The tall stranger stops at the treeline and seems to be peering into the darkness at me crouched on the ground.
I hear him inhale.
I’m desperate to hide.Call it old-fashioned animal instinct, but I’m frozen to the spot in so many ways, there’s no way I can escape.
But when the man speaks, I feel a small spark of hope… and some other emotion.
“Good evening, my little sacrificial lamb…”
ChapterOne
Luna
Tallie pounces on me the instant I return to the studio.
“Well?What did the lawyer say?”
Flinging my handbag onto the old couch by the kiln, I flop down next to it.This brings my knees higher than my hips due to the couch stuffing having shifted around so much from various visitors’ ass grooves.Standing up from this couch is worth a hundred core muscle exercises, I swear.
“He’s not a lawyer, he’s an ‘estate planning attorney,’ and his name’s William Bryant.”
Bustling over to the stainless steel urn that’s plugged into a socket by the makeshift kitchen, Tallie throws a tea bag into a mug and pours a liberal amount of boiling water over it from the urn.
She brings it over to me.
“Tell meeverything.How come you never knew about this aunt of yours?How did she die?”
Struggling to sit up straight before accepting the mug of lava-temperature tea, I grunt my reply.
“Tempest Aherne.That was my aunt’s name.She was my mother’s half-sister, so…” I do a quick calculation in my head.“So she’s my maternal grandmother’s eldest daughter, from granny’sfirsthusband.”
Swiping her hand as if my complicated family tree bores her, Tallie makes a circle with her finger in the air.It’s to show that she wants me to get to the point faster.
“Okay, I’m getting there, I promise.Tempest chose to live with her father after the divorce.Apparently, my gran allowed her ex-husband and her firstborn child to just disappear together and never bothered finding out where they ended up.”
A long whistle of disbelief follows my revelation.
“Harsh!How much did your gran hate her ex?”
All I can do is shake my head.“I called my dad when I was in the cab coming back here.All he knows is what my mom told him—which was the same story as the lawyer’s.”
I can tell from the way Tallie checks out my face after I say the word that she’s monitoring me for tears.I always seem to get a lump in my throat whenever I talk about my mom.
Mom passed away ten years ago when I was only twenty-two years old.She never even got to see my first art installation—a massive two-floor terracotta mosaic in the lobby of Vegas’s top luxury hotel.
She would’ve been so proud.
“Trust your dad to be of zero help.”Tallie rolls her eyes.
That makes me laugh.“Frankly, I would have been shocked if he had been a fountain of information.What doesn’t bite my dad on the end of his nose, he doesn’t bother about.”
My dad surprised everyone by retiring early from the Minneapolis police force three years back.But it wasn’t so that he could go live in Florida; he became obsessed with mountain climbing instead.Once a year, he heads to the Himalayas to acclimatize and then climb some impossibly high mountain.The rest of the time, he’s doing the same thing here in the States.
Tallie is like a dog with a bone when it comes to pumping me for gossip.
“But how did your aunt die?I mean, she must have known it was coming.She had time to visit William Whatshisname, after all.”
Daring to take a small sip of tea, I warm my hands on the mug.
