House of V (Unraveled Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

picture of what a normal couple looked like in
public. Laughing, smiling. I just wasn’t there yet, and I didn’t know if I
would ever be there.
    I would always be watching and
waiting for something or someone to come after me. I think that’s what happens
when you’ve murdered more than one person; their demons come back to haunt you.
I wondered how Holston controlled the demons surrounding him, and I realized
that he didn’t. He simply had too many voices and shadows to count so he merely
screamed along with them. Holston Parker screamed in blood.
    A shiver ran through my body.
    “Just a drink.” Ryan shut the door with a loud bang.
    Instantly, my mantra pulsed through
my head. I closed my eyes and counted, one,
two, three, four, five . Instead of the usual
calmness it brought me, I began to pant as I thought of Sister Josephine. She
was the one that had given me the technique of self-preservation. I was young
then, maybe six or seven when she had taught me to count to five to stay calm.
I didn’t remember much of that night other than being cradled in her arms on
her bed after she had washed off my red soaked hands. Food coloring, she had
said with a forced smile. I remembered believing her; at that age, most
children would. I could only marvel at how many lies I had been fed in my
twenty-eight years.
    She had smoothed out my hair as she
taught me the counting trick in her bathroom. “When you count, Evie , you are bringing yourself back into your own body,”
she had said. I had no idea what she meant, but it had felt good. Everything
about Sister Josephine had always felt good. She had held me in her arms all
night until Holston had picked me up in the morning.
    I wondered who he killed that
night. And I wondered if Sister Josephine knew.
    My eyes flashed open, and my boots
were suddenly hitting the pavement of the bar’s parking lot. We were headed to
the Basementlofoten in Leknes .
I was out. I was here. I could still breathe. I felt my knife tucked against my
thigh, beneath my tight skirt, as I pulled my black leather jacket against my
chest. This was easy. Getting a beer at a bar in a small town with a population
just over ten thousand would be uncomplicated. I was thousands of miles away
from my past.
    I stepped through the wooden door
of the bar into darkness and followed Ryan down the handful of stairs that led
to the open space. The music thumped to an electronic beat pulsed by a DJ at a
turntable. Small puffs of smoke wafted through the air as neon lights flickered
through the small crowd of people dancing.
    Ryan’s hand reached back toward me,
fumbling until it found mine. I followed him to the bar, hand-in-hand like any
normal couple, and we sunk onto two stools next to each other. The last bar I
visited was Angel’s, half-way across the world. It felt like a lifetime ago.
This joint with its mirrored walls and neon lights looked nothing like Angel’s
‘70s diner turned rustic bar. This was a club.
    The bartender turned to us; a bald
man with a prickly beard and thick sleeves of tattoos along both his arms. I
closed my eyes, shaking the vision of Ethan out of my head. Delaney’s emails
were flooding me with all the memories I was trying to forget. I opened my eyes
to see the bartender leaning over me with a grin. All I could smell was cheap
cologne.
    God, I hated cheap cologne. It
reminded me of Dave Williams, the CFO at Parker Enterprises back when I was
there. He was beyond guilty of wearing the cheapest, most offensive smelling
cologne on the market. And despite having a ridiculous salary for the work he
did, Dave Williams would only spring ten dollars for a bottle of that horrible
crap.
    I pushed Dave Williams out of my
head and kept my eyes on the bartender. I forced a small smile as Ryan ordered
and nodded my head in agreement; enough to be unnoticeable.
    Two bottles slid across the bar as
I watched the crowd pulse and sway to the beats, raising and pumping their
fists and drinks in the