Hello, welcome to my first submission! I hope you like the prologue and I hope it makes you want to come back to read the first chapter. Please give me your feedback about the story, I'm new at this writing (and publishing) thing and English isn't my native language so every bit of help I can get is precious. Do criticize but do it in a constructive way and please be nice or leave ; ).
TPiM
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Prologue
Little Jade Bluebell ran through the woods as fast as her small legs allowed her, searching for some place to hide from her parents' attacker. Only wearing her flannel pyjamas and wool socks, she ran through the gelid night in the peak of winter. She ran as fast as her small legs allowed her.
Earlier, Jade had been woken up by a loud crash coming from somewhere inside her house, she thought it might have been a burglar, or worse, a monster and even though she was scared, she managed to gather the courage to get up and wake up her parents. Jade was already a big girl "I am four! I'm not a baby I can do this!" She told herself. Jade got up as silently as possible and walked slowly to her bedroom door which was slightly open and peeked through with one of her big round eyes.
Jade could hear voices, but there was no one in sight. She opened the door gently and ran to her parents' bedroom, her woollen socks effectively muffling the sounds of her steps. She closed the door behind her and ran through the dark room to their bed but it was empty and the sheets were cold.
The little child felt like crying but controlled her anxiety because she knew she had to keep being brave, in case there was something wrong going on. Then while she was pondering what to do she heard her mama's voice, she was crying but she couldn't understand her words. She muffled a sob with her little hand, "someone is hurting my mama!"
Jade gathered her now severely shaken courage, got up, and quietly opened the door and walked along the wall past her room into the kitchen door. From that position she could peep into the lit living room. Her mama gagged and bound to a chair and her papa lying on the floor also restrained with a man straddling his torso while holding a knife to his throat. Her vision got blurry with tears; someone invaded her home and was harming her parents, and there was nothing she could do! The attacker had his back turned to her and was leaning against her papa and saying something in his ear, her papa looked scared. Then she looked at her mama thinking on what she should do, her mama saw her and shook her head in panic without the man noticing, she wanted her to flee.
Jade returned to the kitchen and hid under the table, she was very scared and didn't know what to do, didn't know who to call for help, since she lived in a small cottage in the woods with only her parents. Jade would have to walk down the road through the woods, she was very scared of the dark and of walking alone in the woods, and her mama had told her that there were wild animals in there but she had to do something to save her parents. She decided she would be brave and she would go find someone who could help her.
She unlocked the back-door in the kitchen, remembering to grab the flash-light that her papa had left hanging on a nail beside the door. "I should take it with me, so I won't be scared of the dark", she thought. She stretched on her tip toes and managed to take it of the nail. She quickly left the house and walked through the front yard into the road, once she was far enough from the house she started to run down the road with the lit flash-light guiding her steps.
Jade was getting really tired of running, she never ran for that long before and she was the fastest girl in her class. She knew her mama was friends with their nearest neighbour - June, an old lady that always baked yummy sweets but they had never walked from her home to June's. She didn't know how far from her home she was but she kept going.