Page 15 of The King of Hearts (The Raven Group #1)

CHAPTER TEN

HIM

I reach the bottom of the marble stairs just as Beatrice, my mother’s nurse, grabs the doorknob to the library.

“Is she awake?” I ask the middle-aged nurse.

“Yes, sir. She’s in her usual spot by the window in the library. We were just about to have lunch.”

“I’ll do it.”

She moves out of the way, and I go into the room in her place.

The space is big, with two walls filled from floor to ceiling with bookshelves, and another hosts a massive fireplace.

In front of the fireplace is a blue velvet chaise lounge.

A black leather sofa sits in the center of the room near the bookshelves with a Persian rug beneath them.

Above the fireplace is a portrait of a husband, wife, and their young son.

The family appears happy, but looks are more often than not deceiving.

This was my mother’s favorite room. If I think back far enough, I can picture her reclining on the chaise lounge with a book in her hand. She always had a smile on her face when she read, whether it was for her own personal enjoyment or when she read me stories at night as I drifted off to sleep.

I start across the room to the round table that sits in front of a big bay window. In one of the chairs sits a frail older woman, her glazed blue eyes staring at nothing out of the pane of glass.

Vivian. My mother.

“Hello, Mother,” I say, taking a seat on the other side of the small table.

She doesn’t respond. It’s been twenty years since I’ve heard my mother’s voice. It’s been just as long since she’s acknowledged my existence.

I pick up the spoon beside the bowl and scoop up some of the cioppino soup the cook made specifically for my mother. One of her favorite dishes. Or it used to be. I have no idea if it still is.

She opens her mouth when I lift the spoon to her lips, and her throat bobs when she swallows.

Eating is one of the rare occasions when my mother has any reactions to outside stimuli. She knows what food is and what her body is supposed to do when it’s put in her mouth. It’s an automatic, natural reaction, the doctors say. Like a newborn baby when he’s presented with his mother’s nipple.

I look into my mother’s blue eyes as I spoon up another bite.

They don’t flicker away from the colorful flowers that decorate the back garden.

My mother used to love tending to the flowers.

Every week, the table in the foyer hosts a new array of bright flowers in a clear crystal vase.

As a child, before my mother fell into this catatonic state, once a week, she would wake me at dawn and we would venture to the gardens to pick her favorites and place them in the vase.

I’ve kept the tradition going. Every Thursday at dawn, I go to the backyard and snip a bundle full for the foyer.

I always pick her favorites: yellow and purple.

At first, I kept doing it, hoping that if she saw them when she was wheeled past the table where they were placed, there would be some type of reaction from her. But she doesn’t even look at them.

The gardener offered to take over the task, but I’ve refused. It was what my mother and I did, and I’ll continue to do it on my own.

After a couple more bites, I grab the glass of freshly squeezed lemonade and bring the straw to her lips. They latch around the straw and her cheeks hollow as she sucks in several swallows. I place it back on the table and spoon up another bite of soup.

“How about a stroll in the garden today?” I ask my mother, not expecting a response. “The weather is perfect and the flowers are blooming nicely.”

I’ve had countless doctors assess my mother’s condition.

They all agree that there’s a good possibility that she can hear when someone speaks to her.

Most agree that she actually understands what’s being said.

Tests show normal brain activity, so they’re all stumped on why she’s in this state of mind.

I know the reason, and any time I’m in my mother’s presence and I’m reminded of her condition, my need to spill blood grows stronger. I want the person responsible in front of me so I can watch the life drain from his eyes as I filet the meat from his bones.

My father.

He did this to her. The night she was attacked was the same night he disappeared.

Doesn’t matter that he wasn’t the one to hurt her.

He was there, and he didn’t stop it. And he’s not here now to care for the wife he used to claim he loved with every beat of his heart.

I don’t know what the fuck happened that night, but he was a part of it, and because of that, I’ll rip his fucking heart out.

Literally.

I was only seven at the time, but I remember the day of the attack like it was yesterday.

My mother was her normal self. Breakfast with her and Father was fine.

