Page 20 of Raine
“You did so well, Princess,” he coos into my ear, and I feel the heavy lull of sleep dragging me under. “I wish I could keep you,” he admits, and I hear the melancholy bleed through his words.
And when I wake up the next morning wrapped around my purple blanket in my own bed, alone, I wonder if I dreamed the entire encounter.
Chapter9
Raine
Ihaven’t seen Arrow for a week, my mind playing havoc over the night I spent with him and Raven. Fuck, I miss my best friend.
Every time I ask Justyce where he is, his answer is short, telling me he’s off running errands. I call bullshit, but there is nothing I can do. If Arrow doesn’t want to see me, then Justyce will honor his wishes.
So, that’s why I’m holed up at my grandparents’ house, the one everyone told me to sell or demolish after my parents were found brutally murdered in it.
My thoughts drift to the crime scene photographs I had Arrow show me when I was fifteen —images of my mother strung up with ropes in an elaborate show. The killer had carved her up, derogatory words etched into her naked skin, and her once beautiful face covered in bruises and dried up tears tracked down it. The photos had captured the scene with such finesse that it’s been engraved in my mind ever since.
A tear falls down my face, and I swipe it away as my thoughts turn to the photos of my father tied to a chair. He too was made into a work of art, his hand reaching toward my mother, his face carved into an expression of agony.
I’d been looking my entire life for any clue, but whoever the killer was, he was good, and he didn’t want to be found. I call the murderer a man because there is no way anyone other than a man would have been able to restrain my father from saving my mother from that level of torture.
Although I was only seven, I remembered their love for each other like it was yesterday — the way my father would dote on my mother and how she’d laugh and bat her eyelashes at him to get her way. It was fierce, like every little girl ever dreams of being loved by another.
I rock back and forth in my babushka, Alla’s, chair on the wrap-around porch, looking out at the lake and watching the ducks swim. Babushka is how we say grandma in Russian, and she made sure that’s how I addressed her right up to her last breath. She was a sweet old woman; the veneer she hid behind was just that — a costume she placed around herself in order for people to view her as weak. She was anything but. A wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing.
A smile tickles my face as I remember her scalding me as a young girl, building me up as a teen, and making me as savage as her, right up until I grew into a woman. She used to say to me that we’re living in a man’s world, and we need to show them who the real alpha was.
Men thought because they had a dick dangling between their legs that they were the gods, the superior sex, believing they held the power.
But even on our knees, sucking their overinflated ego out of the eyes of their cocks, we held the power, the key to their pleasure. Anyone can kneel, but it takes a real woman to bring a man to their knees, and these are words that I live by. Maybe taking it a little too literally at times.
It's so peaceful here; the chaos that once happened here is nothing more than a fleeting memory. Their ghosts are still haunting the walls, though. Sometimes I think I hear them, but I know it’s all in my head, wishing for something that will never be.
I think that is why I’ve never wanted to sell the old mansion in the middle of the sticks, somehow feeling closer to the souls that once roamed the earth. The family I miss daily.
Sighing, I reach across the old slatted table and pick up my vodka, bringing it to my lips and taking a sip. The birds are chirping loudly together, singing their happy songs, while I sit here drowning in my own misery and feeling more alone than ever.
A sound snaps behind me, drawing my attention. I draw my purple and silver P365, switching off the safety and standing against the wall.
Keeping my back to the wall, I hedge closer to the edge of the porch, scanning the hundreds of trees around me. There is no movement, and when I make my way inside, gun still cocked, I search the entirety of the house.
Nothing seems out of place, but I can feel an energy thrumming around me, and it’s making me anxious. Walking up the stairs, they creak with every step until I reach the top. Surveying the hallway lined with photographs of my family, I look to the room at the end — the room that shattered all my hopes and dreams when I was seven.
The door is cracked slightly, and the hairs on the back of my nape stand to attention because that door is always closed.
Walking along the pale green hall runner, I avoid the timber floorboards I know will wheeze under my weight and move slowly toward the door.
My heart is hammering in my chest, the blood whooshing in my ears, while the uneasiness settles around me like an unwanted lover.
When I reach the door, I peer in through the crack and listen quietly. There is no sound, no movement, and when I’m certain no one is in there, I open the door and look around the space.
My skin breaks out in goosebumps, shivers racing down my spine as I take in my mother and father’s room when they stayed here — the murder room. Nothing is out of place; the space is exactly as it was when my babushka scrubbed the blood from the floor and painted the walls to remove all evidence of the blood spatter.
My eyes zone in on the rug running underneath the bed. Eyeing it with disdain, it branches out on each side of the ensemble and hides the blood stain from where the sick fuck allowed my mother to bleed out in his twisted rope show.
Searching around the space, I look around the room that was my mother’s when she was younger. A dresser sits hard up against the powder pink room, with photos of her and my father when they were in high school, photos of me when I was a child, and the other members of the Tartarus Mafia lining the top of it, dust collecting all over them.
I move toward the bed, my feet moving of their own accord, as I look to the ceiling to find the hole that held the anchor point that had my mother suspended in time.
He’d moved the furniture around in order to display my parents in his own presentation; the last time anyone would see them was not how they would have ever wanted to be remembered.
