Brothers of the Flame (An Ariel Kimber Novel Book 1) Read online

  She was very pretty but didn’t have the look of one of the Pretty Princesses in expensive designer clothes. Still, she was probably another would be tormentor. In my eyes, they all were.

  It was safe to say I had had a rough first day. It was also safe to say this might have been one of the worst days of my whole freaking life. Okay, so maybe not the worst, but it was definitely in the top five and quite possibly the most humiliating.

  Thankfully, nobody had sought to physically harm me after the dimpled jock tripped me in first period. Oh no, they’d tried to verbally nail me instead, only not directly to my face. The beautiful, blue eyed, blonde haired, football player had nicknamed me freak show and it made its rounds. Fast. It was whispered behind hands as I walked down the hallways. Some kids pointed at me and laughed when I was in the cafeteria getting lunch, but they hadn’t approached me. I grabbed an apple and a pop, paid for it and quickly got the heck out of there. I found empty picnic tables outside and I ate my apple there in silence. Mercifully I was left alone. People did more staring and whispering after lunch, but thankfully that was all they did.

  I’d had two more classes with that Tyson person. Both of which I had taken the empty seat either to the side of him or directly in front of him. And like first hour I felt his eyes boring into me the entire time. He didn’t say word one to me but I didn’t take offense because he didn’t speak to anyone else either. He was beyond weird, but then again, so was everyone else. At least he hadn’t been mean after the first encounter.

  I ignored the girl sitting next to me. She didn’t seem to care because she kept talking to me like she couldn’t feel the unfriendly vibes rolling off me that I sent her way. “It’s not just because you’re new. Mr. Cole is well liked in the community here and people think your mom is a gold digging whore,” she informed me on a whisper.

  My mother was a gold digging whore. That was part of her crazy-assed scheme. Hook up with some lonely, rich old dude and have him pay our way in the world (mostly her way, but mine until I legally became an adult, then she could wash her hands of me). To be fair to my mother, she met Mr. Cole on the internet and if she hadn’t sunk her sharp, greedy claws into him, someone else would have.

  His profile on the online dating site had said he was looking for a companion to spend the rest of his days with, and that said companion would be highly compensated and would be expected to perform minimal duties outside of pleasing him. Seriously, she’d shown me his profile and it had indeed said those things. He had four full grown children and his wife had died of a heart attack several years ago. He never stood a chance against my mother, but at the same time he’d kind of been asking for it.

  My mother was only good at doing a few things. Like, day time drinking (she seriously rocked day time drinking!), sucking men dry (sometimes literally, yikes), looking pretty, stripping (how we got by the majority of my life), and shoplifting (something I only knew she was good at because she’d boasted about how good at it she was). That was about it, though. She didn’t do manual labor, or any kind of labor. Unless sex counted as labor. Did sex count as labor? I didn’t know. She did men, and she did them well. Until they got sick of her, that is. Then they’d move on to the next easy piece and she’d do the same.

  My mother had seduced Mr. Cole over the phone, and then we were here. It hadn’t hurt that she’d sent him a ton of selfies where she wore the least of amount of clothing she could before it became indecent. It had taken her all of a week. During that week, she had me pack up our belongings because she’d been that confident in her skills and her good looks. He didn’t even mind that I was a part of her package. He got exactly what he wanted and gave my mother what she wanted in return. A win/win for the both of them.

  Still, I got why they were calling her a money grubbing whore because she was one. His kids had come over for a meet and greet and they had hated my mother right off the bat. Heck, they were probably the people who spread it around about my mother and me. Although, they hadn’t really seemed to take issue with me, just my mother.

  I didn’t deserve to have my mother’s behavior taken out on me in any way, and I hated where this conversation had turned to, not that I had even participated in the conversation thus far.

  My table mate leaned in closer to me and whispered, “It’s more than that, though.”

  More? There was more?

  And why in the heck did we have tables instead of desks? This was creative writing, not chemistry. I wanted a damn desk all to myself.

