.

None of them needed the illegal business anymore, the town can probably prosper solely on the numerous legal businesses running through out the town.

We were all loaded with money that can keep us living for years to come, and the Snows had a lot more than us. But greed is a fat demon with a small mouth and whatever you feed it, it is never enough.

Lately, my father and the head of the Snow clan named Isaac Snow were having some kind of disagreements I couldn’t give a damn about.

What I gave a damn about was that because of those disagreements with the Snows, he was even more intolerable than ever.

And we were always at the receiving end of his abuse.

He unleashed his anger on us. Mostly on my poor mom, but I always intervene so she doesn’t suffer alone.

He was an abusive asshole. He has been like this ever since I could remember. At first I was too young. My mom always tried to protect me from his beatings and took all the harsh treatments on herself. But after I grew up enough, I couldn’t watch helpless anymore, or cover my ears with a pillow and hide under the covers every time, I couldn’t keep singing a song to drown out the sounds of shouting, screaming, beating and whipping.

I stood up to him and accepted my share of suffering. I was only twelve years old then.

Because of that, I grew up having a rough, traumatic childhood. It forever changed my perspective on the meaning and interpretation of ‘family’.

It doesn’t matter whether we have done something to piss him off or not, he always finds a reason to hurt us.

I always wondered why my mom was too weak to run away from him all those years. Or tell someone and get his ass locked in jail.

She was always scared into submission and I secretly hated her for it.

She is an amazing caring mother. The best mom. But she was too weak to protect us both.

I was weak too, and I also hated myself for it. I couldn’t save us from that monster of a man either. But it shouldn’t fall on me. I wasn’t the adult here, she was.

In her defense, she had no where to go. My grandparents died right after mom got married; and it wasn’t like they were going to save us from him anyway since they allowed her marriage to him in the first place. Her only family remaining now is her sister; aunt Jenna, who was lucky and brave enough to escape her parent’s house; at the age of 18, and start a life for herself in Canada where no one can control her anymore.

I wished I had her bravery and courage. I wanted nothing more than to leave this hell hole. But I can’t leave my mom with him. And I can’t take her with me.

He would immediately hunt us down before we set foot out of town.

I always keep in touch with aunt Jenna. She knew we were being abused by him; but she wasn’t aware of the extent to which we where being treated, my mom and I made it seem like a once in a month thing. We didn’t want to burden her with the truth when there was nothing she could do from there.

I take a deep calming breath as I run the comb through my bed tangled red copper hair.

I have thick, shoulder length, straight hair with soft natural waves.

My rare hair color was inherited from my mother.

My green eyes unfortunately were inherited from my father. I hate those eyes. Because when I look myself in the mirror, I see him staring back at me.

While his are dull and cold, mine are fiery supported by my blazing hair color.

It made me seem defiant, fearless, and brave.

Yeah right, it was a fucking illusion. I was anything but that.

The only act of defiance I could muster all these years was standing up to him and provoking him enough so he could direct his anger on me instead of my mom.

My skin is pale all the time. I blame that on my medical condition.

I have been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes since I was 15 years old, after I passed out from my father’s physical abuse on me during one unfortunate night.

He got lucky because his abuse left no seen marks on my body when I was taken to the hospital that night, or the whole town would have known what an asshole of a man he really was.

Not that the town people were saints compared to him.

I have it on good faith that most of the men treat their women the same way. Most of them prevent us from ever leaving this town and living our lives the way we wanted to. The men were free to do whatever the hell they wanted on the other hand.

It has been like this ever since the town was established.

Outsiders were not welcome into the town either because of its illegal activities. Trust is essential in this line of business.

No outsider can be trusted enough to be allowed to live here.

And why would they want to live here in the first place? Lucky them.

My unconsciousness that night was due to severe hyperglycemia; high blood sugar, in my blood stream.

Ever since that diagnosis, my whole life; which wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns to begin with, was turned upside down.

It was a lifelong, incurable, draining, chronic condition to control.

I struggled so hard with it at the beginning, both to accept it and learn to manage it.