AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Mom and Dad are coming,” I remind her.
She shakes her head. “Before my phone ran out of battery, I checked. No flights today because of the storm.”
That makes sense. Why didn’t I think of that? Outside, the beautiful, chaotic, deadly dance of ice and thunder hasn’t let up since last night. No one would fly in this.
“Do you think they’ll deliver food to us?” I ask, concerned.
Honestly, I don’t believe anyone is going out for anything today.
We’ll be fine, though. We’ll just have to be careful about the fire.
I’m the big sister. I should find something to do. Here she is, boiling water by hand and telling me how we can handle this.
“Does your phone have battery?” she asks me.
I picked it up from my nightstand without checking.
“A little,” I say. “We should try the wood company. Explain we really need the logs. We can manage, so long as we have fire.”
“No one’s going to risk their lives out there to bring us wood.”
She takes my phone anyway, and enters my passcode without asking me what it is—her birthday.
“Take this.” She hands me the handle of the pan, which I dutifully hold over the fire.
Instead of calling Mom and Dad, as I expected she would, I watch her open a social media platform and type a name I never use.
Valmont.
Oh.
It makes sense.
The Valmonts’ house is next door, and they’ll have wood. They would risk it to get some to us, if she asked her fiancé.
“When did you get so smart?”
“I had coffee,” she retorts with an eyeroll. “Unlike you. That’s why we’re heating up more water.”
As I expected, she hunts down Nicolai, who is on my friend list, although I muted him to make sure I wouldn’t see any information about him pop up inadvertently.
It’s not his fault. I actually like the guy—and before hearing that he liked to watch my sister fuck his friend, I actually liked him with her, too. Maybe I still do. I don’t really kink shame, unless it happens to involve my seventeen-year-old sister.
Like you weren’t letting a man you hate fuck your brains out when you were a year younger, hypocrite, says a little voice.
I tell it to shut the hell up.
She calls Nicolai, and although as far as he’s concerned it’s me calling and not her, he answers pretty quickly. It’s early, too. Six in the morning.
“Now that’s a surprise,” I hear, because she’s close enough. “The runaway bride herself.”
“I haven’t run away yet,” my sister quips.
“Preziosa,” he says, his voice going from sarcastic to lower, deeper. “I was worried. I hear it’s a mess up in the mountains today.”
“I can’t talk long. We don’t have electricity and we’ll be out of wood in six hours, max. Can you get the house to run us some?”
He curses at the end of the line, in Austrian German, Italian, French, a little Mandarin unless I’m mistaken. “Fucking storm. Fucking planes. Fucking bloody mountain. You’re never leaving without me again. You stay safe for me. You still owe me. Nothing gets to you except me. You understand?”
