PREVIEW OF ARIA FORDS BOOKS

The Rebel

Prologue

“Kyle! No!”

I turned around, just as the bigger, older guy swung a punch at my head. I felt the blood trickle quickly down my face, and the rusty taste of it enter my mouth. I caught sight of Shane, my friend, who’d warned me. Then I let out a hiss of breath as the big guy’s fist came at me again.

I swore using words that the other kids used—words that would have made my dad go gray if he’d heard them—and then punched out hard.

The big guy grunted and swung back. I ducked and the punch hit my upper bicep. It sent me backward against the wall, and I slid down, my left arm lame and throbbing.

“Kyle!”

Shane was screaming at me again and I spat, spitting out blood and other things and fell on the older guy, hitting and kicking. He had tattoos from the Benson bunch. We were the Skifflers. We hated them. I kicked him, and he swore at me and reached up, gouging at my eyes. I felt hands on my shoulders.

“Kyle, come on! Get off. Look!”

“No!” I yelled, furious. I was winning. I would finish this and make a name for myself. Dammit! I was seventeen, and this guy was maybe twenty, and I was winning.

“Kyle!” Shane dragged me back and the big guy got up, glaring at us. “Look there.”

I looked around and caught sight of Darrel, the boss of our gang, a guy somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two. He was there, but it wasn’t at him that Shane was looking, but just behind him.

I followed his gaze and saw the car. I froze.

“Kyle Beckham! Get here now.”

I felt my heart race.

“No,” I said.

Shane threw me a look. “See? I did warn you,” he added. He looked really upset. “I did try.”

I looked around once more. The other guys had melted away. The gang who had become my family for the last two weeks. I was alone on the street, with Shane and the black car.

A Mercedes E-class, latest model, with a street value that any of us could have estimated as more than our skins were worth on the black market, had stopped. The man behind the wheel had his eyes on me.

I swallowed hard under his gaze and let out a long sigh. I then walked forward into the alley.

“Kyle!”

I had planned to face them down. But in the last minute, I couldn’t. I ran. I tried to dodge up a side street. But I hadn’t understood how powerful the acceleration of that Mercedes could be. It sped up behind me. And it was a blind alley. I was trapped.

“Kyle Beckham. You will come here.”

I looked into those commanding flint-pale eyes. I sighed. In some lights, they were the image of my own.

“Yes, Dad.”

That was the day my freedom ended and my life as I knew it now began.

I blinked, looking up from the paper as that memory shattered on the sound of feet on tiles. I was in the living room at Beckham Hall—my dad’s pretentious name for his country escape. I stood up from the designer couch and faced the man who entered.

“Dad,” I said.

The memory of my youth—my misspent shameful years—was vivid. In that moment I could have been a seventeen-year-old runaway and my dad a forty-seven-year-old man with a cold temper and an iron heart.

“Son,” he said thinly. “So? What do you say?”

I sighed. “I don’t want it.”

His gray eyebrow raised and fell fractionally. His face—chiseled cheeks, long, straight nose, high forehead—was mine. The only difference was the hair coloring. And some thirty years.

“You are my son, Kyle Beckham,” he said thinly. “I know you’re not a fool. Or a coward.”

I closed my eyes. Whoever said “words will never hurt me” had never faced my dad. The sticks and stones I had faced as a runaway had never wounded me half as much as one of his words could.

“I’m not a fool,” I said tightly. “Or a… a coward.”

My throat was closing up, years of pain—of that cold contempt he leveled at me—shutting me down. My fists were clenched and I could feel my biceps tighten. I felt rage build up inside me. I’ll show you. Everything you’ve built can break. I’m strong and young and powerful. I’m not a coward.

He just smiled thinly. “So you accept?” he said.

I closed my eyes. What could I do? Dad might have been older than me, but he was wily. He could tie me up in knots with his words and I was hopeless against him.

“Yes,” I said. “I will.”

He smiled. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. But I had. As I signed on the dotted line I felt like I was signing away my life.