EVIL QUEEN - Rebel Hart Page 0,88

morning with Nikita gave me was gone by the time I stood in front of my parents’ house on our property. I’d made a handful of absolutely necessary trips in for no more than a couple of minutes over the course of the last six months, but I hadn’t gone in with the intention of changing or moving anything. It’d been the subject of conversation in my therapy sessions as of late since I realized I’d been avoiding going in. Did I think they were suddenly going to come back somehow? Did I think my mom wasn’t going to be dead, that my dad wasn’t going to be a psychotic murderer?

But I had a new plan in mind now. Something that was going to take the house of horror and turn it into a place of warmth and love. There were people in my life who meant the world to me, and I wanted the main house to be a tribute to that fact. So I stepped up to the front door, ignoring the shake of my hands as I set the key in the lock, and finally stepped through the door for the first time in over six months.

It was dusty and dank inside, which was to be expected. The overwhelming smell of cleaning products still dominated the space, likely because with no windows or doors opened, the ones that had been used to clean the carpet after my mother’s murder hadn’t had a chance to properly ventilate. It was weird, almost like I’d expected the place to have changed somehow, but the living room was still pristine and untouched—a place I was never allowed to go as a kid. The kitchen still had pans stacked on the oven, likely prepared for a new day’s meal before I fired the chef.

I spent about thirty minutes walking around the house. When it was my home, before my parents had my own house built on the land, there were several rooms that I was never allowed into. One was my parents’ plush, well-appointed bedroom on the third floor, complete with a gaudy four-poster bed. Another was my dad’s office, with its stacks of papers and the only thing he ever truly loved—his work.

Then there was my mom’s studio.

A lot of my memory of my childhood was filled with her disappearing into the room for hours on end, doing god knew what. I always thought that she was doing something untoward inside, but when I walked in, I was presented with some of the most beautiful paintings I’d ever seen. There was even a painting that looked like she was trying to paint me from memory, but it looked much more beautiful than I felt like I looked. I loved my mom a lot, but thanks to my dad’s oppressive reign over me, we were not allowed to bond the way any mother and son should. People thought she was evil, but she was just another of Connor Loche’s victims, hanging on by a thread.

As I looked over the collection of stunning pieces, tears slowly started to slide down my cheeks. Everyone kept telling me that it was strange that I hadn’t seemed to have mourned my mother, but the feelings never really hit me. It didn’t feel like she died, more like she’d gone on vacation, and she’d come home one day.

She wasn’t coming home.

For all her talent, the only mark she left on the world was the nasty reputation she earned as an extension of my father. She didn’t deserve that. Over the course of the next hour or so, I collected all of the paintings in the studio. She had a closet in the back of the studio with hundreds of paintings in it, all various paintings of landscapes, people, and close-ups of objects. There was enough to fill an entire gallery, which was what they’d do.

I kept the painting of myself. It felt a little too narcissistic to hang it up anywhere, but if my mom saw me in that beautiful light, I couldn’t just sell it or give it away. I selected an additional ten or so paintings to hang around the house, and the rest I stacked to be wrapped. I’d commission a gallery somewhere and get my mom the notoriety she deserved, even if even post-mortem.

Wiping my eyes and wishing that I had kept Nikita with me, I finished my tour of the house, taking stock of all the rooms. Then I went back down