They spoke of taking a trip to the mainland in a couple of months to visit my aunt and refurbishing the sunroom in the back of the estate.

After breakfast, Father kissed Mother on the lips, gazed into her eyes like she was the prettiest thing in the world to him, and left her and me in the library while he went to his office to tend to some business.

Mother and I stayed in the library for several hours.

She read me a couple of books before settling down on the chaise lounge and read her grown-up book.

I was content on the floor at her feet with toy trucks and plastic monsters.

Dinner was served that evening. The cook made pot roast. I can still smell the fragrance of the meat, potatoes, and seasoning.

I remember when I brushed my teeth before bed, and I had to take extra care with flossing my teeth because some of the meat was stuck between them.

Just like every other night, Mother and Father came to my bed and wished me a good night, telling me they loved me.

They had smiles on their faces when they left my room.

In the middle of the night, everything changed. The police were there, my father was missing, and my mother was found unconscious on the floor, her body beaten and bruised. And there was blood everywhere. No one knew who the blood belonged to, but they were guessing it was my father’s.

For a week, I stayed in the mansion with the household cook, Mrs. Myers, while my mother was in the hospital.

Then my aunt showed up, who was my only known living relative, aside from my mother.

I continue to spoon the soup to my mother until the bowl is empty.

Thirty minutes later, I’m pushing her wheelchair along a row of yellow forsythias and purple dahlias.

These two colors, along with blue, are the only colors allowed in the garden.

The yellow and purple because they’re her favorite, and the blue because it was what I liked when I was a boy.

I park her chair just before we get to the end of the row of flowers. Pulling out a pair of cutters from my back pocket, I pluck one of the purple dahlias, then turn to Mother. I weave the stem behind her ear, the color going well with her blonde hair.

“Beautiful,” I murmur, looking into my mother’s beautiful eyes. I swipe my thumb over her cheek. She doesn’t so much as twitch an eyelid at the touch.

I went through a period of years where I hated my mother for being like this.

I hated her with a passion born from a child who felt unloved and unprotected from the cruel happenings of life and unfathomable circumstances.

But I am who I am today because of those circumstances.

I’ve long since accepted who I became and the things I like.

There’s no use denying what you are or dwelling on what you can’t change.

I wheel my mother’s chair over to a bench that faces the garden.

I park it beside the concrete slab and take a seat.

Her head faces forward, but her unfocused eyes don’t see the multitude of yellow, purple, or blue flowers.

She doesn’t get the enjoyment she used to when we would come out here and sit for hours when I was a child.

The soft, briny breeze blows a few strands of hair in her face, and I gently brush them away, tucking them behind the flower in her ear.

I take my phone out of my pocket and pull up the program I’m looking for.

I tap on the thumbnail that shows me what I want to see.

It’s a live feed of Savina lying out by the pool at her friend Emersyn’s house.

I have cameras set up all over the island, including her friend’s property.

Anywhere Savina visits, I have eyes on her.

Emersyn and their other friend, Tomas, are on either side of her, but I only focus on the brunette.

She’s wearing a bright-yellow bikini that complements her tanned complexion and shows off too much of her gorgeous body.

Her thick, dark hair is twisted up into a loose knot on top of her head.

Sunglasses protect her eyes from the sun, and she’s holding a bottle of water.

Every Tuesday, from one to two in the afternoon, this is what she and her friends do. Savina does it to please Emersyn because Emersyn wants to fuck the pool boy. Or rather, the pool man.

Karter Sinclair is thirty-nine years old, owns his own pool cleaning company, has never been married, has no kids, is healthy, and owns a three-bedroom, two-bath house on the north end of the island.

He grills his steak medium rare, prefers baked potatoes over mashed, wears boxers instead of briefs, and has good stamina in bed, whether he’s fucking a woman or a man, in which he isn’t picky. And his blood type is AB negative.

I know all of this from the file I have on him. I have a filing cabinet full of dossiers. All of them belong to people who come in contact with my woman.

My eyes move to the man who’s occupying the lounge chair beside Savina.