Page 117 of A Shade of Myself
I raised my eyebrows. “Is it some big secret?”
Laurent glanced up at the ceiling, then shook his head. “I guess not anymore. If she’s mentioned the pain, then she probably wouldn’t have a problem with you two knowing. She was in a car crash years ago. It was really bad.”
“How bad?” Emmett said.
“It was a miracle she survived. She had to learn how to walk again.”
Tatiana was so frail. She was tough as nails too, and she’d physically healed, but had the crash caused an irrevocable break somewhere deep inside her? One that never set properly, just like my parents’ murders had with me?
“My God,” I said. “That’s awful.”
Laurent perched on the arm of the sofa next to me. “No one outside the immediate family knew. And with my aunt’s iron-willed determination, no one ever suspected she’d been hurt, much less that she’d been paralyzed.”
“She’s quite the actress.” Emmett elbowed me. “You should get some tips because you’re crap at hiding your feelings.”
“And yet you think I like you,” I said.
He laughed. “Good one.” He grabbed his phone. “I’m going upstairs to hear about the trip. See yourselves out.”
As the golem left, the Louis Armstrong song finished up and “Mack the Knife” began.
Laurent smiled. “This is Tatiana’s favorite song. Fitting.”
My head snapped up, and I shivered, my blood turning to ice.
“Mack the Knife” was about a killer who’s compared to a shark.
A shark, of all things.
Dread washed over me in a rush. I grabbed Laurent’s arm. “When was Tatiana in that car crash?”
“I was a kid?”
“How old?”
Laurent frowned, pulling his arm out of my grip. “I was ten.”
“Are you sure?” My voice rose to a tight squeak.
“Yes. Why?”
I dropped my head into my hands, and screwed my eyes shut, my breath coming faster and deeper.
It wasn’t an accident. Jake’s message to me hadn’t made any sense when I read it because of course my parents’ murders weren’t an accident.
Except he hadn’t been referring to that. It was the car crash that wasn’t an accident.
A car crash that Uncle Jake only knew about because someone who was like a brother to him had told him about it.
Are you a baby shark or are you planning to finish what your parents started? That’s why James had asked me that question. He wanted to know if I was aligned with Tatiana or if I was planning to finish the job my parents had attempted.
Kill Tatiana.
My parents, the blooming Blums, weren’t just the flowers, they too were sharks? Was I the baby shark because killing was in my blood? I placed my hands on the sides of my rib cage like I could force air into my lungs.
The room swam; I couldn’t tell which way was up.
Laurent placed his hand on my back. “Miriam? What’s wrong?”
