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Chapter 53

Larissa

Birds In The Rain 1

Aire Vega

The DeLoughrey estate still seemed far too big to me. A grim Baroque castle with a huge park, a rose garden, and antique stone column pavilions hidden throughout the forest and along the lake shore, where the drizzle now left its mark on the water's surface.

And then there were those gray, moss-covered, weathered stone statues standing at every corner. Angels, virgins with jugs in their hands, half-clothed youths from antiquity almost tearing each other's heads off...

One sculpture in particular caught my eye. A beautiful naked woman, entwined in thorny rose vines, stood in the middle of that antique pavilion, standing mostly on land yet jutting slightly out into the lake behind the rose garden.

From up here at the open window on the second floor, it seemed so small in the distance. But once you were there...

It didn't help.

As always, when I tried to distract myself, I only managed to succeed for a moment. But no matter how innocently I wandered through this estate, nothing could change the fact that I had allowed Kieran Wheeler, a Senseque who had threatened to kill me, to tear my top and touch me as if I were a long-awaited feast.

I could still feel his warm hands, the pressure marks he had left on my right breast, which had healed immediately in the forest on the way home, just like the bite on my lip, so that I was still unsure whether it had all been just a crazy fever dream.

“Larissa...”

I spun around. Still. After all the Ruisangor behavioral training with my new uncle, Bastien, I was still startled when he appeared behind me.

“I didn't mean to bother you…” said the man who had introduced himself as my father after chasing me and my best friend through the damn Blairville forest. The same man who had been worried about me just a few days ago.

Still, I was torn. It bothered me almost more than Kieran's hands on my boobs. Something the clan would punish if anyone in this family found out.

“You're not bothering me,” I said quickly.

Tristan was the only person in this town who could really throw me off balance. At least that's what I had thought until the beach party...

Tristan DeLoughrey wore a dark gray three-piece suit with a white shirt and a mahogany tie under a black felt coat, and his dark brown hair reminded me of Miles's, only his was much shorter.

He joined me at one of the windows on the second floor of the foyer.

“I should be grateful that you haven't judged me yet, unlike your brother.”

I swallowed, trying to concentrate on the rare chirping of birds in the distance, but the drizzle almost drowned it out.

Miles seemed to hate him, which didn't exactly put him in the best light.

Tristan looked thoughtfully out into the park.

“You're just avoiding me.”

I quickly looked away, back out at the lake, over which the fog had gathered. It was winter, and it still hadn't frozen over, even though it felt ten degrees colder here than in other parts of Blairville. It wouldn't freeze over anymore, because the last snow had already melted, ready to let spring into town.

I had been on this strange Canadian island for six months now. My life had turned upside down like a chicken on a spit over a fire, and I was now living here with these people who hid from the rest of the town, drinking blood. It was a strange feeling.

And the knowledge that – even if only slowly – the chicken would still be roasted with each turn lurked in the shadows of my subconscious. Problems would always haunt me, just like my past...

“It's all a bit much,” I tried to explain.

He just nodded, staring out the window, his facial expression behind his sunglasses observant. His posture was upright. Not like Adrian’s, as if there were a strict code of etiquette in this house, but rather as if the fact that he came from a wealthy family effortlessly permeated his every movement. As if he were above it all, even though he had never actually mentioned it.

“Do you also believe that I deliberately killed your mother?”