Page 1 of In Her Blood
Prologue
History Lesson
Evelina pushed up hersleeves before reaching out to brush yet more dust off yet another old, forgotten box in the attic. She was entirely sure the attic itself had been forgotten in the years since she and her mother had been sent to live in the old rowhouse. But that was a straight-shot to a rant for another time, so she shoved the thought down and held her breath as dust pillowed into the air, thick and cloying. Thelightweight mask over her mouth and nose did little to help keep her from feeling the immediate tickle that followed in the back of her throat.
“I could do this for you,” Otto offered, his voice quiet and obnoxiously unagitated somewhere behind her.
Evelina didn’t spare him a glance, only swept harder. “No. I’m doing it. You don’t even need to be up here with me.”
She almost missed his sigh over her poorly covered cough.
Nothing else was said as she dusted off and slowly rummaged through the old boxes in an effort to determine whether or not the contents within were things that needed keeping. Clear items of value could be re-sold or cleaned up and put to use, but she didn’t expect to find those. Her father wouldn’t have allowed her mother to hide such things away. Items of potential value would be harder to discern.
Fabrics were moth-eaten and worn down from poor storage. Other things, like an old dish set, proved to retain the faintest imprint of newspaper print that seemed to have melted into the surface. There was an also-worn upholstered chair she thought she could possibly sell to an antique shop if she were lucky. Chicago had its share of those.
Evelina sighed, sitting back on her haunches to wipe her brow, and spied what looked to be a pair of shoeboxes tucked behind a larger packing box. The packing box was labeledbooks, and a glance inside had confirmed as much, but the shoeboxes were different. They almost looked … hidden. She scowled. “Otto, make yourself useful and move this heavy box for me.”
She didn’t need to address him by name. He was the only one up there with her. He was always the only one with her.
Otto made a low sound of acknowledgment and moved forward, swiftly cutting across the space between them and taking hold of the labeled box. “Keep or dump?”
Evelina felt her scowl deepen. “Mamma’s not gone yet, don’t be a dick.” She motioned to the makeshift donate section—where most of the boxes had been repositioned.
He lifted the book box and turned accordingly. “Used bookstores are hard to come by these days is all. If you’re serious about cleanin’ out this stuff, you actually have to get rid of some, Lina.”
She glared at his back. “What part of bodyguarding requires your opinion? Right now, I’m categorizing, if you must know. Now go back to shutting up.” She turned her attention away from him before he could aim any kind of frown at her.
In her right mind, Evelina was well aware it wasn’t Otto she was angry with this time. Although he was excellent at drawing her ire with only a few words—always had been. But currently, she was just angry. Period. It was a near-permanent state and a direct result of watching her mother deteriorate before her eyes.
Annetta Nikolaev had less than a month left, by the doctor’s estimate.
Then Evelina would be alone, biologically, with her father and her boor of a cousin. And while she knew she couldn’t blame cancer on other people, there was an irrational part of her that very much wanted to blame both of those males. Her uncle, too, though at least that bastard had taken a bullet acouple of years previously and was already paying his dues in the afterlife.
Evelina blew out a breath and reached for the nearest shoebox. This was not the time for those reflections. This was perhaps the last chance she was going to get to personally handle her mother’s affairs before her father, overbearing asshole that he was, bulldozed everything. Possibly literally.
Pictures?Her fingers skimmed over the top of old, laminated photographs that lined the narrow box. Some looked more like the instant polaroid type she’d only seen in movies, and several were stacked face-up instead of neatly in line. But there was no doubt, this was a box full of old pictures.
She lifted the face-up stack to thumb through them. It only took a moment to recognize her mother, younger, and a few seconds later she realized the other vaguely familiar face was her late grandfather—her mother’s father. He was also younger, of course. They posed in front of signs as if marking a journey. Some looked to be from a vacation, in a forest, where Nonno held a hunting rifle with a proud smile. As she went through the stack, her mother got younger and younger, progressing magically backward into or through her teenage years.
She was so lost in the surreal, oddly nostalgic pain unexpectedly and remorselessly burning through her chest that the final picture in the stack jarred her like a splash of cold water. It was entirely different, as it was of no one. It was a sign, blurred and off-center but not ineligible. It was a New Jersey state limit sign.
New Jersey?Evelina didn’t think she’d ever known her family to have history there. But then, she did know her grandfatherhad immigrated to America as a teen. It wasn’t impossible he’d have traversed that area in his younger years. Just like she knew her mother hadn’t moved to the Chicago region until she’d become a Nikolaev.
Her gut souring, Evelina set down those photos and reached to grab some more. She wouldn’t go through all of them, but she was curious if the standing ones were newer or older. Maybe she’d take the whole box downstairs with her and see if Mamma was up for some reminiscing.
She was unprepared to find herself staring at a young girl who she was pretty sure was her mother, but younger than any picture she’d seen, standing beside another girl with eerily similar features. Both wore pretty dresses, their hair even similarly done. The truest differences were their visible ages. Her mother—or who Evelina assumed to be her mother—hadto be prepubescent. The other girl looked to be in her late teens.
Was this … was this some distant relative?
No. Deceased, maybe. Probably.And probably on her grandmother’s side. She’d never even met her grandmother, after all, because her grandmother had died when Mamma was young.
Evelina moved to set the photo aside when she caught sight of something on the back. Writing. Something like anticipation twisted her chest, but she flipped the photo around and forced her eyes over the painfully familiar lettering.
Eleonora’s engagement party
That was it, that was all her mother’s note said.
Evelina flipped it over again, her throat constricting. She stared at the printed date, doing quick mental math and trying not to jump to weird conclusions. She’d never heard the nameEleonora before. But this photo had been set so carefully inside the box, it felt significant. And her mother clearly expected she would need no prompting to recall who Eleonora was, so she couldn’t have been a passing friend.
