Let Me Burn (Six Silent Sins Book 3) by Elodie Colt

Author:Elodie Colt [Colt, Elodie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hudson Indie Ink
Published: 2020-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

15

Ella

I watch my fresh dragonfly nymphs as they explore their new environment, crawling over the rocks inside my aquarium. They resemble brown bugs with fat nubs as tails, but in a few months, they will shed their skin and grow up to be majestic conquerors of the air. The southern hawker will grow a long body with lime-green specks, the common whitetail will get a tail so white it looks like someone dipped it in paint, and the ebony jewelwing will turn its body into a shimmering turquoise along with wings so black, they almost seem unreal.

A contented sigh wafts over my lips. I don’t know why, but this felt important somehow—to have six dragonflies in my aquarium again, true to my lucky number. Our lucky number.

Mom loved to watch the dragonflies buzzing around the pond behind our house. I remember her whole-hearted laughs whenever they landed on my hair, wriggling their tails in front of my forehead.

My phone pings with an incoming message, and my smile wavers when I look down at the picture. I called the cemetery gardener in Belgorod yesterday, asking him to plant new flowers on Mom’s grave in honor of her birthday and send me a picture. Now, it’s bursting with yellow Bidens and pink Zinnias—her favorite flowers.

Tears prickle my eyes, and I lock the screen, taking a deep breath. It would have been her fifty-eighth birthday. A day we would have spent with homemade honey cake for breakfast, a spa treatment in the afternoon, and a vodka-shot drinking game in the evening. A beautiful day she should have lived to see.

I amble over to my closet to pull out Mom’s shoebox. The alexandrite ring rolls loosely around inside, and I pluck it up to put it on my finger, watching the multiple colors refracting in the light. I’ve never seen Mom wearing it. What did this ring mean to her? What did the man who gave it to her mean to her? Did she love him? Hate him? Both?

A knock on the door resounds, and I quickly wipe a tear away as Zoya pops in.

“Are you ready? Oh, I remember that one,” she says when she takes in my purple halter dress with a tiered skirt, smiling. “Mom wanted you to wear it every Sunday for church.”

I utter a low chuckle. “Yeah. And no one ever saw it underneath my thick winter coat.”

“Well, you can skip the coat here.” She winks at me. “Come on, let’s get going.”

Mom made all the clouds that had darkened the morning hours disappear. The sun kisses my skin as we make our way to Zoya’s car, promising a beautiful, warm afternoon at the beach.

“I’m glad we’ve found the time to hang out,” Zoya says when we arrive at Coney Island Creek Park a few minutes later.

“Yeah. Funny that we’ve been living in the same house for weeks and haven’t shared a single day yet.”

“Was Nathan okay with you spending the day with me?” she asks when we exit her car to go for a walk.

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