Page 7 of Cruel Legacy

Miss LaReaux? Nobody, other than the judge at my court hearing the day I got caught riding in a stolen car, has ever addressed me as Miss LaReaux. I’ve been called miss thang, miscreant, and amistake, but never Miss LaReaux. I’m uncomfortable with the formality and sound of it.

“Uh, you can call me Thea.” I say, following her into the house.

“I’m Cora.”

I give a cursory look at the room we’re traveling through. It’s some kind of bedroom, but it doesn’t look like anyone slept here last night. I follow her up a small flight of stairs and turn left down the hall that empties into the kitchen. It’s a stunning combination of white, black and chrome. Clean lines and angles and empty.

She’s starts pulling things from the pantry as I take a seat at the huge island counter in the middle of the room. The scraping of the stool must remind her I’m still here.

“Oh, Miss. You must be starving. I’m sorry I wasn’t up when you arrived. You can wait in the dining room, and I’ll have your breakfast brought out to you.”

I ignore the Miss part, and my stomach chooses this moment to growl. “A bowl of cereal sounds great, but I can eat it here.”

A voice behind me snaps, “You most certainly cannot eat it here.”

I roll my eyes so hard, I literally feel them bouncing around in my skull, before turning to look at Sourpuss. She looks just as dour and unpleasant this morning as she did last night. “Oh, you’re here.”

“Of course I’m here. I’m your uncle’s assistant.” She says as if she’s repeating it to me for the tenth time, when the truth is this is the first I’m hearing about it. Last night, she never actually introduced herself or told me what she does.

“Right.” I turn back to Cora. “Like I said, I’m fine eating cereal here. No sense going through all the trouble of bringing it to the dining room.”

“It’s no trouble at all,” Cora says. “Your aunt and uncle prefer a formal set-up.”

I arch my brow at her. “Well, they’re not here, and I prefer not to sit at a ridiculously huge table alone, when this counter is just fine.” I settle myself more comfortably on the stool.

Since Sourpuss is Uncle Scott’s assistant and seems to know so much, maybe she knows where my stuff is. I turn to face her. “Um, did my shipment arrive?”

Cora drops something on the counter when the stuffy witch says, “It did.”

“Cool.” I wave my hands around, indicating the walls and doorway she’s standing in. “Care to point out where in this big ole house I would go to find it?”

“You won’t find it anywhere in here.”

“Okay. Then where is it?”

“Closest landfill most likely,” she says, walking over to the coffee pot.

I rub my ear to make sure there’s no water in it. Nope, there isn’t, so I heard her correctly. “Excuse me?”

My voice bounces around the cavernous kitchen, sending it out in stereo. I fly off my chair and stalk towards her. “What the hell does that mean?”

I don’t have much in this life to call my own, but what I do have I packed up and sent here, trusting it would arrive and be waiting for me. Now she’s telling me they threw it out like garbage?

“That was my stuff. What gave you the right to throw it out?”

“What in god’s name is going on in here?”

I spin around, coming face to face with my relatives for the first time. They look more uptight in person than they do in their pictures, but they’ve got impeccable timing.Today. The rest of their timing was bullshit, since they were about ten years too late for showing up to make a difference in my life.

“What’s going on is your assistant was just telling me she threw my stuff in the trash.” I glare at her before turning back to them. “You told me I was welcome here, and this move wasn’t meant to disrupt my life. But somehow, I don’t have my clothes or any of the things from my old life. Everything I owned was on the moving van and now it’s just gone!”

My aunt looks at her husband, before taking a tentative step towards me. She looks freaked out. I get it. You open your door to someone and your first interaction is her going off. But they had no right to trash my stuff.

“Theona, I’m sure it’s all a big misunderstanding.”

“I understood the wordslandfilljust fine.”

She looks at her husband again, before saying, “Ms. Mercer has a unique sense of humor. We had the crate with your things put in storage and the unit sustained some water damage.”

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