  I turned my head towards her and asked, “What else?” I couldn’t help myself. I should have stopped myself and held onto my silence.

  She eagerly shared, “You live next to Tyson.”

  Tyson? That wasn’t his last name? And… “No I don’t,” I told her. “The house next to ours is empty. Has been since we moved here.”

  “It’s been empty because Tyson’s been gone all summer. He moved here two years ago. Everybody wanted to be his friend and all the girls wanted to date him because he’s so stinkin’ hot. But in all this time he’s never dated anyone and he has zero friends to speak of. He doesn’t seem to want friends. He’s mean to people, like, really, really mean. He’d never stop in the hallway to pick up a paper someone else dropped after he ran into them. Heck, he’s so mean he’d probably spit on the person as they bent over to pick it up.” She shook her head with wide eyes. “He treated you different.”

  “Okay. But, who cares if he’s my neighbor? Or that he didn’t spit on me?” I asked her. Thank goodness he hadn’t spit on me. How utterly disgusting.

  “The girls are going to hate you,” she gushed, sounding like she found this to be a good thing. “Most of them already do. There are rumors flying around about you. Some say you’re just like your mom and you’re going to try to nail Tyson because he’s rich. Some say you already nailed him this summer and you guys have, like, a secret relationship going on or something. It’s all so exciting. Normally, this place is real boring. You’re not boring.”

  Her face was flushed, her eyes bright and animated. She looked like she did indeed find this all to be very exciting. I wanted to smack her upside the head.

  “Why are you talking to me?” I rudely asked her.

  She pursed her lips and shrugged. “Everybody needs a friend,” she told me.

  She was wrong. Not everybody needed a friend. I’d always been fine on my own.

  “Don’t you already have friends?”

  She looked away from me and bit her bottom lip.

  “Are you one of those girls who’s in love with him? You think you can get close to him through me because he and I are neighbors? Look, I don’t know him. We aren’t having a secret relationship. I’ve never even seen him before today and he most certainly wasn’t nice to me in the hallway.”

  She released her lip from between her teeth and looked back at me. “I don’t have friends,” she quietly informed me.

  I snorted in disbelief.

  She had to be lying. She was trying to play some type of trick on me or something. I turned around in my seat and looked through my classmates. Who I was looking for I had no clue, maybe Chucky or blondie, but they weren’t in this class.

  “Whatever this is, just leave me alone,” I told her harshly.

  Her eyes got big and a look of hurt crossed over her pretty face. “I’m trying to be nice to you,” she told me.

  I wasn’t so sure about that. Nobody had been nice to me the whole day and I did not trust this girl at all. I had no reason to trust her.

  “Right,” I muttered disbelievingly.

  “You know, you’re not very nice.”

  I wasn’t very nice? Who the hell was this girl kidding? Instead of responding I sat facing forward in my seat and ignored her.

  When I didn’t respond, she huffed out an irritated breath, flipped her blonde locks over her shoulder and started to pay attention to the movie that was playing on the tv the teacher had wheeled into the classroom when we’d first taken o
ur seats. Why we were watching a movie in a creative writing class on the first day of school baffled me, especially when the movie itself had not one thing to do with writing and everything to do with some famous, dead baseball player, I had no clue.

  Her ignoring me suited me just fine. Still, the rest of the hour seemed to drag on forever. The movie turned out to be terrible and I found myself disappointed because I had really been looking forward to the class. The teachers in this school were horrible.

  When the bell rang, I had the strap of my bag over my shoulder and I bolted for the door. I was the first person out the door. The hallway quickly filled up as I made my way to the exit. There were more kids in this school than I had originally thought.

  Thankfully, I didn’t have to take the bus so once I cleared the parking lot I wouldn’t have to be subjected to these horrid people until the next morning.

