Kingpin's Foxglove (The Tarkhanov Empire Book 1) by Bree Porter

Author:Bree Porter [Porter, Bree]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-11-13T06:00:00+00:00

16

Elena Falcone

This was wrong.

Morally, what I was about to do was incorrect. It was everything my Sunday School preacher had warned me from doing. What every lesson about ethics given by my guardians and teachers had cautioned against.

I stopped outside her door, breathing deeply.

It doesn’t make any sense, I told myself. You need to see if your theory is correct.

You need to know if you’re in danger.

I knocked softly.

“Come in, Elena,” Tatiana called. She sounded strong, healthy.

I took another deep breath and stepped into her room. She was leaning against the bed on the floor, playing trains with Anton. Anton smiled up at me as I entered, holding out a blue train for me to admire.

“Very nice,” I told him. “Is that your favorite?”

He nodded excitedly.

Tatiana caressed her rounding stomach and smiled at me. “Have you come to deliver some more magic potion?”

I nodded and crouched down in front of her. “How are you feeling?”

“Amazing,” she said. “I felt strong enough to take Anton for a walk this morning. We went and played on the swings, didn’t we, my darling?”

Anton nodded, talking rapidly about how exciting the sandpit and monkey bars had been.

I pulled the small tonic out of my pocket. Do not reveal anything, I instructed my face as I passed it to Tatiana. “If you keep getting better this quick, we might be able to put you on a smaller dosage.”

“That would be nice,” she laughed. “I am getting sick of mixing it with tea. There is only so much tea a girl can drink, you know?”

I nodded, forcing a smile of agreement. “I do.”

Tatiana didn’t inspect the tonic too closely. It looked identical to the other one.

“I have to go and sort out the library, but I’ll be back to check on you later,” I said.

Both the mother and son waved me goodbye, before going back to the game of trains. I hovered outside the room, listening to the jubilant chatter, before leaving.

I wished I had confronted her, or not been so suspicious. Some part of me wished I had enough courage to seek out the answer without tricks and deceptions.

I was too calculating to be brave.

It was a fact I had known about myself since I was a child.

I had learnt it about myself as I had watched my father collapse to the ground after drinking his finest whiskey. As he had clutched his heart and struggled to live, I had realized at my core I wasn’t valiant or fearless.

Instead I was intelligent and calculating and heartless.

Too calculating to be brave, I mouthed to myself. There was no point being angry at myself—it was those very attributes of mine that had kept me alive so long.

I yearned for the lab in that moment. I wanted to create something, act like an alchemist or botanist or chemist. But…I was growing too close to the lab. I knew everyone there, what all the equipment was. Even the time and fundamentals of the heroin deliveries.

I was growing too close. Much too close.

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