Corinne (Book One of The Red Diamond Saga) Read Online Free PDF

life from her, though she understood now that he had no choice.
    She wondered as she stared off into the darkness that surrounded her if
she would ever truly be capable of trust.

10
    The mid-summer sky was weighted with the promise of a thunderstorm as the sun struggled to break through the clouds gathered. Corinne found the imagery to be a perfect representation of what had been happening within her over the past few months.
    After discovering that she had been misled for most of her life by the only person she had ever truly trusted, she had to testify at his trial. Seeing that Sam, a police officer who had been beating and raping women while he offered her fatherly advice and pretended to care about her well-being, had been convicted and would spend thirty years in jail.
    Corinne had been one of the women he had attacked, and every time she recalled the feel of his fist colliding with her flesh, she wondered how a judge could decide how many years such torture was worth. He had not sexually assaulted her as he had the other women; her rape was not of her physical body, but of the last shred of her innocence.
    In a time when she felt the most lost, Sam had come to her rescue. She had been a young girl, barely able to speak, when he had befriended her as a rookie police officer. Since that moment she had believed that there could be good in people, only to have that belief shattered by who Sam truly was.
    Her mind was plagued with the memory of his words. He said that he had been kind to her because he was paid to be, and that he knew things about her past that she did not. She was certain that was possible considering that she knew nothing about her past. She had no information as to her parents names, or whether her last name, Sanders, was shared with either of her parents. It had never crossed her mind to dig into her past. Unlike some other children in her situation, she did not question where her parents were, she had always assumed she simply had none.
    Her curiosity had been awakened by Sam's words. She knew he could be lying, but the more she thought about her past, the more strange it seemed. Most kids in foster care had a story behind it. Often they were born to drug addicts or simply put up for adoption and not adopted. A rare few were orphans in the traditional way, with both parents being dead. Many parents were in jail, and some had simply been abandoned.
    She was one of the abandoned children, as far as she knew. The only information she had ever been told was that she was left at a hospital at a few days old with no evidence of her past other than a blanket embroidered with the name Corinne.
    One of her foster mother's had once murmured as she ran her fingers across the embroidered name, that someone must have been waiting for her to be born, to take the time to embroider it. Corinne had ignored the comment. She had learned not to feel emotional about the parents she did not have, as it had served no purpose.
    Shuttled from home to home, the blanket was the only thing that never left her side. She did not sleep with it or use it for security; she simply made sure it did not get left behind. She operated on the assumption that if her parents had seen fit to abandon her, then they were not fit to be parents.
    These thoughts had driven her to one of her sacred places, a local park where she enjoyed observing the nature around her. Here, she could be out in the open but still remain as isolated as she was comfortable with.
    As hard as she tried to distract herself from the gnawing curiosity that plagued her, she simply could not let go of the notion that there was more to her past than she realized. She had even gone to visit Sam, hoping that he would be able to tell her something more. He had only laughed at her, with no trace of his previous affection. She had set him up; she was responsible for his arrest. He would not tell her a thing.
    So she was left with no information, not even a name to begin with, and