AllFreeNovel
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A lilting, French café song fills my ears, and I lean back in my chair and close my eyes, transported to happier days. Before I knew what searing pain and longing were.
Before my beloved was killed.
I adjust the volume of her recorded music. It’s really the only thing I have left of her. When she was killed, her asshole parents swept in and removed every trace of her from our home.
I was too grief-stricken at the time to stop them, catatonic as I was for the better part of a year.
I take a deep breath as she finishes a song that’s always been one of my favorites. I remember her singing it onstage with a flower behind her ear, her lips nearly kissing the mic, staring at me like I was the only person in the room.
We might have been in a crowded club, but it was always just the two of us.
I didn’t deserve her. If she were alive, I’d tell her that.
My eyes fall closed and I am remembering her scent when a hand lands on my shoulder, startling the shit out of me. My eyes fly open. I yank the headphones off, and the room fills with Clara’s lovely voice.
“Fuck, Niko, you scared the shit out me,” I yell.
My brother takes a step back, hands up, as if in surrender. “Easy man. I knocked several times but no answer. When you have those headphones on, you can’t hear a goddamn thing.”
“Yeah. That’s kind of the point.”
Niko looks at the headphones, now on the floor where I dropped them, Clara’s lilting song pouring out of them.
I know what he’s going to say. He’s said it a hundred times before.
And he’ll say it again.
“I don’t know why you do this to yourself, man.”
No, he doesn’t know. He never will. No one will.
It’s my cross to bear.
“What’d you come by for, Nik?” I ask.
He tilts his head toward the wall that my room shares with Charleigh’s. “I guess you heard her, huh?”
I nod, grabbing my headphones off the floor and shutting down my phone’s music app.
My brother Niko’s a good guy. Almost too good. He can be a hard ass when he needs to, but he’s also the kind of person who finds a spider in the house and goes out of his way to move it outside before someone stomps on it.
He’s always been that way, unlike Vadik and me. And there’s a reason for that, if you ask me.
“I was thinking of going to talk to her,” he starts to say.
Oh, Christ.
“You can’t do that, Niko. You know you can’t. And what would you say, anyway? We’re selling your virgin ass for beaucoup bucks to some rich motherfucker? I bet she’d love to hear that.”
“I feel for her, Kir—” he starts to say.
I stop him. “I know you do, man, but you know the rules. You know how we do things. Same as we always have. That’s not gonna change.”
He’s a kind-hearted man, Niko is. Much more so than Vadik and me. And he knows what betrayal feels like. So, he’s got something in common with this chick. Thus, the empathy.
Although he has empathy for everyone.
Which means we need to watch him at all times.
