Page 53 of Roma King
Her confusion only seems to make her more fucking beautiful—highly inconvenient for me, and not at all helping with the situation developing in my pants. “Usually, banishment only lasts a couple of months, though. Weeks, if you get down on your hands and knees and beg.”
“You must have done something really bad to warrant being cast out for three years, then.”
An image flashes into my head: blood. The gleaming edge of a fiercely sharp knife. Wide, furious eyes, as the steel sank through flesh and hit bone. “You have no idea.”
“You were at the fair the other night, though.”
“My banishment ended five weeks ago. I went there to see Shelta. To tell her I was denying my claim to the Roma throne. She didn’t take the news well.”
“And then The Empress showed up, at my hand, and now I’m paying the price for your mother’s bad mood.” She doesn’t seem impressed. “If you’re in line for the throne, then Shelta answers to you, right?”
I already know where she’s heading with this. “Yes. And Iwillfind her tomorrow and tell her to call off the dogs. She isn’t going to like it, though.”
Anger rises in Zara’s cheeks, coloring them a delicious crimson. “I don’t give a fuck if she likes it. I want my job back. And I want to know what she’s done with Sarah, too.”
“Sarah?”
“Oh…” Her lips part. She grips the edge of the table, as if she’s just realized she’s made a terrible mistake. “My friend. I think she went out last night. She hasn’t come back.”
So, there it is. The reason why she was nearly in tears on the phone. “And what can I do about that? My influence, limited as it is, only extends as far as Roma matters.”
My little firefly seems a little lost for a second, looking around the kitchen as if she might be able to relocate her train of thought in the drying rack over my right shoulder. “Fuck. I was going to broach this a little differently, but…” She falters. I would leave her to figure out what she’s trying to say on her own, but her eyes are shining all of a sudden, wet with tears, and I’ll fuckingdiebefore I allow a single one of them to fall.
So I do something really fucking dumb.
I reach across the table, and I take hold of her hand. So small in mine, far more delicate and fragile… She freezes, sucking in a sharp breath, but she doesn’t try to pull away.Yet. “Spit it out, Firefly,” I growl. “If there’s something I can do…”
When she sucks her bottom lip into her mouth, I have to forcefully restrain myself from climbing over the table and sucking it intomymouth. Her shoulders slump as she says, “Sarah. My friend. She’s like you. Roma. But more than that, she’s…relatedto you. That’s what she said, anyway. That she’s your mother’s sister. Making her your…aunt.”
The blood has drained out of my face. I know it has, because I can feel it pooling in the pit of my stomach. “Aunt? That’s not possible. I don’t have an aunt.”
“She said there was some sort of falling out. She and Shelta—”
“Her sister died five years before I was born. And her name was Kezia, not Sarah.”
Zara tucks her hair behind her ears, then covers the lower half of her face with her hands. She peers at me over the top of her fingertips, and the tears that have been building, the ones I would hold back at any cost, fall like miniature crystals from her eyelashes. “I have this terrible feeling,” she whispers. “I think something’s happened to her. And it’s no coincidence that the fair just arrived here and you’ve shown up, and—”
“If Kezia was still alive, I’d know about it.” But something is stirring inside me. Something dark and nasty and foreign. My mother holds a grudge like no one else. She is always the last to forgive. Never the one to forget. If Shelta did fall out with her sister, and Kezia left the clan…would she have denied her existence all of this time? Would she have lied and said she was dead? I wouldn’t put it past her.
“Sarah has no reason to make it up. I didn’t tell her anything about the fair. She already knew its name. She was terrified when she realized who was down that stairwell in Rochester Park. She already knew Shelta’s name, too. Have you ever seen a picture of her?” Zara asks. “Maybe if I showed you a photo, you’d be able to recognize her?”
I manage a curt nod. Ihaveseen a photograph of my long dead aunt; I pulled it from a pile of papers that was burning in a brazier outside one of our settlements when I was ten or something. My memory of the picture is hazy at best, but it should suffice. I’ll take a look at this woman posing as Kezia, and I’ll be able to clear this up pretty damn easily.
I wait while Zara picks up her phone and scrolls through her photos. She turns the screen around and offers it to me, showing me the image she’s selected. Zara’s smiling face distracts me for a moment. Her grin is so broad, it knocks the wind out of me for a second. During my brief encounters with her, I’ve never seen her look so happy and carefree. Just annoyed, or kind of worried. To see her smiling like that, her eyes crinkled at each corner, fuckingdestroysme. It makes me regret that I will never be the cause of such an astonishing smile.
The woman standing next to her in the picture is older. Older by a long chalk. Her hair is blonde, but the color looks like it came out of a bottle. Her smile is just as wide as Zara’s, and her arm is snaked around my little firefly’s waist in a way that shows they’re close. I look at the zebra print dress, and the almond shaped eyes, and the heavy mascara, and… what the fuck isthat? I frown, taking the phone out of Zara’s hand, studying the screen a little closer. There’s a chain around the woman’s neck. A chain so similar to the one around my mother’s neck, that I…
It can’t be.
My mother never removes the crescent moon pendant around her neck. Not for anyone or anything. The one around this woman’s throat is remarkably similar, and yet it’s different. Instead of a moon, the charm dangling from the fine gold chain is a blazing sun. The style of the pendant, though. The actual chain. It looks like a corresponding piece, as if it were crafted by the same hand.
I give the phone back to Zara, a filthy feeling settling over me.
“Well?” she asks. She’s as anxious as I am perplexed. “What do you think?”
I stare at her, hating that she’s crying. Hating that so much of my life has already seeped into hers. “I think,” I say, taking a deep breath. “That I need a fucking drink.”
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