Stolen Heir by Sophie Lark EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Sophie Lark
- Language: English
- Genre: Organized Crime Thrillers
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
MIKOLAJ WILK
WARSAW, POLAND
Ten Years Ago
On my way home from work, I stop and buy a bag of fresh
chrusciki for Anna. Little spots of grease seep through the paper
bag from the egg and cream pastries, dusted with powdered sugar
to suit their name of “Angel Wings.” She’s writing her university entrance
exams today. I already know we’ll have something to celebrate. Anna is
brilliant. I’m sure she’ll pass with top marks.
We may be twins, but you’d never guess it. She has brown hair, while
I’m blond as corn silk. She devours every book she can get her hands on,
while I left school at fourteen.
I didn’t have much choice about that. Someone had to pay the rent on
our dismal little flat.
Our father had a good job at the Huta Warszawa Steel Works. He was a
maintenance technician, bringing home a salary of almost six thousand
zloty a month. Enough to keep us all in new shoes with a full fridge.
Until he was cooked like a lobster in a pot while working on a blast
furnace. He isn’t dead. Just so badly burned that he can barely work the
buttons on the remote while he watches television all day long, holed up in
his room.
Our mother left. I heard she married an accountant and moved to
Krakow. I haven’t heard from her since.
It doesn’t matter. I make enough at the deli to keep us going for now.
Someday Anna will be a professor of literature. Then we’ll buy a little
house, somewhere other than here.
We’ve lived our whole lives in the Praga District, on the right bank of
the Vistula River. Across the water, you can see the prosperous centers of
business and finance. We live in a slum. Tall, rectangular, filthy brick
buildings blocking out the sun. Empty factories from the communist era,
when this was the center of state-run industry. Now their windows are
smashed and doors chained shut. Addicts break in to sleep on piles of rags,
injecting themselves with flesh-rotting Russian krokodil.
Anna and I will have a proper house with a garden, and nobody above
or below us, banging and shouting at all hours of the night.
I don’t expect my sister home for several hours, so when I open the door
to our flat and spot her school bag on the floor, I’m confused and surprised.
Anna is scrupulously tidy. She doesn’t dump her backpack on the floor,
letting the books spill out. Some of her textbooks are muddy and wet. The
same with her shoes, abandoned next to the bag.
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