EDEN (Eden series Book 2)
Read EDEN (Eden series Book 2) Online
Authors: Georgia Le Carre
ALSO BY GEORGIA
The Billionaire Banker Series
Owned
42 Days
Besotted
Seduce Me
Love’s Sacrifice
Masquerade
Pretty Wicked
(Novella)
Disfigured Love
Eden
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EDEN
Book 2
Published by Georgia Le Carre
Copyright © 2015 by Georgia Le Carre
The right of Georgia Le Carre to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the copyright, designs and patent act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN:
978-1-910575-03-1
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O Mother, I have made a bird of prey my lover,
When I give him bits of bread he doesn’t eat,
So I feed him with the flesh of my heart.
—Shiv Kumar Batalvi
Contents
ONE
Lily ‘Hart’ Strom
If I should die before you, cremate my body and commit my ashes to the ocean.
—
A note from Luke Strom to his sister
A
month after my brother’s remains were brought home in an earthenware urn, my father and I—my mother was still too distraught—took the container out to sea.
I remember that day well.
The sky was cloudy, the light tinged with pink. Windless. At the pier the driver of the chartered boat held out his hand, weathered to leather, to help us in. My father and I sat side by side on plastic cushions. I jammed my hands into the pockets of my wind jacket and my father lovingly cradled the urn. Neither of us spoke. The motor began and we sliced cleanly through the water, the cold salty morning air buffeting us, flattening our clothes against our bodies, and tearing at our hair.
When we were three nautical miles out, the driver cut the engine, and the boat began to gently drift. For a few seconds the air held only the sounds of water lapping against the sides of the boat and the whispered creak of wood as my father and I moved toward the rail. The sea was a gray blank, quiet, waiting. Like a cemetery.
I stood beside him while he opened the mouth of the urn and undid the knot of the plastic bag inside. We each took a handful of the pale gray ash. One last touch.
‘Oh, Luke,’ I whispered brokenly, unable to reconcile that handful of
dust
with the living breathing being I had loved so dearly.
When we were young we had been like Siamese twins, sharing one heart. Inseparable.
Without warning, it began to drizzle. I raised my eyes at the sky in surprise. Was it a sign? A final goodbye? Luke had always loved the rain. When he was young he used to cartwheel in it. Laughing, happy Luke. But the arms of my memories were cold. He was too young and sweet to die.
I began to cry.
Thousands of water droplets struck me and mingled with my silent tears as I stood perfectly still, fist stretched over the railing. I was aware of my father opening his hand, and the cloud of ashes pouring from it. As if that was not enough of a magic trick, he took the plastic bag out of the urn, and upended its contents into the sea. I watched Luke blossom in the water, temporarily disarmed by the gentle beauty of his new form. Finally I understood why they call incinerated bones white flowers in India.
My father turned to me.
I swallowed hard. I had no magic tricks up my sleeve. I had nothing.
Gently he nudged my arm. ‘Let him go, Lily,’ he urged, his voice lowered and solemn.
I looked up at him blankly. His blond eyelashes were wet with rain or tears or both, and in the milky light his eyes seemed paler than I had ever seen them. I noticed the deepening lines that fanned out from the corners of his eyes. Poor Dad. Somehow life had defeated him, too. I felt the first flash of helpless anger then.
With his left hand he wiped the damp strands of hair away from my cold cheeks. ‘It will be OK,’ he promised. He had no idea how hollow he sounded. His eyes flicked down meaningfully to my hand.
I nodded in agreement. Of course, it was what Luke wanted. And yet I could not open my fist. The drizzle became a freezing steady rain that plastered my hair to my head, and ran down my neck into my clothes, making me shiver. I could hear my father’s voice in the background, like a distant buzz, pleading with me, but still I would not let my brother go. I could not. My hand was red and frozen tight.
Finally, my father pried his fingers into my tightly clenched fist and forced my hand open. Numb with horror, I watched the rain turn the ash into gray mud on my palm and wash Luke away forever.
On our way back the clouds opened to reveal a sky as brilliantly blue as my brother’s eyes had been. So blue you could have wept.
I did.
TWO
I
fell apart after that. No one could understand how painful it was for me. No one.
They had
absolutely
no idea about the sharp teeth of guilt tearing at my insides, or the inescapable sorrow that wound itself around my heart like a thickly muscled anaconda tightening its hold every time I exhaled.
I had not been there for him.
My dreams became footsteps that kept taking me back to his killing ground. In my dreams I stood at his window, pale, limp, my hair waving like seaweed in water, and watched him push the needle into his arm. I was the witness. I was there to see the stair I had missed in the darkness.
I woke up in a trembling fury.
Rage at everyone. No one was immune from it. Especially me.
I sprang to the floor and like a caged animal paced my bedroom restlessly for hours at a time.
That last sniff of him—his perfume after the cells of his body had stopped replicating and replacing themselves—the bouquet of raw meat became a friend. Calling. Calling. Dangerously seductive. My existence had become hellish. I wanted to escape. That day on the boat I had seen Luke become the ocean, the rain, the wind and the blue sky. I wanted all of that and Luke within me, too.
The otherworld… I nearly went.
After one failed attempt, while my mother looked at me with shocked, reproachful eyes, my despairing father who is a doctor quietly persuaded me to consider a temporary treatment of antidepressants.
‘No one outside this family need ever know,’ he said, the terrible guilt of not being able to save Luke skulking in his eyes.
I took the wretched things he gave me. They did the job. They banished my intolerable grief, but
I lived in limbo, speaking only when spoken to, eating when food was put before me. And I think I might have been content to exist in that walking dream, on that cloud of dull edges forever, if not for the visit to the toxicologist.
It gave me a fresh pain. It woke me up.
Mr. Fyfield was small, assiduous, clean-cut, well groomed. He opened my brother’s file as if that was the most important thing he had to do that day and in a funeral director’s voice proceeded to explain some of the details contained within. I listened to his voice drift around the room idly until one sentence sent blood rushing up into my brain, so fast I felt it slam into my head.
Whoa! I opened my mouth and made an odd choking noise.
Both my parents turned to stare at me in surprise.
‘But Luke died of an overdose,’ I blurted out. My voice was unnatural, guttural.
Mr. Fyfield spared me an oddly sterile glance before returning his eyes to my parents. ‘
He overdosed because the heroin he consumed was spiked with acetyl fentanyl. Fentanyl is an opiate analgesic with no recognized medical use. It is typically prescribed to cancer patients as a last resort. It is five to fifteen times stronger than heroin and ten to one hundred times stronger than morphine.’