Drake ✔️

Prologue

Shay

Around here, the word 'harm' has several meanings. Firstly, the classic definition; physical injury, especially that which is deliberately inflicted. "I didn't mean to cause him any harm". Yeah, sure you didn't. The second meaning is much more significant, and it's this; HARM. As in, the Harm boys. My boys. Hunter, Axel, River and Macauley. And there's no other word that could perfectly sum them up.

For as long as I can remember, Macauley has been running around me. We went through the foster system together, we moved up in the world together, and now here we are, a fifteen year old girl and a seventeen year old boy, doing what we need to do to get through life. Together? Yeah, we're still bound. But sad as it is, Mac has matured in ways I haven't. I've fought the darkness while Mac has welcomed it. He's embraced it just a tad too tightly, and I fear that whatever light there may have been in the scared little boy Mac used to be has been completely snuffed out of him. Mac is breaking more and more with each passing day, and I worry that in a few years the little boy I met in a foster home ten years ago will be gone forever.

I was a foster baby from day one. Bounced from family to family, never able to settle and never given a chance. I met Macauley when I was five and he was seven. He was quiet and withdrawn back then, and by the time he turned nine he'd developed a damaging taste for alcohol. That taste has never left him, and I'm not sure he can make it through the day without a drink anymore. He gets by, I'll give him that. But he uses alcohol as a coping mechanism, although he'd never admit it. He progressed to coke and weed too by the time he entered his teens. Unsurprising. Mac likes to party, no matter the occasion. I've tried to change him before and it was a wasted effort. I gave up challenging him a long time ago, he likes his lifestyle and who am I to try and change him anyway? There's only one person who can so much as attempt to control Macauley. The H in Harm. Hunter.

Macauley and I met Hunter on the day that changed both our lives. I was ten and Macauley was twelve. It was Hunter's thirteenth birthday. His step-mom Annette had taken him out to the store to buy him whatever he wanted, and they just so happened to bump into little old me and my foster brother Macauley. And what were we doing? We were stealing liquor. Well, Mac was. I was waiting outside. Luckily for us, Hunter's step-mother saw past the reckless action. She saw a couple of kids in need of nurturing. She saw two lost souls craving direction and support. So - she took us in.

From that day on, Macauley and I both mysteriously disappeared from the foster care system. It's like we'd never been in it in the first place. That's the level of power Hunter's step-mom holds. She took us to her house (correction, mansion), she spoke to her husband Tony (Hunter's father) and they did what they had to do. I got my own room, I got a pretty pink four-poster bed with fluffy cushions and teddy bears and all the shit I'd never had up until then. I got everything I'd never had before, and I welcomed it entirely. I felt like god was finally smiling down on me and giving me the chance I'd been deprived of from birth. I assumed the same was happening for Mac, but I assumed wrong. Hunter and Mac became fast friends, but Mac wasn't welcomed into Hunter's family home like I was. No. Macauley was taken care of, don't get me wrong. Just in a totally different way than I was.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and enter River. On the day I was finally taken to the house Macauley had been put up in - Oak Hill House - I met River. He was staying there too, along with an assortment of other abandoned boys who had no family of their own and no where else to live. It was like a homeless hostel or something, filled with boys from River's age right up to teenagers approaching their twenties. And why does Hunter's father and step-mom take these boys in? Why do they pay for their food and electricity and accommodation? Because they work for them. River and Macauley were working for Hunter's parents. And so was Axel.