Prologue::

"You get your slutty, whore self upstairs before I kill you!" raged Hannah's father.

"Honey, just do what your father says. he knows what's best for you." muttered her mother, stumbling across the kitchen, the few inches of brandy sloshing around in the bottle clamped tightly in her right hand.

Hannah walked slowly upstairs. She did not run, she did not scream, she did not bang her fists and yell. She just walked upstairs calmly and walked slowly to her room. The hard floor made her bare feet ache and want to fall down right there and then and just die. She walked into her room and closed the door. She sat down on her tiny bed and looked down at herself. Bruises covered her arms, legs, and pretty much her whole body. The black eye she had gotten a couple days before when she had asked her father for a blanket was mostly faded, only the slight outer rim showed.

Her honey hair hung limp around her back. Her eyes were an emerald green, a very unusual color for someone with such blonde hair, but she was also quite an unusual person. Her body was the only part about her she really liked, she was fairly skinny, but not lanky, and she was a fairly good height.

She quickly undressed and switched into her dreaming outfit. She pulled on some black pants, a white shirt, some old worn out suspenders she had found one day in the attic, and her old, weak black shoes. These were her most comfortable clothes. They helped her to forget about the world around her and allow her to dream peacefully about a life she might have had if she wasn't who she was.

She reached into her organized, incredibly small pile of clothes that she had made some sort of a structure around with an old cardboard box. She lived in a laundry room inside of the house. She had made do with it for fourteen years and it was something that she called home. All she could fit in was her small, twin sized bed, and her "closet". that was the cardboard box.

As she pulled out her old jewelry box her Grandmother had given her when she was a baby, she smiled. It was of course, empty, but she treasured it more than anything else in the world. On the top it said, "to my Granddaughter, From your Grandmother.. You are special, you are beautiful, and you are loved."

This quote had kept her alive these fourteen years. Just looking at it made a tear roll slowly down her cheek. She opened the polished wooden lid and was prepared to see the empty box before her she had seen so many times. But there, lying in the dusty box, was a necklace.

It was silver with an intricate design embedded into its outer rim. Inside of it lay a bright, electric red jewel which shone from what seemed the depths of a world unknown. Hannah was in a trance looking at that necklace. it seemed to call out to her, its fine silver chain curled delicately around it. She reached out her hand and her fingers stretched toward the gleaming metal. Nothing in the world seemed to exist except her and the mesmerizing necklace. Then, her fingertips touched . . . . . .