Total pages in book: 158
Estimated words: 145803 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145803 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
Vienna wished she could read him, but there was little inflection in his voice. He might have been telling her about another child—not a toddler—finding his way on his own in a city. He fell silent, continuing to knead up her calves.
“You can’t stop there. I know you have a good education. How did you manage to go to the schools you went to?”
“The bakery. I learned by watching how to make bread and listening to people talk. I heard them reading. That was easy enough. Math was extremely easy for me. I could pick up languages. So many different people came into the bakery, and all of them spoke different languages. I stole clothes and then books. I knew the neighborhood like the back of my hand. I found out about school at a very early age and I snuck in and sat in on classes. I liked when the teachers read to everyone, but it was frustrating to me, so eventually I borrowed the books every night until I could read them all myself.”
“Weren’t you ever caught?”
A ghost of a smile touched his eyes. “Yeah, a few times. I had to bring papers home to my ‘parents.’ This sweet old lady owned the bakery. She knew I was hanging around by that time, and I helped out by dumping the garbage and doing odd jobs. I took the papers to her, didn’t say a word. I think the first time, I was so little I didn’t even come up to the top of the counter. I just pushed the papers up to her, didn’t say a thing. She filled them out and pushed them back to me. I gave them to the teacher. I had no idea what they said at that time.”
Vienna found herself a little shocked that the woman would fill out parental papers for a child she knew was living on the streets rather than report him to child services. “Why didn’t she turn you in?”
“I would have run. She knew that already. We ended up having a loose relationship. I was more like a wild animal at first, and she was gruff. Had no kids of her own. I lived in the basement in a small room there and she pretended she didn’t know. She bought me clothes and I pretended I didn’t know, although I wore them.”
“Did you continue to go to school?”
He nodded. “I learned at a very fast rate, and I needed to learn. I discovered the library and computers, which gave me access to the internet. That opened up a new world of learning to me. I excelled in math and languages and jumped grades. I had no real idea what that meant, and I didn’t care as long as I could keep learning. I was working for Sophia in the ovens baking bread for her, and sometimes I’d go translate if she needed it. Mostly, I stayed out of sight.”
Sophia. She liked that name. She liked that Sophia had taken care of him. It might not have been the care others would have approved of, but she’d done her best when others might have looked the other way or abandoned him.
“One day some men came to the neighborhood and demanded Sophia give them her special focaccia bread. She had her own special twist she put on it, and it’s renowned. We were out of it, and she told them she would have the bakers make extra for them if they wanted to come back the next day. One of them, the youngest, a man of about twenty, pulled out a gun and shot her. Just like that. And he laughed. He called her a bitch and then spit on her.”
Vienna’s heart nearly stopped beating. She started to pull her feet back so she could go to him, but he clamped his fingers around her ankles like a vise.
“No, Snowflake, you have to hear this. All of it. You have to know who I am. What kind of man I am. I was down in the basement and I heard the gunshot. I ran upstairs and saw the car racing away. I have a good memory and recorded the license plate. I could see Sophia on the floor and I went to her. She was dying. I held her until she passed, and I promised her that I would get the bastards who killed her. Then I went to the security tape and played it. I’ll never forget those faces. There were four of them. The twenty-year-old who pulled the trigger was the son of a local gangster and thought he was untouchable.”
Vienna pressed her fist to her wildly beating heart. Zale’s eyes moved over her face, a moody, brewing storm in their dark depths. Her mouth was suddenly dry. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and hold him to her. How easily someone had taken Sophia’s life, a woman who had been kind to a little boy, giving him what he so desperately needed, a home of sorts. A place where he was safe from the streets. A chance to go to school and learn when it meant so much to him. She’d been killed for no reason at all.