Page 46 of Roma King
The coffee, black and thick as tar, just how I like it, turns bitter and acerbic in my mouth. “Touching. Really touching. I’m so glad to know you’re concerned about my wellbeing.”
Her tisk of derision makes me clench my jaw. “Just because you don’t seem to care about your responsibility to me as my son doesn’t mean I’ve foregone mine to you as your mother. Tell me you made enough to walk away for a few weeks, at least.”
She’s never liked me participating in the fights. Always gave me grief about earning money with my fists, even before I was cast out. “Did you give Jamis this much shit when he was a bare-knuckle boxer?” ‘Jamis’ not ‘my grandfather.’ I never got to meet the man; he was long dead before I was even born. “Everyone talks about him like he was a legend. I’m sure the money he won fighting back in the day, the money that put food on their table when the fair wasn’t doing so well, wasn’t considered shameful.”
Something clangs in the background. A pan, most likely. She has a penchant for banging pots and pans whenever she doesn’t like what she’s hearing. I learned at a young age never to break bad news to her when she was cooking. “Times have changed,” she says sharply. “Theclanhas changed. Good or bad, we made the decision to modernize.”
“Good or bad?” I laugh. “You think that was a mistake? You wanna go back to the old ways? Kids getting married at thirteen? Women chained to the kitchen sink? No education for girls whatsoever? Superstition restricting every single move you make?”
“Watch your mouth. You know what I mean.”
Idon’treally know what she means. If she had her way, I think we would still be living like her father, and his father before him. You still can’t talk about bodily fluids without her bursting a fucking blood vessel. Back in the day, any mention of blood, sweat, saliva, or even needing to go to the fucking bathroom would have meant immediate bad luck for the entire family. If she’d heard what I said about fucking a girl on her period in that bar last night…ha! Holyshit. I’d have had to beg for forgiveness from the entire clan to avoid being banished for six months, or paying a fucking fine. Shelta might claim that the Rivin clan are beyond the traditions of the past, but I know she makes Patrin turn people away, refusing them entry into the fair, if they’re wearing even the smallest scrap of red, and her skin still crawls whenever she sees a cat. If she had any idea that I regularly feed a stray that lives in the alley behind the studio, she’d never fucking talk to me again.
Maybe I should tell her.
“The fair makes plenty of money these days. You’d know that if you’d even bothered to ask how we’ve been doing the other night. Yes, my fatherdidmake money fighting, but things were a lot harder for us then. After the war—”
“Oh god, don’t start on about World War II again. I can’t fucking bear it. Jamis wasn’t even born until nineteen forty-seven. And guess what? Our family was here in the States. Had been for generations. Hitler didn’t kill a single one of our relatives.”
If my mother knew how to drive, if she knew where I lived, she’d be over here in a heartbeat to flay the skin from my bones. Thankfully, she doesn’t. Sheisseething, though. “We were the lucky ones. Imagine if things had been different. Imagine if the Rivinshadstill lived in Europe.”
I get where she’s coming from. I do. Our people have faced persecution and prejudice since the beginning of time, and never so much as than back then—millions upon millions of Roma died—but she’s right. Wewerethe lucky ones. And clinging to a brutal past that never actually happened to us just doesn’t sit right with me. She’s borrowing someone else’s tragedy to serve her own purposes.
I rub my eyes a little too hard, sighing down my nose. “If you’re calling to find out if I’ve made enough money to stop fighting the rest of the month, then the answer is yes. I have.WillI stop fighting for the rest of the month? Probably not. Now, if you don’t mind I have some stuff I have to be ge—”
“Brigid Clay’s coming to the fair tonight. Her niece just turned eighteen, and she sent a photo. She’s very pretty. I want you to come and meet her.”
Across the city, a plane climbs over high-rise buildings, soaring upward like a bird. The early morning sunlight bounces off its metal exterior, almost too bright to look at, as three or four hundred people leave Spokane behind, headed off to god only knows where.
For one hot-tempered moment, I seriously envy those bastards.
“I will not meet with Brigid Clay’s niece,” I snarl. “And I will not be meeting with anyone else, either.I will not tolerate this. Please don’t call me again.”
I hang up the phone before she can fire one of her viper-tongued retorts down the line. I can’t sit here and listen to another single word come out of her mouth. Now that I’m aware of her agenda, I also know that she won’t give up on this. She’ll call again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after, if she thinks she might be able to work on me, like an ocean’s tides work against a shore, trying to break it down, one grain of sand at a time. I won’t be weakened by her constant badgering, though. My will is not made of stone. Its diamond-edged and sharp as a fucking razor, and it willnotbe eaten away by her sheer determination, or anyone else’s for that fucking matter.
I’ve dreamed of the woman I’m supposed to be with for years. I’ve finally found her, finally met her, finallytouchedher with my own cursed hands. And if the vitriol that fuels my mother’s deranged heart is going to prevent me from finally having her and keeping her to myself for the rest of time, then I will not fucking have anyone. To keep Zara safe, I won’t get involved with her. I’ll never marry, and I’ll never accept the crown.
There’s still so much to know about my firefly. Still so much to learn. I doknowthat Zara and I are fated to be, though, and that she is supposed to complete my fucking soul. And if my own mother is so determined to damn me to roam this earth with only half a soul, and half a heart, and half a fucking life…then I’ll also be damned if I give her any other part of me.
I clench my hand around my phone, daring myself to crush it. To shatter the screen into a million little pieces. My hand is throbbing when the device buzzes, registering a text message. I don’t even want to look at it, but I do.
Patrin: Homer’s Sports Bar on Longview. One hour. We need to talk.
18
ZARA
LAST RESORT
Lightning lashes across the sky like a whip. This morning might have been crisp, bright and sunny, but now the sky is a dark and angry gunmetal grey, and there’s enough electricity in the air to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
I’ve always loved storms, but there’s something ominous and worrying about the tempest that’s brewing now. I’m restless. Agitated. Can’t sit still. And nothing I do seems to take the edge off my anxious energy.
Sarah still isn’t back. Or she’s still locked inside her apartment and she won’t answer the door. A suffocating blanket of silence greets me every time I jog up there and hammer against the wood, and I’m growing more and more concerned by the second. My paranoia has reached psychotic levels. So far, I’ve theorized a number of scenarios, some of which are strange and unlikely, while others border on downright terrifying and ridiculous. All of them involve Sarah being in some sort of trouble, and it’s driving me fucking crazy.
I don’t know what to do, or where to go to look for her. It’s highly unlikely that she’s gone to seek out her sister, but if she did go to the Midnight Fair last night and she still hasn’t come back, then what does that mean? I know nothing of the issues Sarah faced with her family. The nature of their rift is still completely unknown to me. Was the cause of their estrangement so terrible that Shelta and the other members of the Rivin family would hurt her for it? Surely not.
And, try as I might, I can’t get the tarot card out of my head. I’ve half convinced myself that Imusthave picked it up from Shelta’s table when I was at the fair, that I must have put it in my purse or something and absent mindedly pulled it out at work, but I know the truth in my heart. Besides selecting it from Shelta’s deck, I didn’t touch it again. There’s no way it could have wound up amongst my things on my desk. Not without someone from the fair taking it to the dispatch center and purposefully leaving it there, hoping I would find it.
