Kyanite Pryce-Ruze Resub; D2; Fin

Kyanite Pryce-Ruze

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There was once a time in my childhood when I would sit on my mother's lap and let her read stories to me. She'd toss back a wisp of hair that fell out of the two braids I always loved to wear and then she'd wrap her arms around me with a book in front of us so I could see the pictures as she read. I read along with her, lisp and all because my front tooth that had gone missing for two years from being knocked out too prematurely. I used to hear her tell me that I was absolutely beautiful despite what my bully had told me and I believed her over anyone else. Even among all the physical pain.

It was an easier time when my mother was alive and truth be told, I miss her more and more every day since I became a mother myself. My daughter, Mira, will never know how wonderful her Nana would have been. She's got so many more influential people in her life though. I just know, that as she grew up, I would pull her on my lap and wrap my arms around her and read to her. This life began as a blessing, one that I didn't know I needed. It was a spiral of events that started soon after my birthday.

When I was sixteen, I fell in love.

It started out as a simple training exercise where me and the most woman hating boy had gotten paired up to fight. He was without a doubt the worst human being to walk the planet. He was rude, sarcastic and he hated all females that crossed his path. He didn't care to show his ass in front of anyone and feelings? He could care less.

Somehow, my cocky attitude and his disrespectful demeanor brought up the most awkward moment when a training exercise turned into a night fighting for our lives. We battled the cold, wounds that wouldn't stop bleeding and an angry man with a gun in the forest. We stayed together all night long and it turned into one of the most lustful nights I'd ever had. I fell for him hard and in turn, he fell head over hills for me. We somehow made it into a relationship but not the typical relationship that normal couples had. I spent the majority being a secret for him in fear that he would ruin his relationship.

His name was Matthew Dunham. He was just a year older than I was at the time. It was also the same year that my childhood bully that had never left me alone surfaced again. His eye for me turned deadly over several occasions and hurting many people in the process. With Matthew's help, he enlisted a few other friends to join in the battle. In the end, Jins was killed after nearly ending my life and my baby's. I was pregnant at the time. Jin's had also shot a peacekeeper that had come to my rescue. He's retired on good terms, a hero, to be honest. If it wasn't for him and Matthew's intervention, I would have died or Mira would never have been born.

Sometime before my eighteenth birthday, shortly after Jin's death, I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. She was the tiniest little thing I had ever held in my life. She looked like Matthew by his nose and chin, but her eyes - she had my mother's eyes. She slept so soundly right off the bat and as the months came and went, Matthew's presence in our life dissipated. It was slow coming at first when it was to go to work and it would last several days and then a few weeks. Around six months old, Mira's father had basically left us and only sending word once in a while in letter format. By her first birthday, he saw her for the first time in six months. He looked rough but in his absence, I fell in love with another.

Her name was Vanity Pryce.

But everyone called her Vy. I met Vy in an underground fight where we were placed together in the ring and the match ended in a tie. She had busted my arm up pretty good, but I didn't just leave her without something from me to remember me by. Her knee was the sole point of revenge and we ended up bedmates in the hospital that night.

She lived a web of secrets and I was the first to know that the little girl that called her mommy was in fact the one that had given birth to her even though known among the district, she was merely her little sister. We bore a friendship immediately from that. She even helped with my bully issues that came up and she too suffered from it. She protected me a few times from his unrelenting force and I gave her my undying affection. After years of friendship, the moment Matthew split is when we became an item. She and I were more relationship material than my ex was and she cared for me in a way that I could only want.

She became pregnant not long after Mira's first birthday by my brother, the peacekeeper. Though, as the rules and regulations would imply, for him to father a child would surely send him a one way ticket to becoming an avox, so our son's birth father's identity is just another secret that we both harbor and keep to ourselves.

Living with Vy and our three children gave us another opportunity to adopt from the shelter and thus Scarlett came to be one of our own. Three girls and a boy in the household was surely a stretch for us, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I was born to care for others and that's why I had been a trainer's healer for years at the center before I wanted more. I went from tending to broken knees and cuts to more serious wounds, making house calls and working with the search and rescue as a medic in the field. It's a trying job, but I love it so much.

My life has had so many ups and downs, but the one blow that rocked me was the news a peacekeeper brought to me of my father's death. His presence in my life stopped when I was seventeen because the moment he found out about my pregnancy, his barbaric ways of training me and without compassion sent him over the edge. He attacked me and Matthew. My brother and Vy were the ones that were able to stop him and he was promptly sent to the detention center where he stayed until his death had came to me. My heart hurts knowing that both my parents are gone, but in their wake, my life has backup suitors in their place.

With Brody and Nolan to look after me and Mira, I know that life has finally found a smoother path. Love will conquer all. Family is everything to me and just because they aren't blood, doesn't make them any less.

No.

It makes them more because they choose to be in my life and my daughter's. Family always survives any hardship.