  Mr. Cole had given my mother a red, sporty convertible to drive around when we first arrived here. It was a lavish gift and my mother couldn’t have been more pleased with him. I don’t even want to know what she gifted him with in return. I was thrilled because it meant she gave me her old car. An old, army green Volkswagen Beetle. The Bug was rusted around the bottom and clearly had seen better days. I didn’t care about those superficial details. It ran good and gave me a sense of freedom that I desperately craved. I loved it.

  As I made it to my car in the parking lot a two-door, black Audi raced by me, Tyson behind the wheel. I fought back the urge to flip him the bird. With all the eyes, I knew were probably on me I didn’t dare raise my middle finger in the air. It would just give them another reason to gawk and point their fingers at me.

  I got in my own car and quickly, but safely, drove away from what had become my own personal hell.

  Chapter Three

  “How was your first day at the new school, honey? Did you make any friends yet?” My mother asked me as soon as I walked through the front door. Almost like she’d been sitting there waiting for me. This was for show. She didn’t want the big man of the house to know she could give a shit less about how my first day went. Or how I was. Or anything about me for that matter. He’d care about those things more than she did. She had one thing, and one thing only, that she cared about and that was herself. But hey, if pretending to give a crap about me kept her in fancy clothes, Grey Goose, a sporty, red convertible and she never had to work again ever, then she’d do it with ease.

  My mother was a real piece of work and I did not want to have a conversation with her. Not after the horrid day I’d had.

  “Fine,” I muttered, but said no more.

  “That’s good to hear, dear,” she cheerily called back, making it blatantly obvious she didn’t really care at all. If she had cared she would have been able to tell from my tone that I was devastated and most certainly not fine. Or, if she had bothered to even glance my way she would have seen it on my face.

  I looked at my mother. She was seated regally on a lounge chair, back ramrod straight, legs crossed at the ankles. Her ash blonde hair perfectly coiffed, she wore a sun dress that was so far from her usual tight clothes it wasn’t even funny. Even though we were inside she had an expensive looking pair of black heels on her feet. She’d never worn shoes when she was at home before we’d come here, she liked to be barefoot at home. She had a glass of dark, red wine in her right hand. She never drank wine. She hated wine. Always, she drank vodka on the rocks. Until coming here. Briefly, I wondered if she had to choke it down.

  I took all this in and I couldn’t help but resent her for the awful day I’d had. There she sat sipping on a glass of wine (at the moment I didn’t care if she hated it) looking like she’d had a relaxing day filled with lounging around the house in her expensive heels (even when I knew she liked to be barefoot around the house) when I had been through hell. And it was all her fault. Even if it wasn’t entirely her fault I planned on blaming here for it all the same.

  “How was your day, mother?” I couldn’t help but snidely ask. Not that I really cared about how her day had been.

  “Lovely, dear.” She murmured and took a healthy swig of her wine. “Just lovely. I’m so happy here. I think this is going to work out just swell for us. Don’t you think, honey?”

  Honey? Dear? She was laying it on a bit thick, if you asked me. She’d never referred to me by those endearments before coming here. Even when she had other men around to suck dry she’d never gone this route before. I’d always been ‘girl’ to her. She’d spill her drink and snap at me, “Clean this shit up, girl, and when you’re done you can make me a new one.” Heck, half the time it seemed like she didn’t even remember my name, the name she’d given me.

  I assumed Mr. Cole had something to do with this change. He seemed to genuinely love his children and they openly returned that love in spades. Which is partially why they hated my money grubbing mother on sight. He treated me with genuine warmth as well. Mommy Dearest wouldn’t want him to think badly of her, now would she?

  “Yes, mother.” I dutifully answered her. “I think we are going to be very happy here.” A partial lie because even though I might not find happiness here that wouldn’t stop her from finding it.

  “Yes, well…” she took a sip of her wine before she continued, “Go and do your homework or something.”

  I took this as her polite way of saying she’d done her motherly duty for the day, now I needed to get out of her sight and leave her in peace so she could pretend that I didn’t exist again.

