Prologue- New Orleans, USA, 2 years ago...
I was running fast, faster than even before. Sprinting down the street, my bare feet slip-slapping over the sidewalks, so hot in the sun that they could have been smoking. I heard the screams, so loud and broken that they pierced my soul. But there was no looking back. I clutched the cloth wrapping, now stained with blood from the cuts on my hands. The ''smooth glass cutter'' had smashed the window. False advertising, ugh. I had nobody to go to, no parents to ground me or love me. I had Park, Kell, Vee, and Clo. Oh, and me, Jac, or Jacqui, if you wanted to waste more time saying my stupid name. Jacqueline Theodore Falconer, the girl named after a first lady and a president. The girl who had broken into a house and stolen a family heirloom. Who had been caught by a child. My knuckles still stung from punching the kid. I was still seeing her chubby face in my mind, replaying as she fell to the floor. As I kicked the case open, and grabbed the necklaces, slashing my hand on the glass. The look on the young woman's face as she burst into the room, only to see her kindergartner lying on the floor, with a pistol pointed at her (I didn't know how to fire anyhow, don't worry). The mother's scream had resonated through the halls. A thought popped into my mind ''Would your mother have done that for you, Jac? Hmm? You'll never know now, because you left her to take care of your siblings and ran off with kids whose home was a fire escape!'' a little voice seemed to nag. I shoved that thought out of my mind, and kept running, not looking back.
The beads on my hundreds of tiny, tight braids clacked. Clo had made them that morning, going out to buy them with her last three dollars, convinced I'd execute the theft perfectly, her eyes shining as she gave me a hug goodbye. None of my little sisters would have done that. Just like Ma would never have taken one look at me, and told me that I would do this perfectly, like Vee had. And Dad wouldn't have ruffled my hair and told me to blow a raspberry at the police if they showed up, like Park had. And none of my friends would have encouraged me to go steal thousands of dollars worth of diamonds, but as Kell liked to say, he was special. Oh yeah, now back to the story, where I was sprinting along a boiling sidewalk in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in New Orleans, clutching about 800,000 dollars worth of jewels in my bleeding hands, wrapped in cloth. I felt a stitch in my side but kept going, until I had run out of the neighborhood, and onto the street. I blended in here now, looking like all the other poor kids begging on corners. Stuffing my bloody hand in the pocket of my jacket along with the cloth, I trudged down the street to the pawn shop, feeling the cloth in my pocket grow damp with blood. Feeling lightheaded already from that pesky detail of losing blood, the transaction passed in a blur. Credit, not cash, of course, put on the old credit card belonging to Vee's cousin, who had never noticed it gone when she left. I stuck the card in my pocket, never noticing several things, like the strange wind blowing, not hot, but not cool. The beady eyes of the ratlike pawnshop owner. And of course, how when the drop of my blood his the fabled Legend Diamond, it glowed like a moonbeam in the middle of the day...