Page 98 of The Harbinger
“You’re not my mother. I fucking hate you.”
Chapter 23
Sacha
Iheldhertomy chest, her limp arm dangling as I cradled her on the kitchen floor—the staff gathering around from the commotion.
“Ivan, get me a pillow.”
He darted out of the room without hesitation and returned with a plush yellow square from the couch in the living room I’d never sat on, then tucked it under her knees. I swiped her hair off her angelic face. The dark circles she’d arrived with were now gone.
“Dmitri, add the name Lexi to your search.”
He nodded and swiped out his phone.
Not even Inspector Andrei I’d used to gather intel on future deals could find this girl’s origins. She was a ghost, a specter, a wisp in the wind. It was a miracle we even had her name if it truly was Mia.
Tears pooled in the corners of her eyes as her brows pulled together, her lips moving like a silent film.
I pulled her tighter and leaned against the cupboards, her small frame shaking as though she’d fallen into icy waters, then caressed her chattering lips as if I could read them like Morse Code. Then her eyelids fluttered open, and her gray-blue eyes came to life, the whites now red with irritation.
“Sacha?”
Her chin quivered, and for a brief moment, we were alone with a softness in her gaze that cut straight to my core until Francesco tapped his utensil on the pot. She sucked in a breath through her nose and glanced around at the staff, her expression shifting to embarrassment as she sunk into me. My grip tightened around her, and my hand soothed her arm.
Her gaze came back to mine, her cheeks red as roses, and pulled away. Pure animus pulled her brows together, her lips pressed into a thin line, her teeth creating that vexatious grinding when she clenched them together.
Mia rolled out of my arms, and I let her as she stood and bolted out of the room, shoving Ivan out of her way. “He’s just like them,” she mumbled as she stormed outside.
What was that supposed to mean?
“Want me to go after her?” Ivan asked.
I shook my head and rose, brushing off my knees, and tracked her outside, waving off my men as I stepped into her garden, then stood at the fountain and watched her tantrum with a fixed compulsion.
Mia’s cries and grunts of ire writhed around her as she bent over her garden plot, her arms slinging back and forth as she grabbed flowers from the roots and tossed them to the side. Each new flower earned a cry of anguish.
“This is mine… when I…argh.Nothing.”
A high-pitched scream emanated after she gripped the rose bush and threw it toward the trees. Polka-dots of crimson tarnished her dirty palms as she held them to her sides, her chest heaving with her knees planted in the garden I’d watched her toil over while sitting at my desk in the city.
The birds ceased their calls, casting us in a silent world where only her misery could be heard through the whispers in the wind.
“Do you plan on ogling me all night?” She whirled around, tears staining her face and the pearl white pantsuit she wore, now caked with dirt.
“I have many plans for you. But that isn’t one of them.”
Staring was such a mundane action that any vapid creature could commit such an act. Study, analyze, and calculate. Now those were mental thought processes that separated what I’d done for the last five minutes from a horny teen looking through windows.
“Is that right? Care to share?” She stepped toward me, the heightened emotion still riding her like a parasite catching a full belly.
“I’d prefer to show you.”
Dirt caked under her nails, the blood doing little to help. She’d opened the cut on her hand and had created more from the thorns.
“Do your worst, Sacha. Nothing you can do to me will break me any more than I already am.”
“Giving up already,milaya?We haven’t even started.”