Vendetta (Blood for Blood #1)(4)

Before I could piece together what had happened or just how exactly I was going to be murdered, I was lifted out of my bubble of pain, away from the asphalt and onto my feet again, to where I had been standing seconds before, like someone had pressed REWIND.

Only this time, something was different. There was the feeling of strong hands on my waist. They held me upright as I wobbled back and forth, trying to find my balance.

“Stai tranquillo, sei al sicuro.” The words were so strange and unexpected, I thought I had imagined them.

I dropped my gaze and found his hands around me and suddenly I saw myself, as if from above, relaxing into the arms of a complete stranger on a deserted street in the middle of the night, in front of the most notorious house in Cedar Hill.

A stranger who had just caught me trespassing and then knocked me to the ground.

I had seen enough romantic movies to appreciate a swoon-worthy moment — but I had also watched a lot of CSI. With a start, I pushed the unfamiliar hands away from my body and leapt forward. I crouched and grabbed my bag from the ground, catching a glimpse of the thick silver buckle on his leather boot before springing back up and hitching my bag onto my shoulder hastily. I looked up at him, wishing I had something weapon-worthy in my handbag, just in case. But he stood still, his face a collection of shadows in the darkness. He didn’t make another attempt to attack me, and I didn’t wait around to give him the chance.

“Don’t follow me.” My voice sounded stronger than I felt.

I turned and started to run.

I heard him call out, but I was already gone.

I didn’t turn around, but I was sure I could feel the shadow’s eyes — his eyes — on the back of my neck as I ran. The distant sound of laughter followed me through the darkness.

*

I got home in record time. After depositing the pot of honey on the kitchen windowsill and trudging upstairs, I rubbed some ointment on my stinging knees and crawled into bed. After what felt like hours of staring wide-eyed at my ceiling and listening to the urgent thrumming in my chest, I fell into an uneasy sleep during which dreams of boys in windows dissolved into nightmares about shadowed figures and black-ribboned pots of honey.





There wasn’t a whole lot that irritated me. However, the source of such rare annoyance had managed to slither into my house and ruin the sunny morning barely before it began.

“… It’s not a good omen, Celine. I have a sixth sense about these things …”

Rita Bailey’s voice, which was shriller than a police siren, had no trouble infiltrating my bedroom despite the fact she was an entire floor below me. I scowled at my ceiling. I didn’t want to hear about Lana Green’s affair, Jenny Orin’s worsening psoriasis, or the Tyler kids’ lice scandal. But the volume of the old lady’s voice left me with no other option. I would have to suffer it either way, and, given the depressing messiness of my bedroom coupled with my desire to eat breakfast at some point, I decided to face her head-on and get the most unpleasant part of my day over with.

I rolled out of bed, crawling between crumpled jeans and inside-out T-shirts to fish out a partially obscured bra. Springing to my feet and swiveling around without touching anything — because sometimes I liked to make a game of it — I swooped a pair of denim shorts off the ground and pulled them on before settling on a white tank top and my favorite pair of Converse. After putting on some moisturizer and pulling my hair into a messy braid, I crept downstairs, steeling myself for what I was about to hurtle into, coffee-less and overtired.

Rita Bailey, an old, portly woman with cropped white hair and pinched, shrunken features, hunched over the kitchen table, sipping her coffee in an outrageous pink pantsuit. Beside her, my mother was politely enduring her company, offering a tight smile and a robotic head nod at appropriate times. She had even cleared part of the table, which was usually buried beneath stray sewing projects and piles of fabric samples. Now confined to just one square foot of space, they balanced precariously against the wall, threatening to topple over them.

When we lived in a spacious four-bedroom house on Shrewsbury Avenue, my mother had two whole rooms dedicated to containing the explosions of materials needed for her dressmaking, but here, her works-in-progress always seemed to spill from room to room, following us around our cramped home in every shade and pattern imaginable. Yards of Chantilly and ivory lace stretched along armchairs, jostling for space beneath mannequins in short summer dresses and rich evening gowns. On several scarring occasions since we’d moved here a year and a half ago, I had woken up screaming at the sight of a half-finished dummy bride perched in the corner of my room, or a denim dress that should never see the light of day.

It wasn’t that my mother didn’t have some sort of system in place, it’s just that no one but her could ever figure it out. She was probably the most organized disorganized dressmaker in all of Chicago, and I think she liked it that way. Mrs. Bailey, who was staring narrowed-eyed at the teetering pile of fabrics across the table, evidently did not.

I swept into the kitchen, pulling her attention away before her frown became so intense it broke her face. “Good morning, Mrs. Bailey.” That wasn’t so bad.

She refixed her stare on me. “Good morning, Persephone.”

I winced. It had been a while since I had heard my name in its hideous entirety and, unsurprisingly, nothing had changed — it still sucked. But the way the old lady said it always seemed to make it worse, drawling over the vowel sounds like she was talking to a five-year-old child — Purr-seph-an-eeeee.