Page 22 of Queen of Nothing

Together, they count the cash.

And then they count again.

And the whole time he just thinks he’s doing business with two wealthy, older women who turned up at his door in the middle of the night.

Strange, sure.

Suspicious, not enough for him to turn us away.

But soon, our trail will be followed to this showroom.

I don’t know what that means for him or our jewels that we sell him, if our families will buy them all back, or simply take them.

Suppose it depends on how valued this man is to the Videralli—and, considering the stolen pieces around us, I’m assuming he is very valued.

I leave it behind, because it’s not my concern.

I follow Serena out into the night.

3

The filling station is a little on the overwhelming side.

It’s small, but striped with glaring lights on the ceiling, the kind that ache my eyes and brew a headache behind them, the radio speaker crackles almost as loudly as the high volume itself, and the aisles are stocked full of too many choices.

I focus, not on the hum of the half-dozen refrigerators lining the wall, but on the shelves.

I take my time to pick through everything while Serena disappears into the bathroom, and I fill a basket with crisps, chocolates, juices, energy drinks, packets of cheese and crackers and breakfast bars and then, I find an entire section of coffee machines and hot food in glass casings. But then, my mouth puckers at the sight of the remaining selection of hot food.

Fried chicken strips that look sort of grey under the glaring fluorescent light, two whitish pieces of pizza that I’m sure aren’t meant to be white at all, a few small buckets of limp soggy fries, and a pretzel that’s dented and torn along the side, like it’s been banged around and dropped a few times, so there is no way in any world, Videralli or krum, that I’m touching that.

There might not be anything open at the airport.

Usually when it’s so early, the restaurants and cafés are shuttered.

So I snub the hot food but start sifting through the equally as disappointing sandwiches in the open fridge.

After too many suspicious looking chicken and cheese options, I decide we are too late in the filling station for any decent food, and, from the basket on top of the coffee machine, I grab a couple of packaged pastries that are probably stale, and a banana—the only one that, after picking through the lot, isn’t bruised.

I stop at the magazines and get one of each kind.

Flights are super boring in the krum world. And claustrophobic. The more I have to distract me, the better.

I dump the whole basket worth of items onto the counter. The banana jumps on impact, and bounces over the edge, and down onto the floor at the server’s feet. A chocolate bar is quick to topple after it.

The server behind the counter spares me a withering look before he picks up the fallen item. As he starts scanning them, Serena returns.

She asks, “Did you get that juice I like?” The one she decided is her new favourite at the second airport in our travels. Gatorade.

I tried it. It’s disgusting.

“I got the blue one.”

Her gratitude is a mere nod, then we wait in silence as the server takes his time scanning and bagging.

It’s a minute that stretches on for ages, each tick of the clock behind the counter louder than the last, until finally, Serena pays.

I start packing everything into my empty backpack.