BOOK I



Loved to Death

What would you do if the man you love wants to love you to death?  Beautiful, naïve and young, Kali has already overcome one of the worst tragedies in anyone’s life.  When she meets the man of her dreams, she is hopeful that her past has been put to rest and only happiness lies before her.  Little does she know, his obsessive ideas of the ideal family may mirror deadly secrets hidden by his powerful, tumultuous family.

 

 

EXCERPT

Kalina’s skin was crawling with fear.  She pushed the kitchen door open and heard another loud boom.  She froze.  The noise was coming from inside her house.  Her hand held the doorknob tightly as her mind raced madly.  What was going on and what was she supposed to do?  The kitchen was empty and neat as always.  Her mother would never allow a dish or a glass to sit dirty and unwashed, not even for a second.  Everything was in its proper place.  Everything looked normal.  The white metal chairs with the yellow cushioned seats were in their proper places.  The salt and pepper shakers sparkled in the afternoon sunlight that crept past the bright yellow kitchen curtains. 

“No!” she heard her mother scream.  “No, Preach!  No!”

Kalina let go of the doorknob and ran through the small cramped living room.  She had always complained that the furniture was far too big for the room.  She bumped her knee squeezing past the coffee table and the console television set her father had just bought.  Then she heard another piercing scream.

Kalina’s feet hit the bottom stair, and she stood still as she heard her mother pleading.  Then Kalina moved up the stairs toward her mother’s voice as silently as she could.

“I did it for you and for her!”  Charlotte’s voice choked with tears and dread about the money in the drawer she had just earned. 

“I did it for you.  Preach, listen to me.  He paid me.  Put the gun down, Preach.  Please, Preach!  Put the gun down!  Let me explain!”

“Once a whore.  Always a whore.  That’s what Momma told me when I brought you down here.  She said you would make me rue the day I laid eyes on you!”

Kalina heard him clearly.  Her parents’ bedroom door was open.  She was less than ten feet away.  She stood stock-still and listened.

“Preach, Preach.  Come on, Preach.  Think about our baby.  Think about Kalina.  You don’t want to ruin her life because of our mistakes,” Charlotte reasoned.

“What do you care?  She could have come home and been the one to find you with that man in our bed.  Charlotte, how could you?”  Her father’s voice was calm as it echoed through the hallway to her standing on the stairs of the small brick cottage.  Then Kalina heard the sound as Preach primed the shotgun.

“Preach, you made her promises you couldn’t keep.  We can’t send her to school in Pennsylvania.  That scholarship money won’t cover enough, and you know it.  I was just trying to help,” Charlotte offered.  “Put the gun down, Preach!  We need to get Deke some help.  He’s losing a lot of blood.”

“He’s already dead, Charlotte,” Preach said so calmly that Kalina’s entire body shivered.  “I never ever would have thought you would have betrayed me – not trusted me.  I had faith in you, Charlotte.  Why didn’t you have faith in me?  I took care of you, of Kalina, the church, my job, all my obligations to everybody.  What was it that made you do this to me?”

“I was lonely, Preach.  You didn’t look at me with that love in your eyes no more.  The only loving eyes you have are for Kalina.  But, that’s not why I did it.  I wanted to make sure she didn’t have to want for anything.  Not the way I did.  That’s how I ended up down the wrong path.  I didn’t have anything.  Nothing.  My parents weren’t there for me.  You know that.  You helped me.  Preach, you know I always loved you for that,” Charlotte was measuring her words.

Kalina absorbed everything, but she didn’t want to understand what she heard.

“I took you off the street, and after all these years you bring the street to my bed, my home that I built for you.”  Kalina heard her father take a couple of steps.

“You built it for us,” Charlotte’s voice became shrill, “for us!  For Kalina.  For us.  Don’t throw it away, Preach!  Not like this.  We have got to stay strong for our child.  You have to help her reach her dreams, Preach.  Don’t throw those dreams away.  Please don’t throw us away!”

“I could have asked the same of you, Charlotte.  I can’t let you destroy me like this.  You’re right.  That’s why we both have to go.  Kalina.  She’ll be all right,” Preach began to sob, and Charlotte began to moan loudly.

“No!”  Kalina tried to yell as her feet became unglued from the landing of the stairwell, and she started toward her parents’ bedroom door. 

“No!” she tried to scream again, but nothing was coming from her mouth, or maybe it did but was drowned out by the deafening sound of the gunshot that silenced her mother’s excruciating cries for mercy. 

She reached the door just in time to have it blown shut in front of her.  She heard the impact of her father’s body slam against the door as he had put the second shot to the bottom of his chin.  Kalina was thrown against the wall by the force of the door.  She slid onto the floor and sat there for a few seconds.  The house was deadly still.  The smell of sulfur permeated the air.

She found it in her to jump up suddenly and started pushing frantically against the door.  She used all the strength of her one hundred pound frame to get the door slightly open.  She saw her father’s legs stretched out across the carpeted floor.  They were sprayed with blood.

“Daddy!” she screamed.  “Daddy, let me in!”

Copyright 2009, 2012 Dilsa Saunders Bailey-For permission to re-print contact dilsa@simplydilsa.com