Chapter 1
Sapphire
Twenty-One Years Old
Grief is no stranger in the Valdawell house.
It lives down the hall in my father’s room. It sleeps on the right side of my mother’s bed on a cold night amid a winter storm. It haunts the pages of our family photo albums.
And we let it reside here because there is nowhere else for it to go.
I think on that as I trace the uneven edge of the wooden table.
The imperfect carvings of a wolf sprinting through a mass of trees along its perimeter.
I admire the careful details and the precision it must have taken the artist to draw the lines with the pointed end of the knife. It must have taken days to complete.
Though I’m careful not to let my mother see how my index finger caresses the paws of the wolf.
Any time she sees me giving this table the slightest bit of attention, she starts to explain how my father built it himself.
Carved it from a red oak tree and spent all night drawing those designs of DaiSzek running through the forest.
I’ve heard it as a child.
I’ve heard it as a teenager.
I’ve heard it at holiday gatherings.
I’ve heard it.
I’ve heard it.
I’ve heard it.
“Set out the candles, please,” Mom calls over her shoulder, seasoning the meat before she slides it into the oven.
I raise my eyebrow at my brother, jerking my chin toward the dining table. “You heard her.”
Krimson swings his glare back to me, narrowing those dark, heterochromatic eyes in annoyance. The orange glow of the oven fire flickers along his chocolate brown hair, casting a rich glimmer in this depressing house.
“You know who I was talking to,” Mom clarifies, wiping down the glossy, garnet countertops. “Krimson is peeling potatoes. How are you contributing?”
I contemplate how I’d like to respond as Mom organizes the glass jars of herbs and seasoning lining the backsplash next to the stove.
She’s always so quick to clean up after preparing each dish for dinner.
If she doesn’t, Grandpa almost always cleans the entire kitchen, though it’s small, Mom doesn’t like him doing additional work.
“I’m using all of my energy not to bitch and complain.” I sit on the chair next to my brother, arms crossed, jaw locked, staring at that front door that seems to mock me as the winter winds bustle against its barrier.
We are twenty-one years old. Why am I letting our mother pressure me into continuing to attend these dinners?
“He’s not going to be that bad this time. Seriously. He’ll be on his best behavior,” Krimson says calmly, tossing potato skins in a bowl.
I raise my grimace slowly, pointedly. My brother meets my eyes and sighs.
“You’re a fool.”
They know why I hate these dinners. They know I can’t stand to be in the same room as Niklaus. They know why I get into a shit mood when Sundays come around. But family is everything here, isn’t it? A toxic idea my mother and her friends inherited from their time behind bars.
“He’s right, Sapphire. Uncle Warrose and Aunt Ruth are coming too.”
Thank fucking heavens.
Almost every Sunday evening Aunt Marilynn, Uncle Niles, and their deranged son come over for family dinner.
Regardless of our parents’ epic familial bond, the night always ends with Niklaus saying something subtle, something atrocious to provoke me.
I’m apparently not smart enough to ignore the bait.
He’s crafty with his words, careful not to alert the parents that he’s tormenting me.
I usually hold it together. Simmer in unbearable silence.
But there has been the occasional outburst.
Krimson is the only one who can pick up on the subtle digs. He’s the only one who believes me when I come home crying.
He’s gotten in a few fights with Niklaus over the years because of it.
“He’s scared of Uncle Warrose,” I mutter, continuing to study the carvings of trees in the old wood.
“I would too if he threw me off a cliff.” Krimson chuckles.
Mom shoots us a warning look from her crouched position by the oven. But it’s too late, I relish in the memory as it settles into my thoughts.
When I was eleven, Niklaus found me sitting on the cliff of the lagoon, praying to God to wake my daddy up. Praying that I’d get to see his brown eyes that my mother speaks so fondly of. Praying that he’d get to watch me grow up. I was in tears, and Niklaus still said what he said.
“Your daddy would have been a terrible father. He’s got demons in his head and would have killed you for fun, I’m sure! You should be thanking God he’s in that coma, rotting!”
It was the cruelest thing he’s ever said to me.
And at such a low moment too.
But what he didn’t know was that Uncle Warrose had just come back from Vexamen and was standing right behind him.
I froze at the look on my uncle’s face, the expression coated in ice, in war, in insurmountable rage.
He lifted Niklaus off the ground with one hand by his throat and dangled him over the edge of the cliff.
And his rigid words have haunted me since.
