Roma Queen (Roma Royals Duet Book 2)

by Callie Hart

  An elderly man with a tuft of silver hair smiles at me when I sit down on the bench beside him at the bus stop. “You getting the thirty-two to Montgomery?” he asks. “They weren’t expecting snow so early. Everything’s running late on account of the fact that they had to bring out the ploughs in the middle of the day.”

  It is unusual for snow so early in the year, and even more unusual for it to stick. The landscape’s very different from the national park we left behind this morning, but the inch-thick mantle of white that lies like fresh poured cement on the roofs of the parked cars and on top of the bus shelter suddenly leaps out at me, and I’m shocked that I haven’t noticed it before now. “No. I’m waiting on the twenty-two, actually,” I tell the old man.

  He starts rambling on about how people were more prepared back when he was a young man. That the city’s infrastructure has turned to shit. I’m barely listening to him as I stare off up the street, watching the stream of traffic approach, looking out for the boxy, rectangular shape of an approaching bus.

  Five minutes later, a number twenty-two turns off the freeway exit, making its way toward us, and the old man tisks under his breath. “Just my luck. They’re gonna have to chisel me off this bench by the time mine arrives.”

  The bus pulls up, the doors make a futuristic Star Trek style swishing sound as they part, and a brunette woman in her late forties glowers at me from the driver’s seat. “You getting on or what? Hard enough keeping this thing warm as it is.”

  I take a step back and sit back down. “No. Sorry. Wrong bus.”

  The driver looks like she’s going to flip me off. Instead, she grumbles under her breath and the doors swing closed.

  “That was yours,” the old man says. “Twenty-two. Said so on the front.”

  I give him a tight smile. “I need a specific number twenty-two.”

  The poor bastard eyes me like I’ve lost my damn mind. “They’re all the same inside, these buses, Sweetheart. They all go to the same places.”

  Oh, but how wrong he is. One of these buses is going directly into hell. Eventually, the old man’s number thirty-two arrives, and he gets on without saying another word to me. Five minutes pass, and another twenty-two exits the freeway and turns onto the street, heading straight for me.

  This time, when the doors swoosh open, I’m met with a familiar face.

  The person I’ve been waiting for, here at the side of the winter road in Spokane.

  Garrett smiles when I step onto the bus, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. He knows why I’ve come.

  Twenty-Two

  PASHA

  The halo of light from my cell phone illuminates the ground in front of me as I stalk down the tunnel toward the unknown. My pulse is thumping in my ears, so loud that it actually sounds like there’s a train up ahead, chugging along the non-existent tracks, and I’m about to get pasted to the tunnel siding any second now.

  The wrench is heavy in my right hand. I’m ready to swing the fucking thing at the first sign of trouble, but so far all I’ve seen are rats the size of house cats, scurrying away into the darkness. The gravel underfoot makes it hard to be silent, but I do my best as I creep forward, straining to catch anything that might sound like human voices on the cloying, sour smelling, surprisingly warm gusts of air that blast me in the face every few seconds.

  I must travel a good three hundred feet before my eyes snag on a thin shard of light up ahead, glowing orange amongst the shadows. I kill the flashlight setting on my cell, slipping it into my back pocket as I stalk forward. The nearer I get, the easier it is to make out that the tall, narrow bar of light’s coming from a cracked doorway up ahead—probably an access point to one of the many maintenance shafts that are dotted along the tunnel, designed to make it easier for service men to get onto the track and complete repairs as and when they were needed.

  I’m within fifteen feet of the door when I hear the gentle hum of music. Weirdly, it sounds like church music. The door doesn’t make a sound as I open it wide enough to lean in and peek around it. Beyond, the room is much bigger than I anticipated, at least eight hundred square feet, and inside three rows of small, slim cots, half the size a cot would be if it were to fit a fully-grown man. Each one is made up with white sheets, one single white pillow at the head, and covered with a thin grey blanket at the foot. On the far side of the room, a loudspeaker mounted high on the wall burrs as the haunting choral music dips.

  There’s no one here.

