Race with Danger (Run for Your Life Book 1) Read Free

who Alex and Amy Robinson were before I knew them as Mom and Dad. Yep—Alex, Amy, Amelia, Aaron. My parents used to call our family “the straight A’s,” and of course they had to add that our grades in school needed to live up to that.
    Dad grew up in the foster care system in Chicago, so we never had grandparents or aunts or uncles on his side, or at least not any that he’d admit to. He went to college there on some sort of poor-brilliant-kid scholarship and then he got an MBA in New York before moving to the west coast. Mom was a Jansen in Africa before she became a Robinson and a biochemist in the U.S.
    Or is any of that true?
    Now that I’ve become an expert at hiding in plain sight, I know how easy it is to make up your own history and plant bits and pieces in public records that get splashed all over the Net. Mom and Dad must have had secrets, and those secrets had to be something awful. Ninjas don’t just show up one night and slaughter whole families for no reason.
    I spent the night of my family’s murder in a dumpster, rolled into a quivering ball of tears and snot. We’d just done a study unit on the homeless in school and the dumpster diving bit really stuck with me. Getting inside wasn’t as bad as you might think, because it was garbage day, so the dumpster had been emptied that morning and had accumulated only a few bags of trash since then. I managed to mostly stay away from the damp spots that still had bits of rotting food clinging to them like some sort of gruesome confetti. The worst part was the ripe-vomit smell, which still haunts my imagination anytime I stumble into a place I don’t want to be.
    Of course I didn’t sleep that night. Every moment kept replaying in my head—the bodies, the blood, Aaron’s screams, the hissed word, the car chase.
    Were Mom and Dad really dead? How could I have abandoned my little brother like that? How could I not run for my life? None of it seemed possible, but it was all too real at the same time.
    All night long I heard cars drive by and people moving around outside. Once the lid flew open and I thought it was the end; they’d found me. But a large trash bag sailed in, the lid clanged shut, and my wait for daylight went on.
    Somewhere I’d dropped my cell phone—probably when I jack-knifed over the fence. I had thirty dollars in the back pocket of my designer jeans, and another twenty zipped into my inner jacket pocket—my emergency stash, in case I needed to take a cab or buy dinner for myself.
    What a spoiled little rich girl I was then.
     
     
    I don’t want to think about any of this as I stare across the table at Sebastian, but it naturally comes to mind because his past used to be a secret, too. Now everyone knows his history. His mother was the Cuban cook in a senator’s house, back before her boss became President T. L. Garrison and took up residence in the White House. According to the magazine articles, Sebastian grew up “in a stable household with two older sisters and a man he thought was his father.” For eighteen years, more than my lifetime, nobody except his mother knew Sebastian was American royalty.
    I’m trying to remember how the secret came out when the prince looks up from his lunch plate, aims those laser green eyes at me, and snarls, “Stop staring.”
    Somebody should have put the clues together a lot earlier than they did. The son’s eyes may be green, but they burn with the same intensity as President Garrison’s famous gold-colored eyes. Sebastian shoves a forkful of barbecued beef into his mouth and chews as he points his fork toward the table and mumbles, “Focus.”
    He’s right. Stay in the here and now, Tana. My cheeks burning, I take a swallow from my banana protein smoothie and then shift my gaze to the contour map stretched out between us. The map is one of those old-fashioned 2D printouts instead of a regular 3D projection. Map-reading is one of the skills that differentiate endurance races from