Page 6 of Devil's Retribution

“Can I have a hundred little ones?” He gave me the puppy eyes. Oh boy.

“How about ten little ones? That’s what you had last time. And we’re having fruit and yogurt too.” Nick was growing so fast it was ridiculous, it felt like I was buying him new clothes and shoes every few months.

“Okay!” He hopped up onto his seat at our blond wood breakfast table, squinting a little in a sunbeam coming through the windows. “The rain went away. Can we go to the park?”

“After I pick you up from kindergarten, sure.” I had gone back and forth with Uncle Charles about putting Nick in a regular school, even a nice one. He had tried to insist on a nanny and private tutors, but I wanted Nick out there making friends and doing normal kid things. He had already lost so much already, he didn’t need to miss out on that too. Isolated rich kids were almost always the most badly adjusted, along with traumatized kids. I didn’t want Nick to be both.

I made little stacks of silver-dollar pancakes for him and for myself. Breakfast and dinner were my only chances to have a sit-down meal with him on weekdays, and I always tried to make it a little special. Besides Uncle Charles, I was all Nick had now, so everything was up to me. His health, his happiness, his safety.

“So can I play Minecraft when we get back from the park?” His voice was high with excitement at the prospect. He loved to build anything, both in the game and with the model sets I got him. Just simple ones now for his little fingers, but he was improving fast.

“Sure, kiddo. You can play while I’m making dinner. Maybe a little after. But we still need to work on your reading tonight, so not all night.”

Negotiating with a five-year-old was its own unique skill. I was just glad that I’d had some experience before ending up with my own to raise. I had seen too many kids hurt by their parents’ and guardians’ mistakes, even some well-intentioned ones. One of my greatest fears these days was messing up myself, but I was starting to gain more confidence.

I brought the food over to the table after turning off the burner and leaving the griddle to cool before I cleaned it. My mind kept jumping ahead to my day’s schedule, which patients I had, how much paperwork was due and to whom, and what errands I could squeeze in on my lunch break. It was going to be a tough day—but the life I led was exactly what I had signed up for, so I could hardly complain.

“And here are your pancakes,” I said as I set down the plate with the small pancakes in two stacks on them.

He set to work at once, layering them with sloppy scoops of yogurt and fruit in little towers, like an architect’s idea of a parfait. He then made one of the towers disappear much faster than he’d built it. “Yum,” he declared, and went back to work.

This kid is either going to be a master chef or build skyscrapers. I hadn’t ever met a kid who liked order as much as this one. His room wasn’t immaculate, but the little guy tried. I knew it was a way of coping, and he’d relaxed on it a little in the last year, but even when he was feeling better, it was a good habit to have.

And one I didn’t have. The top of my desk in my home office was a disaster, even if the spaces I shared with Nick were tidy. I lost my car keys, or the remote, or left a book I was reading in some weird place when I got distracted by something.

I had spent most of my life being trailed around by nannies and maids at Uncle Charles’s sprawling penthouse and had gone from that to living on my own, and then looking after Nick. Only once I was responsible for cleaning up my own mess had I realized just how terrible I was at it. I was a lot better than I had been in college, but as I looked at the relative chaos on my own plate, I knew I was being outmatched by a five-year-old.

Now that will keep you humble. I thought to myself.

“How come we never go to the park after dark?” Nick asked me suddenly, catching my attention.

“The park closes at sunset, honey.” And with good reason. The local park was maybe five years old, with a large play structure, swings, and a small dog park—which was what always drew Nick the most.

“Yes, but why do they close it?”

“They decided to do that because it’s not as safe there after dark.” I softballed the truth, but I gave it to them. “People can’t see to play safely, and sometimes there are crimes.”

“They could put big lights in,” he said, surprising me. “Then bad people couldn’t hide, and kids could see.”

I wasn’t sure how to explain to him that the Parks Department budgets had been cut multiple times in the last five years, How his idea would work, but still would probably never actually happen. And even if it did, these days, nowhere was entirely safe, even with bright lights and cameras. Unless you were Uncle Charles in his guarded tower, of course.

“It’s a good idea. It really is.” I smiled at him. “Maybe you’ll design a park someday, where kids can go and be safer.” And knowing Los Angeles, and how bold the local criminals were getting, that place would probably need armed guards.

My uncle thought I was crazy, moving away from his castle in the sky to my own home, to work and earn my own money. He thought I worked too hard, and unnecessarily. I had my trust fund to live off. I could have retired at any time, stayed nestled in the lap of luxury, where nothing took any effort and we mixed constantly with the kind of people he thought were beneath us.

Uncle Charles was a dinosaur, and overprotective. I’d made my peace with it. As I finished breakfast and brought Nick a little more yogurt, I wondered what kinds of experiences had led him to become quite so cloistered and paranoid, and to want the same for me. Maybe I would never know. My uncle wasn’t the talkative or the emotional type. He had been there for me constantly after my parents’ deaths, and I owed him a lot. But sometimes I really wondered what was going on in his head.

I was cleaning up from breakfast and planning the day’s wardrobe when a sudden chill touched the back of my neck. The hairs there prickled. I looked around instinctively, eyes flicking first around the room and then to each of the windows in the bright kitchen.

Someone is watching me. The feeling hit me right in the gut, an instinct with no evidence, as I nervously looked everywhere I could think of. The hill above our house. The trees across the street. The van with darkened windows parked in their shade. The sedan driving by.

What was this feeling?

I was no stranger to fear. Some patients got violent—even adults. Some misfortunes could hit out of nowhere—like car crashes. But I wasn’t used to this.

I found myself trembling as I went around checking doors and windows, making sure they were all locked. It could have been nothing. Just my imagination getting stirred up. But it had happened absolutely out of nowhere, and that made no sense at all.’ I hurriedly finished up with the dishes and went to hop in the shower.

I didn’t quite relax again until we were in my royal blue Volvo and safely underway. Even then, I kept an eye out for anything strange as we headed for Briarcrest Day School. I had learned early that no one was ever truly safe. That was just an illusion we convinced ourselves of to keep from being afraid.