  I scan the space again, and something catches my eye. Something I didn’t notice just now: the furthest cot from the door, in the corner of the room, half hidden in the shadows, is unmade. The pillow bears a deep dent in it, and the sheets are untucked on one side, tossed back, as if someone’s just climbed out of it and vanished into thin air.

  I’m probably imagining it, but the air feels a solid ten degrees colder inside the room as I enter; the hairs on my arms are standing to attention, and a nervous, uncomfortable voice whispers urgently into my ear, suggesting that I turn back the way I came and get the fuck out of dodge. A creeping malice exists here. It feels like it’s slithering over my skin, oily and rank, sinking down into my pores and coating my bones.

  The sound of my boots echoes, pinballing around the inside of the windowless, airless box of a room as I make my way past the small, half-sized beds and come to stand next to the one with the disturbed sheets. The painted metal frame that forms a small, arched headboard is scuffed and scratched; I find out why when I nudge the untucked sheets back with my boot, and I see the pair of handcuffs hanging from the metal bar.

  There, in the middle of the sheet that covers the cot’s thin mattress, a single, perfectly round, perfectly red drop of blood stains the over-starched cotton.

  This droplet of blood is small, but it’s loud. It fucking screams at me. It’s trying to tell me a story that I don’t want to hear, but it’s all my senses are picking up on. The vivid, brightness of it won’t allow me to look away. I can’t stop staring at it. I—

  The choral music stops dead.

  My focus snaps up, as if I’ll be able to see whoever removed the needle from the record by somehow looking at the speaker. My mouth’s flooded with copper, the taste of old pennies spreading across my tongue. I’ve bitten the inside of my cheek, but for a split second, it’s as though I’m tasting the violence that happened here on the air.

  “In 1956, a woman gave birth at the side of a railway track five miles outside the city of Des Moines, Iowa,” a deep, rasping voice says. Lazlo—I’d recognize the bastard’s voice anywhere. “The child ripped her right open. As she lay bleeding to death in the dirt, her child still emerging from her womb, shivering and screaming, she noticed the sound of bells. A gypsy woman found her there, attracted by the sounds of the babe’s wails. The dying woman, too weak to lift her son herself, begged the gypsy woman to take her son and save him. The woman did as she bid her and took the boy into her arms. The gypsy cut the cord that connected mother to son, and the woman died instantly, knowing the sole reason for her existence was now over, and it was time for her to leave. The gypsy stood over the lifeless body and made the woman a promise: I will care for this boy. I will keep him as my own. I will be everything to him that you would have been. He will know love.”

  Looks like the element of surprise is no longer mine. Lazlo’s voice, muffled by the warped, aged speakers, fills the room and makes my teeth buzz together. I glare up at the speaker, and that’s when I notice the tiny, red, blinking light flashing in the corner—a camera. The bastard. The sick, depraved, psycho. He’s kept someone in here, cuffed to this cot, and he’s spied on them through the lens of that camera, watched their every move without having to face them. The man is the epitome of evil. “LAZLO! Get in here and face me, you piece of shit!”

  The voice on the loudspeaker continues on without pause. “The gypsy woman took the boy back to her vitsa. Her people were confused by the boy’s appearance. His head was capped with thick, black hair,
his skin pale and white, and the other gypsies thought he might have been a ghost of some kind. The leader of the clan took one look at the boy and shook his head. “He cannot stay,” the man said. “He’s an ill omen. See how he doesn’t stop crying? He brings misery with him to our heaths.”

  “The woman who had carried the boy from the train tracks wept as she cradled the babe to her. “I swore to protect him,” she argued. “I made a promise to the dead. Force me to break my promise, and the clan will be haunted by his mother’s ghost forever.”

  “The Roma King was not happy, but there was no argument he could make that would settle his people’s unrest. They balked at the idea of the broken promise, so the king had no choice. In front of his people, he made his declaration to the gypsy woman. “The boy will remain with us for four years. If we prosper and thrive, he will stay and become one of us for good. If we wither and perish, he will be cast out, and so will you. Your promise to the boy’s dead mother will be unbroken, but you shall carry his bad luck on your own shoulders.”

