The Reaper's Runaway Princess novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Everyone Can See

Mara walked out the front door and stood on the sidewalk in front of her own face.

By eight o'clock, twenty people had gathered on Main Street.

Some held coffee cups and some held phones, and they all looked from the pages on the glass to her and back again.

She was not shaking, which surprised her.

"I want to say something," she said.

The street went quiet.

"That's me in the picture. I was nineteen, and my father married me to a man twice my age. He did things to me that I won't describe on a sidewalk."

A woman near the front put her hand over her mouth.

"I am not sick. I am not missing. I left him, and he has been looking for me for six years."

"Honey," the old widower said from the back of the crowd, "we know."

"I'm telling you anyway." Her voice held. "If he shows up here, he'll say I belong to him. You've all known me for two years. You decide what you believe."

Nobody spoke.

Then the teenager with the rabbit pushed through the crowd, took a corner of the nearest page, and ripped it off the glass.

"This is trash," she said.

The widower came forward with a plastic scraper in one hand and a bottle of window cleaner in the other.

"Brought supplies," he said. "I've been up since five."

A man in a delivery uniform stepped up next. Then two women from the bakery. Then the entire hardware store.

Pages came off in long loud strips.

Boone, Dean and Nash came around the corner from the alley, black with soot, and stopped, because four strangers from the diner were already on ladders.

Wyatt was not with them.

Nash looked at Mara. She lifted her chin.

"Don't just stand there," she said. "Take the top row."

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