Deeper (The Deeper Chronicles #1)

The Deeper Chronicles

Deeper

Deeper Still
(Coming Soon)

Everything Avianna Linton thought she knew was shattered in one traffic stop. With her life turned upside down, she flees to the bright lights of New York City hoping for anonymity and a new life.

Rising from nothing, Noah Adams holds onto his power and control with a bone-crushing grip. No one dared challenge his authority until her...

Avi’s disdain for Noah is barely contained, and Noah does everything he can to restrain himself—a concept he has little experience with.

There’s more between the two than either of them realize. A force looms near, hovering with deadly precision and motivated solely by revenge.

Avi wonders who her new friends truly are and if she’s already in too deep. Noah, accustomed to getting what he wants, will do whatever it takes to draw Avi’s in deeper.

Deeper is an interracial romantic suspense novel by new author allyn lesley.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Books by allyn lesley

About DEEPER

Dedication

Epigraph

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Deeper Still

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright Notice

This novel is dedicated to the dreamer who lives inside us all.

Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

~Nelson Algren (A Walk on the Wild Side)

Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death...

~Song of Solomon 8:6 NIV

Summer 2011

N
o more than thirteen years old, a girl in hand-me-downs and ill-fitting shoes stomped down the sidewalk. Everywhere her plain brown eyes landed was brokenness.

The row houses that made up her run-down neighborhood were broken.

The few cars parked along the curb—belonging to people who used the vehicles as temporary shelters when they couldn’t afford the rent—were broken.

And the neighbors...the neighbors were the worst. Their entire beings were broken. Their minds crumbled from choices they were pushed by life to make. Their physical bodies aged before their time by lack of access to quality food. Their psyches were irreparably damaged by parents who were stuck in a generational cycle they didn’t have the tools to break through.

Broken.

Everyone who lived in this part of town was broken.

And what did brokenness lead to?

Without a backward glance, she ran from the home where just weeks prior she had found her parents with their mouths agape, forearms corded off, and needles sticking from their veins.

She ran from her brokenness.

The teen rounded a corner and slowed her pace to a cool, unaffected gait before she approached the men who were huddled together. This was the place, the corner in Lower Manhattan to get the best drugs; everybody knew that—addict or not.

The teen gripped the crumbled money in her pocket, a gift from the police officer who felt the need to check on what was left of her family from time to time. With a kind smile that reached his violet eyes, he’d told her to buy something just for her. Maybe he thought she’d treat herself to some earrings or her favorite ice cream—little kid stuff—but she’d lost her childhood a long, long time ago.

Around her, men and women with sunken, scabbed-over cheeks became the norm. The girl stuck out like a sore thumb, but had no intention of remaining an ‘other’ any longer. She wanted to have the same euphoric smiles on the faces of her neighbors, her deceased parents, and sibling, even for just a little while.

“You got anything?” she muttered to no one in particular.

“You lost, kid?” the young man in the center of the group asked, snickering to his companions.

“I’m not a kid,” she said with defiance. Her face rose higher in the air and she squared her thin shoulders. Even with a mature body, the freckles that littered the bridge of her nose and spread to the apples of her baby-face said otherwise.