By the third week, the little girl stopped crying.
Not because the pain had stopped, but because every time she cried, the dogs would whimper. And their whimpering would bring her stepmother outside with a bucket of cold water for all of them.
So, at 6 years old, Adai taught herself silence.
But what she did not know was that one day, that silence would make her more dangerous than anyone in that house.
She pressed her face into the fur of the biggest dog, a scarred German Shepherd she called Ease, and breathed quietly until morning.
That was her life every single night for 10 years.
The kennel had no mattress, no blanket, no light—only cold concrete, rusted chain-link wire, and the warm bodies of 3 dogs who had more right to that house than she did.
And the woman who put her there was sleeping in the bed that had once belonged to Adai’s mother, eating from her mother’s plates, using her mother’s kitchen, and running her mother’s house.
But there was something about that house, something Adai did not understand yet, something that would change everything years later.
