Page 37 of The Dark Side

"Has been notified, and a substitute teacher has already been selected to take your place on Monday. Plus, there was a donation of five thousand dollars for the kids to have free breakfast and lunch."

She stood there, lost in space.

Edik grabbed the doorknob and shut the door for her.

Jolie turned around and sat at the table. She couldn't understand how Adrik had such power. It could be seen as magic if she didn't know that beneath the mystery and the awe, there was blood and bodies.

When the movers arrived, she was getting dressed. Edik was nice enough to open the door and let them in, and she screeched as she ran to the bathroom.

"Sorry." His muffled Russian voice came through the door. "I am not used to houses with no rooms."

She glared at him through the wood, feeling the insult in his backhanded apology.

Jolie tried to help pack, but anytime she reached for anything, someone took it out of her hands. They divided her stuff into necessities and things that would be stored. The workers were primarily teenagers, young boys with tattoos on their arms. A warden was among them, keeping them moving, shouting Russian words with gusto.

The older man pointed to her collection of stuffed animals. "I know an orphanage that would appreciate these."

The sentence seemed rehearsed, like Adrik had talked to him. Of course, she couldn't say no to an orphanage. She grabbed two from the pile of thirty: a panda her mother had given her as a little girl and a graduation dog her stepdad got her when she made it through college. Also in her arm was a frame of her parents, her, and Princess Cinderella at Disney World for her tenth birthday. They had saved for years to take her. She dressed up as a princess every Halloween till she was thirteen. And then, she turned to saving the planet and was a recycling bin for the following years.

Jolie turned back to her empty apartment. It hadn't meant much to her, since she hadn't had time to fall in love with it. Her neighbors were too loud, and the elevators were permanently broken. Homeless people hung out by the front entrance, asking for change.

But it had been a gateway to a new life.

Now, she was stepping foot into a whole new world that she didn't want to be a part of.

So, why am I excited?

Chapter fourteen

The Castle

"Idon'tlikethisone bit," Jolie's mother reported from the cell phone speaker. Jolie kept the phone on her lap so she could pick at her nails. It had been a habit she broke back in high school, and for a while, she had manicured fingers that she was proud of, but now, she searched for ways to rip the nail, if only to distract her from her thoughts.

"It will be fine," Jolie vaguely responded, with absolutely no conviction behind those words.

"You had an interview yesterday, and now you're moving in with him. Did you even google him? What's his full name?"

Jolie winced and skirted around the request. "I googled him already. It's real."

"And how do you know they will live up to their side of the bargain? A six-figure salary is nice if it's real. You know people scam."

"It's not a scam."

"It sounds like a scam. What are their jobs that they can afford a full-time, live-in tutor?"

"Mom, rich people do this all the time. This isn't some out-of-this-world idea."

"What do they do?"

Kill people?Jolie struggled with a response. Lies weren't easy to make, especially toward her mother. "Finance."

Her mother mumbled to her stepfather for a minute, and their bickering became annoying. Then she returned to the phone. "Your father wants you to sign a contract with a notary. And we want a copy."

Just to get them off her back, she replied, "Sure."

The car turned into a driveway, and her attention deviated. She pressed her face against the window as the single road traveled up between palm trees and beautiful red and white crape myrtles. "I think I'm here," she whispered.

"What's the address? We'll look it up on Google Maps."