He hadn’t expected her to last more than a few hours, yet here she still was, seven days after he’d picked her up. Why couldn’t she do what she was supposed to? Go back to Wynette or run home to Virginia. He didn’t give a damn where she went, as long as she was gone.

He couldn’t understand her. She’d seen right through that stomach-churning bogus rape he’d staged their second night out, and she acted as if she didn’t hear half the insults he hurled at her. She was so controlled, so disciplined. What she’d done on her wedding day was clearly out of character. And yet … Beneath those good manners, he kept catching glimpses of something—someone—more complicated. She was smart, maddeningly perceptive, and stubborn as hell. Shadows didn’t cling to her like they did to him. He’d bet anything she’d never woken up screaming. Or drunk until she blacked out. And when she’d been a kid …

When she’d been a kid, she’d been able to do what he couldn’t.

Five hundred dollars. That’s all his kid brother had been worth.

Through the cry of a swamp creature, he heard his eight-year-old brother’s voice as they’d walked up the broken sidewalk to still another foster home, their current social worker climbing the creaking porch steps in front of them. “What if I pee the bed again?” Curtis whispered. “That’s what got us kicked out of the last house.”

Panda hid his own fear beneath a fifteen-year-old’s swagger. “Don’t worry about it, jerkface.” He delivered a sucker punch to Curtis’s scrawny arm. “I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and take you to the bathroom.”

But what if he didn’t wake up like he hadn’t last week? He’d promised himself he wouldn’t fall asleep until he got Curtis up to pee, but he’d dozed off anyway, and the next day old lady Gilbert had told Social Services they had to find someplace else for Curtis.

Panda wouldn’t let anything separate him from his kid brother, and he told their social worker he’d run away if the two of them got split up. She must have believed him because she found a new house for them. But she warned him there weren’t any more families willing to take them both.

“I’m scared,” Curtis whispered as they reached the porch. “Are you scared?”

“I’m never scared,” he lied. “Nothing to be scared of.”

He’d been so wrong.