Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 90434 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 452(@200wpm)___ 362(@250wpm)___ 301(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90434 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 452(@200wpm)___ 362(@250wpm)___ 301(@300wpm)
“You should learn that now, Scout. Loving anybody other than your Momma will only bring you pain. Don’t trust nobody. They’ll only disappoint you.”
The four inch heel of her shoe caught in the hem of the dress. Slow to react, she stumbled forward and crashed onto her knees. The bottle of wine bounced as it landed on the ground. The remains of the rare vintage poured onto the carpet, soaking Sebastian’s bare feet.
A horrible noise rose up from deep within his mother’s chest. Horror stricken, Sebastian watched as she began to gag and choke. The liquid contents of Diana’s stomach poured onto the antique Persian that had been purchased at Sotheby’s for a record sum, onto her eight year old son’s Spiderman pj’s.
“Momma!” Sebastian screamed. “Momma!” His voice rose higher and higher as a puddle of bloody vomit slowly spread around his mother’s inanimate body like a scene out of a Hitchcock movie.
Downstairs, a bloodcurdling scream jarred Ruth White out of one of the most peaceful nights of sleep she’d ever had. Unfortunately this was nothing new. Her employer was a spoiled, overemotional creature. She should know, she’d raised Diana since infancy.
Grabbing her powder blue, terry robe, Ruth went to investigate whatever it was that woke her. She was angry enough to spit nails, and rightfully so. How many times had she cleaned up Diana’s mess? How many times! And on Christmas Eve, no less. Mumbling to herself, she walked as fast as her bad hip would allow up the grand staircase to her employer’s bedroom.
Her voice uncharacteristically loud, Ruth shouted from halfway down the hall, “Diana! I am telling you, I’ve had it––”
The rest of the sentence got caught in her throat as soon as she stepped into the bedroom. The oxygen left her lungs in an hurry and the brown skin on her angular face grew taut.
Diana Horn lay face down on the floor––as still as a death. Standing in a pool of blood, Sebastian was shaking his mother limp shoulders. Ruth’s tip-tilted dark eyes shifted to the bedside table where she discovered it littered with empty prescription bottles.
“Lucius!” she shouted. To her right, a young black man ran down the hallway towards her. “Lucius, call 911! Hurry!”
Chapter One
Geneva, Switzerland 2012
Peaceful was the dark, the numbness seductive, stealing away any desire I may have had to return to reality. It was as if my body knew that it needed time to gather strength for what was coming. Time, that is, having become an entirely abstract concept. The consequence of which was that I remained suspended in between two worlds for what seemed like forever. Yet even in the dark, the memory of Sebastian, of the baby, called to me…a far away lighthouse in a storm, beckoning me home.
“She looks so small. Trop petit,” a voice whispered. A woman’s voice. I caught every other word, my mind struggling to keep up. My eyes felt clamped shut by a vise while a heavy fatigue pressed down on the rest of me. It threatened to drag me under by the ankles if I didn’t resist. “The poor, poor girl.”
The voice teased my memory. Synapses fired and connected. In a sudden flash it all came back to me. Mrs. Arnaud. “I brought some of the raspberry tarts she likes. The sooner we get her home, the sooner she can recover.”
“When is she coming home?” said a woman with a clipped British accent. Charlotte.
“Not for a while.”
I knew that voice. I’d know that voice anywhere––the pronounced rasp a balm to my battered soul. The abject despair saturating those four words, however, was a different matter altogether. The guilt it spawned raked its sharp claws across my conscience.
I was in no shape to deal with whatever had caused that soul wrenching despair. So I let go. I relaxed my grip on consciousness once again and let the darkness carry me away to a place where nothing could hurt me, where pain and guilt didn’t exist.
Shortly after I awoke in the hospital for the first time, bruised and in pain although relieved to know Sebastian had somehow found me, a routine began. Every time I opened my eyes for the twenty or so minutes of lucidity I was granted each day, I found Sebastian holding vigil in the same hard, uncompromising chair. I said very little and he said nothing at all. It felt like the words were being stored up for a showdown at a later date.
Reaching up, I felt around and discovered my head swathed in cotton gauze. The persistent ache in my head made it impossible to focus. I could’ve sworn there was a steel vise wrapped around my skull and that the devil himself was tightening the screws.
“Twenty-two stitches,” a deep, raspy voice informed me.
My eyes crept open slowly, painfully, a shaft of light searing my eyeballs. Following the sound of the familiar voice, I found Sebastian seated in his favorite chair. He was bent forward, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands clasped in a single fist. His tailored white shirt was wrinkled and his shirtsleeves rolled up, the sinuous muscles of his forearms taut with energy nourished by too much caffeine and not enough sleep. His grey slacks were rumpled. His expression, though, was not rumpled. It was perfectly smooth in fact, stone cold and relentless.