young boy turned and Elisabeth made the rucksack slip down his shoulders, but in so doing, she also pulled his jacket and t-shirt up.
“Oh, your rucksack is caught in your clothes. Wait, I’ll set you free” Elizabeth lied and bent to the boy, who was unaware of having just uncovered a long violet mark, running from one hip to the other. The mark of the lash he had got three days before.
Elizabeth's narrow eyes and her tightened and white lips made Kira draw back, since she knew that look usually foretold some terrible scolding, but when her mother got up, she was smiling again unexpectedly, making her daughter feel bewildered.
“Let’s go home, but what about having a good ice-cream or a slice of cake at Chocoly’s first?” the woman exclaimed cheerfully, making Kira jump with joy, because she had got to known that place on the day of their arrival, when her mother had bought her the biggest ice-cream in the world, full of candies and biscuits.
Lucas knew that place too, but he had never got inside.
When they got to the car, Elizabeth immediately drove to that place, where she let the two children throw themselves on the sweets, getting drunk of candies, biscuits, muffins and cream, while she withdrew in the most secluded place in the café, to make some urgent calls about what she had just seen on the boy’s back.
Lucas ate like a horse under the careful and happy eyes of the woman, who accused him of being too short and thin for his age.
When the time to go home came, Lucas got into the car reluctantly and gave his address to Elizabeth, who immediately set the navigator up, because she couldn’t master Princeton’s streets very well yet.
“Did your father want you to walk eight kilometers?” Elizabeth burst out nervously when she looked at the navigator’s directions.
Lucas kept silent, wondering if eight kilometers were a long way.
Luckily Kira was able to entertain him, so their trip home passed by cheerfully.
Unfortunately, however, as soon as his father’s huge villa turned out outside the car window, every sign of smile disappeared from Lucas’s face.
When the gate got opened, the child started trembling, wondering how his father would react if he knew what he had done.
“Children, wait for me here!” Elizabeth ordered, getting out of the car and walking to the front door which had just been thrown open, to let Darren Scott's powerful shape come out.
“Mr. Scott, I suppose.”
“I am. Who are you?”
“My name is Elizabeth Madis. I found your son alone at school, at the end of lessons. I caught Lucas and brought him home.”
“Well, now just go away.”
“No, I’m not!”
“You aren’t? What do you want? Money? I haven’t asked you to bring him home! He could walk here, as far as I’m concerned!”
“Don’t you feel ashamed? It’s almost eight kilometers! How could you force him to walk such a long way and what’s more, all alone!”
“And who are you to tell me what I can or can’t do to my son?”
“I’m a social worker and I’ll warn you, there are sufficient grounds to take your son’s custody away from you once and for all: child neglect, physical and probably psychological violence, besides, the child looks undernourished…even if you don’t seem to live poorly!”
“How can you dare come to my house and abuse me?” the man burst out, pouncing on the woman and stopping a few inches from her face.
“You’re drunk” the woman guessed from the stinking breathing getting to her face.
“Go away or I’ll call the police and make you lose your job. I’ll have you banished from this town forever,” he threatened her.
“You can't frighten me. Just know that I’m going to send the health service to you in a few days and also one of my colleagues to check that there aren’t any more marks of violence on Lucas, or I’ll have you thrown in jail. Is it clear?” she went on undeterred and decided to get her way.
“Get out of my house!” he shouted at her, frightening Lucas too, who caught his rucksack quickly and rushed out of the car, to run home and make that quarrel end.
“See you soon, Mr. Scott” Elizabeth told him with a veiled threat, then she got back into the car and drove away.
When the car drove out of the huge estate, Darren walked back home, where he found his son scared and sobbing.
“You’ve brought home a social worker, silly bastard!” the man thundered furiously against his son.
“I didn’t know it” the child could just whisper, ready to pay the consequences.
“Does that bitch really think she can challenge and threaten me…in my town? She’ll pay dearly for that! And as far as you are concerned, I won’t be able to beat you in the next days, but be sure you’re going to pay too for what you have done! Clear off to your bedroom now! Forget dinner tonight, so you’ll learn not to bring that dregs to my house.”
Lucas didn’t let him say it twice.
He rushed to his bedroom like a shot, grateful to Kira and her mother, who had offered him that special and gluttony snack. His stomach was still full, so he plunged under the sheets, praying that the morning would come soon.
He wished to meet Kira again, his special friend, that hurricane with a heart-shaped mouth and wood-green eyes, who had turned his day upside down and who would change his life soon, as he knew in the bottom of his heart.
KIRA
Princeton, Kentucky, July 12 th,2014
“I can't stand this situation any more! I don't care at all whether Darren Scott is the city boss! Yes, I understood...Yes...yes...Absolutely not! I'm not absolutely going to give up...I don't care if this war has gone on for four years! I'm tired of letting that monster spoil a young boy's childhood! I know he has already threatened to have me fired...He has been trying for ages, but luckily I'm too good at my job, so he couldn't get the Major's authorization...I understand...Yes...Okay, but I can't stand this state of things any more! Lucas is once more in my kitchen, he's hurt and my daughter is treating him! He had a wound on his lip last month, while he has a deep cut in his left eyebrow today!” Elizabeth Madis kept shouting on the phone. She was locked into her study, sure that the two young people in her kitchen couldn't hear her, but unfortunately her anger and her frustration seemed ready to break down the walls. She had been discussing with her boss for some years, about the measures they could take towards the powerful Darren Scott, but it seemed that all the people living in Princeton had family members working for him or renting a house in one of his crumbling blocks of flats. Everybody owed Darren Scott something, so they all feared consequences. Even the head of the Police.
In spite of that, Elizabeth had never given up: she was famous because she always got the best results in her job and for her incredible sixth sense which made her discover what was rotten in every family in town. After four years, she was still trying to obtain justice for that miserable child that she often had to put up and heal, together with her daughter Kira, who had never left Lucas alone since she met him.
Even if Kira was still very young, she had taken her best friend's troubles upon herself and she was very busy in looking for a plaster at that moment, so she wasn't listening to her mother's phone call, which she already knew by heart.
“You'll probably get a scar. Just sit down and go on pressing the gauze,” she ordered Lucas, feeling annoyed and nervous inside because she hadn't been able to prevent that new violence on the boy.
“It's hurting!” Lucas moaned, sitting on the stool in front of the kitchen counter, where all kinds of medicine, gauze,