You may not have heard of me, but no worries. Detroit knows me. I’m the old money that new money tries to be. Elite company that you wish you could be in. But if you’re ever lucky enough to get to see my life up close, you’d find that what I want more than anything is to be like you. No privileges. No status. No trust funds. The life I have, the same you seek, is costing me and I knew of only one way out. My escape was the reason for my downfall.
Death.
When I’m finally close to it, I meet the man who attempts the impossible.
He tries to convince me to live.
She is a job, the final payment for a debt owed. I’m not supposed to want her, but I have to have her. When she offers me money to kill her, I make her a deal instead. Now I’ve got seven days to change her mind or risk losing her forever.
Convincing Bet to live will be the toughest job I’ve ever had. The payoff will be worth it… as long as we both live to see it.
There’s just something about lake air in your face that makes your mistakes a little easier to own up to. Sitting out here in this hard plastic Adirondack chair overlooking Lake Huron, I admit that it’s years of mistakes that brought me here. There was a time when my life had been damn near perfect. In the blink of an eye and one drunk driver later, it wasn’t so perfect anymore. In fact, life since then has been nothing short of brutal. Nothing made sense to me now, except making money. What else was there to do? Pills helped at first but then when they didn’t, I switched to drugs only that didn’t work either. I know this because I tried all of them. Twice I tried cutting but passed out when I saw my own blood.
Basically, I suck at coping. Every morning I wake up and the world was still turning, laughing and pointing at me, daring me to take it on. For every step forward, I was slapped in the face and reminded that I had no one, nothing substantial and never would. Bad things were still happening to good people and I was still breathing. I’ve had moments of happiness that were fleeting but it wasn’t enough. Closing a deal, a good movie or a fond memory would surface on occasion but, these moments weren’t enough to sustain me.
On paper I had it all but everyone knows you shouldn’t believe everything you read.
Today I owned so many properties that I had opened my own management company to oversee them. I used the money from that to help business owners get their dreams started and that paid off too. Bottom line, in business no one could touch me. My fleet of cars I never drive would rival any celebrity and yet my social calendar was shit. I didn’t have time for friends and in reality, I didn’t really care for people much anymore. When it came to relationships I had lost the skills to maintain them and frankly didn’t care to. The friends I remember were long before my father struck it big and the second that happened I was thrown into a world of snobs and elitists. When people started associating me with money, life got complicated but back then I always had my family.
Two days ago, I had that moment in my office when I looked around and knew that I had much more than any woman needed. The feeling was so intense it suffocated and shamed me. There wasn’t anything that I couldn’t buy, yet I felt hollow. That very night, I packed a bag and hauled ass from Detroit to catch the last ferry in St. Ignace to get to Mackinac Island.
My loss wasn’t to blame for this meltdown, I was. This breakdown had been coming on for years, I’d just been putting it off by becoming besties with denial. I set myself up for this and I came here to sort it out and put things in order. I’m a business woman and everything I do has a reason behind it, an end goal. Most would say I was a bitch, but an independent female with a shit-ton of money tends to put people off. When a woman appears to have her shit together it makes people jealous. A woman who needs no man to keep her limits the dates she gets called for. Bottom line is, I scare people away and I prefer it that way.
Life was easy up until six years ago and I took that life for granted. Back then I wasn’t a bitch and money wasn’t my motivator. That life didn’t exist for me anymore so I gave it up and played the part of bitch like a seasoned actress. The Bet you see isn’t the real me. The Bet curled up watching parents fly kites with their children wishing it were her, that was the real me.
That Bet was lonely.
I may have inherited my parents’ fortune when they passed but, I’d give it all back to hug them one last time. That money was a blessing and a curse. As it allowed me to venture into business for myself as a small business investor here in Detroit, it couldn’t replace what I had lost. No amount of success would.
This weekend was the six-year anniversary of losing my entire family that brought me to an island hours from the dry land I’m used to. Death may be a part of life, but not only did I lose my parents but my husband and daughter too. I lost too much too fast. I was drowning in grief and I knew it. I could take no more. So it was this little island with horse drawn carriages, bicycles and fudge that I’d take that final step to freedom. Fuck the world, the haters and the money.
I wanted the pain to stop long enough to breathe.
I wanted more than anything, to be free.
To do that, I needed to die
K.S. Adkins is a full time everything. When I'm not wifing, mothering or being bossy, I'm reading, writing or shooting. A full time realtor, lifelong Michigander and all around lover of all things guns and Detroit, I believe in freedom of foul language, gratuitous nudity, tattoos and mosh pits. I've recently taken up drinking wine and feel like I'm really making progress with it. I think my chances at finding a place within the Romance genre is 50/50, but I suck at numbers so what do I know?
My stories are written with heavy dialogue and are Detroit-based. If you don't like heavy dialogue or Detroit, don't read my stories. My characters are typically dark and fairly fucked up so if you want sappy characters without issues, don't read my stories.
I love violence, guns, blood, naughty words, awkward sex, rap, metal, and untraditional people. Every fight scene was tried and tested by me. I have the bruises to prove it too.
I write romance, but my characters are not always romantic. Each is a work in progress. My stories are about strong women and the alphas who try to tame them, but never do.
At the end of the day, you may not like my stories, you may also think I suck as an author and that's okay, but I have to tell you, I had the best fucking time writing them and for me, that's what it's all about.
I love new likes so hit me up on Facebook @ K.S. Adkins or Twitter @ Hoodwrites and let me know if you loved it or hated it. ♥
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