“The man you speak of is my oldest and best friend in this world. He has given up more than you will ever know. Has endured more pain, more suffering than you could ever imagine. That includes not getting to raise the little girl you treat with such disrespect. If you weren’t a child, I would have skinned you alive and fed you to my wolves for saying one ill word about my best friend.
If I ever hear you disrespect his name or his children again, I’ll do much worse than this…
” And with a slight shift of his hand, he let the stunned eleven-year-old boy go, dropping him in the chilly lagoon in the middle of autumn.
My mom glances at me daydreaming, wiping her hands off on a towel.
“Aunt Marilynn says he’s been a lot better lately. Having a girlfriend has really helped.”
Why is she so na?ve? So blind?
Has she never had to deal with a heartless man in her life?
I sigh loudly. “How long until they’re here?”
“One hour.”
I don’t dare to greet them at the door.
Nope, my ass is planted firmly in my chair.
The plan for this evening is to ignore, deflect, and to just leave if he pokes and prods at my patience.
He does not exist.
He’s dead.
Died.
Corpse.
I breathe in and out. Why am I already angry?
“Ahem!”
I jerk my head toward the dining room entryway.
“No one took my coat at the door. No one announced my title and arrival. No one escorted me to my dining seat. What kind of an event are you running here?”
I lose a little steam at the sight of his hand on his hip. Flecks of snow melting on top of his golden hair.
“Hi, Uncle Niles.”
“I’m pretty important,” he adds with narrowing eyes.
I crack a smile and get up to hug him. Wrapping my arms around his neck, my frigid heart thaws out as he hugs me back.
It’s expected when hugging Uncle Niles. It’s a natural law when being embraced by someone like him.
These hugs are the warmest. The sweetest. And he almost always has a joke lined up to make me laugh.
Why does his son have to be a narcissistic—
“You’re insulting my son again in your head, aren’t you?” Uncle Niles kisses the side of my hair.
“No…”
“Can I help?”
“Give it your best shot.” I grin against his shoulder.
“Niklaus was a slippery baby,” he says seriously.
I crack a smile. “Was he now?”
“Yes. Always lathered in too much oil after his bath.”
“Oh. I sure hope he wasn’t—”
“Dropped? Several times? No. No, no, no, no…” Uncle Niles smiles innocently.
I burst into laughter.
“I heard my name.”
The devil himself enters my kitchen bringing with him plagues, famine, everlasting darkness, and the temptation to end it all right now just to get away from him.
“No one said your name,” Uncle Niles responds.
My arms cross as I separate from the warmest hug. It seems you can summon evil by calling upon a demon’s name.
“Don’t I get a hug, Spitfire?”
I stare impassively.
“Niklaus,” Uncle Niles warns. “You know she doesn’t like being called that.”
“No, not at all.” I wave my hand nonchalantly, taking two careful steps toward his tall, cocky stance.
Niklaus’s eyebrows raise a fraction of an inch as I hug him stiffly. He doesn’t react right away. There’s a pause in the slow-moving pattern of his brain.
We never hug.
Maybe three or four times in my life. Once for my sixth birthday when Aunt Marilynn forced him to. Other times when he was made to apologize for bullying the shit out of me.
But I don’t let go until he hugs back. His lean arms circle my waist. It’s intimate…and my skin crawls at the interaction.
Reaching up to my tiptoes, I hover my lips over his ear, and with a tone so sensual, so soothing, I whisper… “Out of all the sperm to win the race…”
Niklaus pauses before he laughs, tossing his head back as his upper body rumbles against my chest. I immediately pull away from our embrace to walk back to my seat.
The sound of his laughter is confusing to me.
It’s the kind of wheezing laugh that gets everyone else to laugh.
It’s the laugh that you look for when you’re trying to decide if something is funny or not.
But unfortunately for me, it’s also the sound I’ve grown accustomed to when he’s getting a classroom to make fun of me.
“Wow. You never laugh that hard at my jokes.” Uncle Niles pouts, finding his place at the table.
“I don’t laugh at all at your jokes,” Niklaus retorts.
I have never understood how he could be so callous toward his dad. It’s always been this way since he was a little boy. My mom assumed it was after Niklaus learned about how his birth father, Aurick Demechnef, died—saving Uncle Niles’s life.
Though Uncle Niles has been such a good father that I would find myself hot with rage and envy. It used to make me wonder what kind of dad mine would have been. Was he funny like Uncle Niles? Was he warm and sweet?
Or was he cold and heartless the way Niklaus has always taunted me with?
I wish I knew.