Deliver Me From Evil: An Arranged Marriage Mafia Romance by Natasha Knight

Author:Natasha Knight [Knight, Natasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

20

SANTOS

Beads scatter across a wooden floor. Wind whips my face, icy rain pelting it. All those gathered move at a frantic pace below, coming and going, as if it’s all happening in double time. Jerky, unnatural movements leave me confused as I see everything at once and too fast.

Words on a page. The same words appear, disappear, reappear over and over again as if being typed out by a ghost typist. Words I’ve memorized. The record of Alexia’s murder. The brutal stabbing as if the killer would murder not only the mother but also the unborn child inside her womb.

Beads bounce, hundreds of them. Thousands. The sound they make is otherworldly, somehow louder than the crashing of waves. They disappear into the abyss below. Black water pounds against rocks beaten down over ages.

A man screams. A body falls.

A woman’s blood-red fingernails slide along the beads of a rosary. Lips move, murmuring prayers. A man’s bloody hands count out prayers on those same beads. Or perhaps he’s counting the number of those he has felled.

My mother stands perfectly still. She is young, her belly swollen. She is silent, her lips sewn crudely shut, sanguine eyes staring straight ahead into nothing.

Beside her, my brother holds her hand. He’s a child one moment, a man the next. In his other hand he, too, holds a length of those beads, from the end of which slip a countless, never-ending supply of them. Bouncing on wooden planks. Disappearing with the screaming man over the abyss.

I see the connection then. The beads they each hold come from one source. Bound together. Eternal.

Darkness surrounds them all.

And I stand on the top of the world watching.

Watching.

It’s as if it’s all on repeat.

Until a door opens, and out walks Madelena. She’s ghost-like here wearing a simple white gown of worn cotton. The wind whips the dress around her. Long hair tangles and knots like a noose circling her neck. Her feet are bare. She’s naked beneath the parchment-like dress.

I scream for her to stop, to not go out there, but she doesn’t hear me. I reach out and see my own hand too far to reach her. To touch her. To pull her back, away from the edge. Away from those people.

“Madelena!”

I scream and scream, my throat hoarse with the effort. And she just keeps walking toward them, entranced, the never-ending string of beads in her hand like that in my brother’s. The Commander’s son. My half-brother.

No one sees her though. No one turns when she passes. I breathe a sigh of relief.

But then there’s someone else. Another figure enters the scene. The man who is falling. Who has fallen. His head is caved in. His body is mangled. But he walks toward her around the other side of the catwalk.

“Madelena!” I call again and again but my voice is ripped from me, wind stealing it away, smashing it against those rocks as it does the ocean. I fight against the invisible bonds holding me in place. The words detailing the stabbing of Alexia swim before my eyes, blinding me momentarily.

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