Shift by Coral Rivera

Author:Coral Rivera [Rivera, Coral]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

| EIGHTEEN |

She had his father’s eyes.

Or rather, his father had hers. Nikolai clutched his temples with the whirlwind of confusion clutching at every synapse in his brain. She couldn’t have been much older than he was, her frame still youthful and straight, no sign of a hunch or decades of weight on her shoulders. Or in her case, centuries. Those eyes, though, they held stories. Years and years of impossible stories waiting to be told.

The stories he knew of Bekka Brax were told to him by the light of the fire in his bedroom growing up. His father, no matter how late he’d come home in the evening, would sit on the corner of his bed, watching the flames crackle and lick up the brick surrounding it. He had told him stories of their family when Helios was once a kingdom of grandeur, before the arrival of powers–and how the Royals’ great denial of it brought the kingdom crumbling down. A peaceful world before borders and betrayals. The Ruins were all that was left of their prejudice.

His ancestor, the king’s most trusted assassin, was an Augur before the term was even coined. Back then, she was simply a witch–hated by most, but highly valued by the ones who mattered.

A hero and a stain on the family line. Much like Nikolai himself.

Here she was now, leaning back in her chair and kicking her feet up on the edge of the coffee table as if her presence wasn’t spinning his world into the ground. She inhaled the bubble of gum she blew out, folding it into a half moon along her bottom lip. She pointed at her cheek.

“Berry Punch, my favorite. It’s the little things, you know.”

Nikolai sat opposite her, the billowing curtains behind her framing her face like Medusa tendrils. The Bottle-Bottom showed no sign of letting up. It had been two days since the cantina, and Bekka hadn’t talked. Nikolai had dragged her to his apartment and fell asleep, practically playing watchdog. He woke up to an empty room and had cursed himself. She had come back later that day but stayed quiet, had to “warm up to it,” she told him. Apparently “warm up to it” was code for being fed adequately–not just with snacks and week-old leftovers in his fridge. He had gotten two sandwiches from Papí’s bodega around the corner. He hated that Val was missing out, but she had been unusually silent since they parted at the crime scene. Bekka’s face had lit up at the sight of bread and meat and a bag of random candies he had fanatically grabbed at.

She all but inhaled the sandwich and was stretched out languidly, about to fall asleep if Nikolai wasn’t careful.

“Bekka, can we please get on with this? It has been…too long, and I obviously have shit to do.”

She looked at him through hooded lashes and popped another bubble of berry punch. “Where did we leave off?”

Nikolai dropped his face in his hands, feeling the weight against his palms.

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