  I took the hint and headed towards the kitchen. I was starving. That apple at lunch had not cut it for me and I’d been too nervous before school to eat anything for breakfast.

  The kitchen was very modern, probably cost a fortune and it was absurdly large. As was the rest of the house. A living room, a formal living room, a formal dining room with a massive table, six bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a media room. There was more but I hadn’t explored the whole house yet, and honestly, I had no desire to. I stuck to my bedroom, which was more a suite than a bedroom, and the kitchen. I’d been forced to use the dining room once and that was when we first got here and Mr. Cole’s family had showed up to inspect my mother and me. Otherwise, I usually ate by myself standing at the kitchen counter or I brought my food up to my room and ate it there. Either way I always ate by myself. My mother and Mr. Cole went out to dinner every night. I didn’t know if this was because he wanted to show her off on his arm as his young and pretty arm candy, or if it was because she couldn’t cook and didn’t want him to find out that particular tidbit about herself just yet so she convinced him to take her out every night. He’d invited me at first but she shot me warning looks every time that told me she would be pissed if I accepted so I turned him down every time. Eventually, he stopped inviting me. That worked just fine for me. I didn’t want him to think I was an ungrateful brat but I’d rather he thought that than have to spend any more time than absolutely necessary with the vile creature that was my mother.

  I made myself a turkey and cheese sandwich, grabbed a bag of Doritos along with a can of Coke and headed up to my room. Something as simple as having cupboards and a refrigerator filled with food most people took for granted, but not me. I was used to living off the bare minimum because my mother put things like cigarettes and vodka ahead of groceries. Before moving here, I could never come home from school hungry and make myself a sandwich, and we certainly hadn’t had things like chips and pop. I’d usually go hungry and end up eating Ramen for dinner hours later. A sandwich and a bag of Doritos was like living the high life for me.

  As I climbed the stairs to my bedroom I made sure to put up visual blinders. I didn’t want to take in the happy family photos that lined the walls at every turn. I had no business intruding on that happy family even in their memories. Frankly, I was surprised my mother hadn’t tried to convince Mr. Cole to take the pictures down. It probably wouldn’t be long before she had him in the palm of her hand and a decorator at her every whim and mercy.


  When I had my door closed shut and locked behind me I unceremoniously dropped my bag to the floor and kicked off my shoes.

  My room was spacious. I had a queen size sleigh bed, a huge step up from my twin mattress on the floor that I used to sleep on. My comforter was a really pretty light blue and decorated with large, red rose blossoms. My pillowcases the same. It was very girly and I adored it. The rest of the room was mostly barren. There was a tall dresser across the room from my bed and a window seat covered with decorative toss pillows. That was it for furniture and I had nothing on the walls. I’d shoved my meager belongings in the walk-in closet and that’s where they’d stayed. Even the damn dresser was mostly empty. The room was massive, with enough space for a couch and sitting area. I wished I had more furniture to fill it with.

  Mr. Cole told me he’d left it empty of furnishings so I could pick out what I liked. He’d also given me a brand new laptop upon arrival as a house warming gift. I loved it. My mother had given me the stink eye when he’d given it to me so I’d immediately tried to return it to him. He wouldn’t take it back and I’m almost certain he’d caught my mother’s stink eye but couldn’t be sure.

  I headed straight for the window seat, it was the best part about the whole room. The pillows were all in bright, girly colors and some of them even matched my bedspread. Mr. Cole had gotten them for me. I could sit there for hours and read or just gaze out at the sky and let my mind wander.

  I sat the plate with my sandwich on it next to me and ripped open the bag of Doritos with my teeth. Bad habit, I know. I took my first bite out of my sandwich as I gazed out the window.

  I almost choked.

  Tyson’s black Audi was pulling up the driveway of the house next door. The house that had been lacking its occupants since I’d arrived here. Apparently, my creative writing table mate had been telling the truth and he was my neighbor. Huh.

  I watched him park his car in front of the closed garage doors, get out and head inside through the front door.