𝑊𝐴𝑆𝑇𝛦𝐿𝐴𝛮𝐷‚ 𝐵𝐴𝐵𝑌ꜝ- M.R.

- prologue.

Delilah is home from university for a week before it happens, a week.

It's a terrible week, filled with her dad's senseless rambling about money and work and how a course in creative writing is going to take her nowhere.

She should be more like him, apparently, a businessman.

He didn't earn his mansion(s) and fancy cars by keeping a fantasy journal.

It earned her a black eye when she'd pointed out, not for the first time, that selling bricks of cocaine as a side hustle isn't how she wants to earn her many mansions.

Or that she doesn't care to earn mansions at all.

But, she will concede that her dad is in fact, one hell of a businessman; he's somehow managed to run a viable drug cartel from a cushy little village in Northern England.

So — she's home for a week, looking around her kitchen for a snack (she picks up an apple, then quickly substitutes it for a bar of chocolate) when she gets a bullet lodged between her ribs.

It feels like a pinch, at first, a blink and you'll miss it kind of pain — one she probably wouldn't have been all that startled by if the kitchen window hadn't shattered when the bullet flew through.

But as it is, she jumps, dropping her bar of chocolate the same time pain explodes on her right side, and quickly ducks under the long marble island in the centre of the kitchen.

There's a block of knives just out of reach and the urge to grab one is difficult to resist, but that would mean breaking cover, and it's not like she could throw them accurately at a sniper anyway, so she stays put.

It's not long before she hears security take care of their little problem, and it's the maid who finds her bleeding on the kitchen floor first.

More than half of the village are stood watching from the street opposite when she finally gets wheeled into the ambulance.

There are passed whispers and shared looks and a few dead-eyed glares directed her way.

She can almost hear the rambling of 'I knew they'd be trouble' and how her two-person family are always 'making too much noise'.

And she gets it, why they think 'they're such a bother, these rich Londoners, moving in and destroying our village with that eyesore of a house, and now shootings? When will it end?'

Because her father did commission the build of a massive, modern house on top of farmlands and rolling fields in a mining village filled with cottages and devout middle-aged townies that have probably lived here all their lives.

-

She's just out of surgery when her dad's right-hand man (because of course, he couldn't hold more than one conversation a year with her) comes in to tell her that she's leaving for California in two days, because it's not safe for her here, and she was only going to get in the way anyway.

Summer alone in a country she barely knows without her dad to bother her sounds, well it sounds like paradise right now — even if she'd choose Bali over Cali, because her dad has a summer house out there too and the water is amazingly blue.

But of course, she's not alone. She's got a whole security detail, one of which is a personal bodyguard hired to literally not let her out of his sight.

Delilah isn't sure if the nausea is from the anaesthetic or the thought of spending two months in a house with three old white guys with superiority complexes. Though she's pretty sure it's the latter.