AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Kristoff!” Angel yelled from behind her.
The girl’s eyes grew wide, and even in the dark I noticed the pink blossoming on her cheeks.
“You could’ve introduced yourself. It’s rude to misrepresent yourself.”
I walked up to her until we stood toe-to-toe. “Little girl, you will never meet another man who will misrepresent himself less than me. Everyone who knows me knows exactly who I am.” And what I’m capable of, especially if you fucking kill my dog.
Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t step back. Somehow I knew she wasn’t the type to ever step back.
“I am not a little girl.”
I didn’t bother to point out that her petulant tone was proving her wrong.
I gave her my back as I turned to address Angel. “Care to tell me what she’s doing here?”
“She’s here with her mother. A woman called Inessa.”
I stiffened and ignored his curious look. I glanced back at the girl and saw the resemblance. With her honey-blonde hair and doe-green eyes, she was the spitting image of the woman I remembered. “Where is she?”
“That’s it? You’re not gonna tell—”
“There’s nothing to tell. She’s just a ghost from the past.”
He snorted. “Yourghostis waiting for you inside, haunting the living room. Never seen anyone that nervous before. She’s probably poltergeisted a hole in the carpet by now.”
A curse sounded behind me, and I turned around.
The girl stood over Cerb’s grave. She’d dropped white roses onto the soil, and was staring at her fingers. Her bloody, fucking fingers. A thousand watts of electricity exploded in my chest. Those damn, bloody, white roses.
I walked up to her and grabbed her hand. Ice coated my veins when I saw the streaks of red across her palm.
“What the fuck did you do?” I roared.
Huge eyes stared up at me. “I just wanted to do something nice for—”
“No one asked you to.”
“But—”
“I fucking hate roses.”
She scowled at me. “Do you hate everything, including your last name and flowers? How about unicorns, or ice cream, or babies?”
As she listed off things any sane person would love, at least according to her, all I could see was my mother’s body. I could still smell her floral fragrance. Sometimes if I tried really hard, I could will away the odor of decaying flesh and the buzz of flies that had surrounded her.
I bit the inside of my cheek and pushed away the memories. And it was all because ofher.Inessa’s daughter.I’d turned my back on her for two seconds and already she was wreaking havoc in my life. What the hell was her mother doing here? And more importantly, when were they leaving?
I released her hand. “Don’t let her out of your sight,” I barked at Angel.
I stomped back inside, searching for the culprit of my distress. Inessa looked exactly the way Angel had described her; pacing nervously on the living room carpet.
The years had been kind to her. She was still a beautiful woman, just like I remembered her. My last memory of her was that she’d followed her Russian boyfriend to the old country. And we never heard anything from her after that.
“How did you find me?” It was suspicious that she would now suddenly pop up in my life. The woman hadn’t even bothered to show up to her supposedly best friend’s funeral.
“I still have a few contacts from my old life.”
Of course, how could I forget? It was what my mother and Inessa called their existence before coming to America.
