Page 4 of Hunted Bride
“You have to help me escape,” Alisa gasps, raking her long mink-brown curls away from her face. She’s breathing as if she ran all the way here from her fancy mansion in Beverly Crest. I’m sure she did nothing more tiring than sprint ten steps from the elevator to my door. She’s exhausting.
“Escape? Mom said you’re getting married.”
“I can’t marry Maxim!”
“Why not? Nobody says you have to stay married to him, Alisa. Honor the commitment and then split after six months.” I go to the fridge and take out a can of Diet Coke. I offer her one. She shakes her head, curls bouncing as if she’s starring in a hair commercial. Sometimes when I’m watching TV, one of her old commercials will come on like a horror movie jump scare. Needless to say, I don’t watch a lot of TV anymore.
“I just can’t. You wouldn’t understand,” she says, miffed. “Bratva men don’t do divorce. They take the whole ‘til death do us part’ thing very seriously.”
“Fair enough.” I don’t understand her objections to her assigned husband. Not that she would deign to explain to me specifically what they are.
Although we were born eighteen months apart, we’ve been oil and water ever since childhood. Growing up, our parents doted on her. I was always the invisible shadow. She had dance and singing lessons. She attended a special school for children who wanted to become actors.
Me? I plodded along doing fine in a normal school. There was never anything special or sparkly about me. I buried my nose in books and escaped from my family into fictional worlds where I got to be the heroine for a while.
Where there was always a happy ending. Unlike real life.
“What do you want from me, Alisa?” I pop open my Diet Coke and take a long swig. Her brow furrows.
“I need money and I need clothes. Do you still have that burner phone?” she says.
“Probably. If it even works anymore.”
“Never mind. I’ll get a new one. Can I borrow like, five thousand dollars? Cash?”
I spit the Coke out through my nose. Choking, I gasp out, “How much?”
“Okay, fine. Three?”
“Three dollars, yeah, I can help you with that.” I brush Coke fizz off my bosoms, and fumble in my whimsically shaped purse looking for my even more whimsical wallet.
“I can’t believe you’re twenty-four years old and still carrying a handbag shaped like a Pokémon,” Alisa grumbles.
“And here I was just about to hand you everything in my wallet, which is all of—”
“I’m sorry I insulted your purse…is that a shark wallet?”
“Yeah, you unzip its teeth like Jaws. Isn’t it fun?”
Alisa rolls her eyes but manages to keep her thoughts about my personal aesthetic to herself for once.
“Here you go. I have $52 and change.”
She gapes at me. “That’s it? That’s all the cash you have on hand?”
“I’m a library assistant getting my library degree. I can barely make rent and keep myself in Diet Coke, okay?”
“Mom and Dad don’t pay your rent?” Alisa seems confused by this.
“No, they do not,” I answer curtly. I wouldn’t let them if they offered. “I can probably scrounge up another few bucks if you give me a minute to search the couch cushions. Sometimes change falls out of my pockets when I’m eating dinner in front of the TV.”
Dismissing myself as pathetic before she can do it to my face has been my go-to survival strategy since we were in middle school.
“Never mind,” Alisa huffs. “Just give me the burner phone and I’ll let you get back to your stupid smut books.”
“Don’t knock ’em until you try ’em.” I rummage around in my junk drawer looking for the emergency phone my parents gave me when I moved in.
I find it buried way in the back inside a plastic baggie with a power cord and an extra power bank. Alisa tries to turn it on, but both the battery and the power bank are dead. She gives me a look of pure scorn. You’re supposed to keep them charged, she doesn’t say, but I can see the rebuke written on her delicate features.