  There are fire ants under my skin, crawling, biting, burning me as Lazlo forges on with his story. I have an inkling that this is his story. I don’t want to hear it, though. I don’t give a shit how he came to be in the world. I only care about punishing him for all the damage he’s caused while he’s been in it. “Lazlo! Lazlo, come out here, you fucking coward!” There’s no response, though. The man either can’t hear me, or he simply isn’t listening.

  “Four years slipped by, and neither prosperity nor famine visited the gypsies. Their lives were as they had been before. The boy grew—a silent, thin, cautious creature—and the clan’s people avoided him. On the anniversary of the King’s declaration, he gathered his people around a fire and bid them vote on what should be done about the boy. The men and women of the clan cast their rocks, until all but one sat in the same bowl. That was it. It had been decided: the boy was prikoza. The Bad Luck Boy.

  “True to his word, the King banished both the boy and the woman who saved him. Alone, out in the world for the first time in her life, the woman had no clue how to survive in an unfriendly city that did not want her or the boy, either. She secured a job. She fought tooth and nail to keep it. She lost it. Again and again, the woman managed to find work, only to have it slip through her fingers. They were hungry days. They were cold and desperate days, and they seemed to be without end.”

  The man’s words ring in my ears as I pace the room. He’s not going to come and face me. He’s going to hide behind his blinking fucking camera, ranting at me, massaging his own ego as he spins his story, and I’m standing here like a fucking idiot, just…fucking taking it.

  Well, no more.

  He could be anywhere. If he’s linked into audio and video down here, then he could literally be in another country for all I know…but I’m willing to bet serious money that he isn’t. I bare my teeth at the camera, staring down the malevolent-looking lens. “All right, asshole. Have it your way. Hang tight. I’m coming to you.”

  I storm out of the eerie room, glad to be putting it behind me. Back in the tunnel, back in the empty darkness, I have to pull my cell phone out again in order to see. I’m glad to have escaped Lazlo’s macabre story…until his voice floods the tunnel up ahead. “Another five years pass. Even though her people turned their backs on her, the woman teaches the boy their ways…”

  Fuck. He’s rigged speakers everywhere.

  “She cherished their traditions and their beliefs, long after they abandoned her. As the weeks, and then the months, and then the years disappeared, the woman grew weak. There was never enough food, and what they had she gave to the boy. Slowly, in a city full of rich, fat people getting richer and fatter by the minute, the woman wasted away to nothing. In the end, for it was the end, for her at least, she had no other choice. She took the little boy, still capped with the thick, black hair and the pale, pale skin, to the steps of a church. It was the only place he’d be safe, she told him. When she died…”

  God, I can’t fucking take this anymore. I see the speaker bolted to the wall up ahead, illuminated in the ring of light cast off by my phone. I charge, running, my boots thudding against the bare earth, and then I’m leaping, hurling myself upward and bringing the wrench swinging down on the speaker. A loud, sharp blast of feedback distorts the air as the metal box rips from the wall and goes hurtling off into the dark.

  Lazlo’s voice pauses…

  …but then continues further up the tunnel.

  “You never were very interested in history, were you?” The words echo. Accusatory. “You were only interested in fighting and fucking, even when you were a teenager. I watched you piss all over your own culture and tradition every single day, and I knew you weren’t fit to be king.”

  I head for the next speaker. “Yeah? Well, kudos to you, motherfucker. Seem to have changed your tune recently, though, huh? Why don’t you put me out of my misery, Lazlo? If you’ve always known what a bad king I’d make, why insist that I accept the crown to save Sarah now?”

  Silence rattles down the tunnel.

  “Yeah. That’d be too easy, wouldn’t it?” I holler into the dark. “To just spit it out and fucking tell me? I have to find you and beat it out of you first, right?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend laying a finger on me if you want Kezia to live, Pasha.”

  I close the gap, reaching the next speaker, and repeat my jump and swing. A bouquet of sparks bloom, orange and red, hissing as the wires rip free from the box. “You’re pathetic. If you think taking a woman I’ve never met before is going to serve as a fitting punishment for me stabbing you, then you really are insane.”

