GRIT (The Silver Nitrate Series Book 2)

Written by Tiana Laveen

Edited by Natalie G. Owens

Cover Layout: Travis Pennington

Model: Mateo Manny

Drawings and illustrations: Tiana Laveen

Kindle Edition

All rights reserved.

Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 (five) years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

IN OTHER WORDS: If you do any of the above, the karma bus is waiting for you. If you steal this author’s work and illegally loan and/or share it, request illegal/free copies online and/or in printed version, you are no better than a burglar that breaks into someone’s house while you think they are away. You are a criminal. A thief. A cheat. You don’t work for free, so why should authors?! WE WORK HARD. SHOW SOME APPRECIATION.

Dreamcatcher Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com is licensed under CC BY 3.0

IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ.

If you are reading this book first, you are not going in order. Please read ‘Grind’, first.

The full novel had to be published in two separate books due to a high page count.
However, ‘Grit’ is being simultaneously released with ‘Grind’.
Therefore, there is
no wait time
for the reader and no lingering cliffhanger. Thank you.

Skilled welder by day and drummer by night, Zenith Taylor has inherited a healthy self-confidence and an enviable work ethic from his Iroquois grandparents. Yet, past suffering stops him from forming emotional ties and seeking meaningful connections.

Such as love for a woman…

Enter Silver Faye, a top notch professional with a zesty personality. Recent grief has left her feeling emotional and guilty to the point where she’s built a wall around her heart. One evening though, Fate brings her face to face with Zenith…

Silver and Zenith share a love for repairing the seemingly unfixable. The attraction is undeniable, and as they begin to forge a friendship, deeper feelings set in. The past is hard to overcome… but eventually, long-held beliefs, pain and trauma are exposed, explored, and released, creating a healing that only they can provide for one another.

GRIND is a tale of true love, of two souls lost finding their path, of getting out of one’s way and becoming bigger and better than one could ever imagine.

GRIND is a gritty urban love story where bad boy meets bad girl—and they become something good, TOGETHER.

This is a warning to all loyal readers, potential readers, and new readers alike regarding the content of ‘Grind’ and ‘Grit’, parts 1 and 2 respectively of ‘The Silver Nitrate’ series. Some believe a warning to readers in a novel to be unnecessary, but I’ve found that to be the farthest thing from the truth. I encourage everyone to read author warnings in books. They are there for a reason. We want you to appreciate our work, and reading should be an enjoyable process. Therefore, if there is a particular subject matter you are not particularly fond of exploring right now, that is your right. Thus, it is my obligation to tell you what you can expect in this book so that there are no surprises, disappointments, etc. as it pertains to the subject matter(s).

This series delves into the following subject matters that the reader may find offensive or objectionable:

1.   Death of a loved one

2.   Depression/Mental illness

3.   Elder abuse/violence

4.   Dementia/Alzheimer’s

5.   Gratuitous Profanity… let me repeat that. GRATUITOUS profanity.

6.   Smoking – tobacco and marijuana

7.   Detailed, explicit sexual encounters

8.   Occasional racial slurs

9.   Disease/Physical ailments

10.  Intermittent violence

Thank you for taking the time to read this list and understand it. I greatly appreciate it! Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, shall we continue? I certainly hope so. :)

This novel, “Grit”, is dedicated to Mrs. Grace Elliott. Mrs. Grace, as I called her, was my next door neighbor when I was a child. She lived in the house right beside ours, and would on occasion watch over me while my parents were working. I remember one time, at the age of nine, getting the brilliant idea of breaking my basement window and crawling inside. You see, I’d forgotten my house keys after school let out and didn’t want to wait the few minutes it would take for my mother to arrive home. Needless to say, this didn’t end well. Luckily, Mrs. Grace took me into her home and cleaned and bandaged my bloody foot that had been sliced open while I tried to crawl into a broken window with jagged pieces of glass dangling all around it. Mrs. Grace would tell me funny stories over the years of her childhood and heyday, and despite being an old woman, she was full of spunk. She had shoulder length fine silver hair that she’d allow me to play with, and she’d fix zucchini bread that smelled so good; the scent of the baking would permeate her entire home. Mrs. Grace, I’d like to apologize to you for eating an entire zucchini loaf and then pretending I had not when you questioned me about it…

In any case, over the years, I began to notice Mrs. Grace changing. Yes, she was losing weight, losing her slight plumpness. Her shirts, always adorned with a fashionable belt around the waist, were no longer needed. She was dwindling away but not only that, I noticed her behavior was changing, too. So much, I’d run home crying from her house one day. You see, Mrs. Grace had dementia. She scolded me for something I hadn’t done, and told me she knew the people personally in the soap operas she was watching. To her, it was no longer television; these were family and friends that came to holiday parties and church service with her.

She thought I was someone else on more than one occasion, and a deep anger manifested within her. It was trauma, pain from her childhood that she’d not disclosed to me previously. Now, her runaway thoughts began to seep out bit by bit, and I’d learned that her daughter had been murdered, as well as other tales and twisted confessions that shocked me, fascinated me, and hurt me deep in my young heart.

My mother took the time to explain to me what was happening to my dear ‘adopted third grandmother’, and I realized that little by little, I was losing Mrs. Grace, for Mrs. Grace was losing herself as well. A few more events transpired over the years, and in order to prevent slandering anyone, I’ll just say that she began to receive lackluster care and things went from bad to worse. There was obvious neglect, and I did not deal with it well. I was a young teenager by the time she passed away, and I look back and thank God that by then I had gotten to see her true essence, hold onto to her stories, and recall her garage chock full of Coca-Cola and neatly stored magazines and newspapers that she’d collected over the years.