Where Orchids Burn

ADELINA

There are two doors on the ground floor of this house and neither of them is locked.

That is the arrangement. There is no demand, no money, no term, and nothing my husband can do, sign, pay or kill that gets me off this hill. I can walk out of that door in the next four minutes.

And I have not.

I am twenty-three years old. I cook for the house that took me. I have a woman of sixty-five who tells me everything she is not supposed to and a man in a green jumper who plays chess badly and has never once raised his voice.

He has not asked me for a single thing in ninety days.

That is what nobody tells you. A man who shouts wants something, and a man who wants something can be refused.

There is a plastic stick in the bottom of a taped wardrobe upstairs.

And the second anybody in this house finds it, the price of me changes.

SALVATORE

A hundred and forty feet of drive, uphill the whole way, and I let her walk up it.

I have spent eighteen years being the arithmetic in this city. I carried four families on an oath I swore at seventeen on a cellar floor, and I have never once been wrong about what a thing costs.

Then a boy of nine carried eleven words down a hill to me.

Tell the Shark his mother said yes as well.

I cannot read it. And the only person alive who can is at the top of that hill.

I have ninety-one men, every dollar I own, and eighteen years of favours owed to me by four hundred and eleven people in this city.

And it is going to turn out that not one of them is worth anything.

They can have the table. They can have the name.

I am going up that drive in daylight, on my own, with nothing in my hands.

This is the third book in The Devil's Garden Series. Reading order:

Where Roses Bleed.

Where Lilies Die.

Where Orchids Burn.

332 pages. Kindle edition.