  Lazlo’s voice is further away this time, almost swallowed whole by the dark. “For stabbing me? You nearly killed me, Pasha. Let’s line the facts up nice and neat, shall we? But no. You flatter yourself. I took her because she’s guilty of her own crimes. Just like your mother. Just like your grandfather.”

  “My grandfather? What the fuck does he have to do with any of this?” I hate that he’s managing to reel me in with this bullshit, but fuck. I have to know. This has gone on long enough. I need answers, for both myself and for Zara.

  “He was the king, after all, wasn’t he? When a sympathetic woman, little more than a girl herself, came before him with a child in her arms? He was the one who cast her out all those years later. Her name was Calliope, but that’s not what they called her. To the Rivin Clan, she was known as the Empress. She looked just like the depiction on the tarot card. Beautiful. Divine. Except…her hair was red, not blonde. Red as rose petals and blood.”

  My feet are suddenly glued to the ground.

  Wait…

  What?

  Red as rose petals. Red as blood.

  Like a sunset. Or a nightmare.

  My own words clang around the inside of my head, the answer to a struck bell. Fuck, this is all too much. The story Lazlo’s been telling me does belong to him…and also to the Rivin Clan? The woman who cared for him was nicknamed the Empress…after the same tarot card my grandmother predicted would be the end of us all on her death bed? And amongst all of it, Zara, with her burnished, flowing red hair, beautiful and benevolent, a mirror to the woman who saved Lazlo’s life.

  How? How is this all connected? The pieces are landing in front of me one at a time, but I’m still missing more than half the overall puzzle. I can’t make any of the individual parts fit into place. It’s maddeningly frustrating.

  “Your grandfather said we would be cast out if I brought the clan bad luck. I did no such thing, but the Rivins, the proud, arrogant Rivins didn’t like the look of me, so they made us leave. I killed your grandfather for breaking his promise.”

  “You’re fucking insane. My grandfather died in his sleep, an old man.”

  The sound of Lazlo’s laughter echoing down the long tunnel chills me to the bone. “Did he? Who told you that? Your mother perhaps?”

  My grandfather was dead and gone long before I was born. I hav
e no memories of him to pull from; I can’t seem to recall any other member of the clan talking about Jamis’ death, either. The only person I can remember talking about Jamis, beyond the odd mention of his name in passing, is my mother. She did tell me her father died peacefully in his sleep. There was no mention of suspicious circumstances, foul play, or anything even remotely concerning. Now, Lazlo’s confessing to murdering him, too?

  “It doesn’t matter what my mother told me. It doesn’t matter what my grandfather did or didn’t promise. Kezia isn’t responsible for their actions.”

  “Kezia broke her own promises. She’s guilty of her own crimes.”

  I’m coming up on the speaker. I heft the wrench high over my head. “How the fuck can Kezia have anything to do with this? She wasn’t even born when Jamis sent you away!”

  Lazlo’s cold, bitter laughter feels like it’s alive, oozing over my skin, poisonous and toxic. “Oh dear, Pasha. You really don’t know anything, do you?”

  I roar as I bring the wrench down, shattering the speaker into pieces.

  Twenty-Three

  ZARA

  The bus station’s deserted. I feel like a convicted felon on the way to the gallows as I follow behind Garrett; like always, he moves silently, even his footfall difficult to discern as he passes a newspaper stand and then a coffee stand, hanging a left, heading down a long, winding ramp into the parking lot below the station.

  If my mother could see what I’m doing at this very moment, she’d have a fucking heart attack. Traipsing after a man I suspect to be involved in a kidnapping, down into a dark, secluded, parking lot? She’d take my fucking head off for being so stupid. I’m not completely unprepared, though. I have the gun I took from Seo-Jun’s safe in my pocket, pointed directly at the small of Garrett’s back, and my friend knows I have the thing trained on him. I flashed the handle at him as he pulled the bus into the bay numbered for the twenty-two service and killed the engine. He’s the mute one, but I didn’t have to say a fucking thing in order to make myself understood. He’d simply sighed and began walking across the station’s apron, his shoulder’s slumped, rounded in, as if he’d been waiting for this moment to arrive for a very long time.