Trust: A Novel Novels & Stories

“Really?” He nodded. “If we run into them, you’ll need it.” The gesture left me shell shocked as I reached out and took the pistol from him. It was for more than my help or to protect myself. It was trust. Six trusted me—the woman he was going to kill—with his life. The restaurant on a cliff was spooky, but the old, falling down warehouse was a whole other kind of creep-tacular. Both looked right out of a survival horror video game, and the mess of bodies dressed in black we waded through was a perfect match.

Alice found herself licking her lips. " You are so beautiful," He remarked looking at her like she was his last meal. A blush spread on her face. Not being used to hearing anything once coming from his lips the past few hours were like stepping into an alternative world. Most of her hoped that this would be her new life. But she found a small part of her was unsure if she could trust him fully yet. Trying hard not to get her hopes up. " Breakfast is served and we are supposed to meet everyone at the mall. Though Josh is also joining us." Her informed her

PERSONAL ASSISTANT I was busy listening to our prof’s discussion when the nosy questions of my friends distracted me. I put down my pen and glared at them. They were smiling at me as if they want me to tell them what happened to me last night. I rolled my eyes and tried to focus on the man in front of us but they kept on bugging me. Seriously, what’s wrong with them? I accidentally slip my tongue earlier and tell them what happened to me last night. The traumatic thing happened to me last night. I already told them everything from the first happening up to the last. I told them about the bad guys was about to hurt and do something harmful to me and someone saved me. But, I didn’t drop the na

I was simply refusing to leave myself with nothing again. I thought about who I could actually trust, and the question led naturally back toward Margaret’s world. Reyes. The property manager who’d kept an entire agricultural estate running quietly for a decade. The people still maintaining Ashwell. The unknown user who’d once moved through the system under my own initials. The messages that kept arriving from a number I still couldn’t trace. I had spent my whole first life trusting people because I loved them. I wanted something different now. *Trust is earned through consistency,* I wrote. Not a blanket suspicion of everyone around me. Just a refusal to hand anyone unquestioned access to my

I know this because Rebecca tells me, three days later, that Isabella has been reading it on and off since it arrived, which Rebecca discovered by walking into a room and finding her sister looking at her phone with the expression that Isabella has when she is receiving something she did not know she needed. Most people are. I wrote that and I meant it and I mean it more completely now than I did in the coffee shop in the West Village when I said a version of it across a table to a woman who was measuring how much trust was safe. We are all scared and trapped and doing our best in some configuration at some point. The question is not whether you find yourself in the trap. The question is wha

I’d never bring myself to trust a man again, talk more of one who shared the same blood as my shitty soon to be ex husband. They both loved power more than people. “It’s just that in this marriage, I’ll have everything in my palm.” I dropped my coffee. “This time, I’ll be the one doing the using. Trust? That is the most foreign language to me right now, Nova. So you don’t need to bother.” She didn’t seem convinced but she nodded and held my palm in hers. “Whatever you do. Put yourself first this time. Do not give up anything.” “I’m wiser now.”

In another way, everything had: the old household’s pressure architecture had collapsed into insolvency; Vera’s absence had become a fixed fact rather than a weather system; the Holts had learned the dialect of non-ownership; Tristan had become not a rescue but a climate; and I had become a girl who could hold a key, a syllabus, a contract, and a pregnancy without calling any of them a contradiction. Bertha opened one eye. “End-of-book face.” “There is no end-of-book face.” “There is,” Sarel said, already awake. “It looks like grief and relief sharing one cup. Drink water before you philosophize.” I drank water. I philosophized anyway, silently, because some habits deserve a gentle retiremen

Tristan, returning from a same-grounds inspection of thaw damage, found us on the nursery floor with her standing in my hands and immediately discarded the inspection’s residual formality to offer his fingers as structural support. “You are going to walk,” he told her. “Not today. Do not look at me like that. The charter includes patience.” “She cannot read the charter,” I said. “She can feel it.” “That is not how writing works.” “It is how my writing works.” He kissed me over her head, quick and warm, and the bond carried the particular peace of a man who had been allowed to come home to a crisis measured in wobbling knees rather than broken treaties. Near the end of the seventh month, the

--- Because without trust— --- Nothing else held. --- The system pulsed again. --- Quieter now. --- More contained. --- But no longer whole. --- Just like them. --- And as the silence stretched between what had been… and what remained— As belief gave way to consequence— As connection fractured under the weight of choice— One final truth emerged: --- Trust is not destroyed by what you lose— --- But by who you become… --- When you choose to lose it.

Trust in Love Copyright © 2020 by Linda Kage Smashwords Edition This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses or establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book—except in the case of brief quotations in reviews—may be used, reproduced, or translated without written permission of the author. Contact Information: linda@lindakage.com