by Hero Bowen
Val released her grip and stepped back. “Get moving.” She shoved Nadia along another narrow, identical corridor. “And don’t think you’ll be getting any special treatment. Nobody here cares who you are, least of all the boss.”
When they reached a windowless corridor, Val stopped by a wooden doorway. She opened it, revealing a wide stairwell that coiled down to some deeper level of the headquarters’ labyrinth. As Nadia reached for the banister and peered over the edge, she immediately regretted it. Vertigo had never bothered her before, but not knowing how far down the staircase went made her stomach twist uncontrollably.
That, and not knowing what waited for her below.
As they made their descent, the steps banged and creaked. With Val behind her, Nadia didn’t have much choice but to keep going. The bottom of the staircase led to another gloomy hallway lit by dim lamps. Val gave her a prompting shove, and Nadia tried keep her chin up and her shoulders squared as she marched toward a wide doorway at the hallway’s end. Val skirted past her and opened it.
Soft, ambient light spilled into the grim corridor, though Nadia didn’t find it remotely inviting. She wouldn’t have taken another step if Val hadn’t forced her.
The lavish chamber had two floors, with the second forming a gallery of sorts, thanks to an elegant balustrade of carved, swirling marble that made Nadia think of sea serpents in constant battle. Velveteen drapes were tied at every section of the galleried upper tier, presumably to give privacy when needed.
The upper gallery of Ionic columns created a shadowed walkway on all sides, giving the chamber a Southern Gothic feel. The entire floor of the lower level was crafted from smooth, pale oak and covered in plush white rugs that made it look like there’d been a polar bear massacre. The white was the first comforting thing Nadia saw. It was unlikely she’d be tortured in this room—blood would be a pain to get out of those rugs.
In the center of the chamber stood a long dining table draped in a silken tablecloth, with high-backed golden chairs spanning both sides. Lanterns with real flames hung down from the upper gallery, and a chandelier of candles and bronze vines took pride of place, suspended by a sturdy iron chain. More lanterns were placed along the length of the dining table, in a medley of ornate black iron vessels. Alongside them rested centerpieces of vivid red, burnished orange, and coral-hued flowers that stood out against the neutral tones of the rest of the room.
“Somebody wished for interior design mojo, I see,” Nadia remarked.
“I suggest you don’t talk,” Val shot back.
Nadia didn’t plan to, her attention fixed on the lanterns. Maybe she could run to one and make her wish before Val or Kaleena could stop her. If she wished for invulnerability, she might make it out alive, but she sensed that the particular wish in her chest wasn’t potent enough for that kind of request. That called for a saved-a-bus-of-orphans level of potency.
A woman emerged from the lower gallery with a book in her hands, interrupting Nadia’s fevered ideas of escape. Her Slavic features echoed Nadia’s own, though she’d gone for a smart-casual attire of black jeans and a flowy, silky blouse instead of the damp lost-and-found clothes Nadia had on. Approaching the dining table, she set down her book and smiled.
Val pushed on the back of Nadia’s head. “You bow to the Wishmaster.”
“There’s no need for that. We’re family, after all,” Kaleena replied in a mocking tone. “It’s been too long, little sister.”
Chapter Twenty
Nadia met her sister’s amused stare. Kaleena’s hazel eyes mirrored her own, and they shared the same long brunette locks, though Kaleena’s had been primped into wavy submission. While they both had strong jaws and defined eyebrows, Kaleena’s cheeks were plumper, with a hard dip beneath that gave them a hollowed appearance. And Kaleena was far paler in complexion, but Nadia supposed that was expected when someone refused to ever crawl out of their underground bunker.
At thirty-eight, Kaleena could’ve passed for late twenties, maybe younger, though she carried herself with a maturity and gravitas that no twenty-something possessed. Her hourglass silhouette, aided by a pricey outfit, oozed power and bolstered the confidence in her stride. A rose-gold watch glinted on her left wrist in the dim light—one Nadia was surprised to find she recognized. She’d bought that watch for Kaleena as a birthday gift years ago, the metal now chipped in places.
“You’ve been quite the busy bee,” Kaleena continued when Nadia made no attempt to respond to her “little sister” remark. It was just another power play, minimizing Nadia’s stance with a carefully chosen, false endearment. “I’m happy to see you return to the hive after trying to steal a drop of honey for yourself. A girl after my own heart. It’s just a shame you can’t enjoy the sweet taste of it to the fullest.”
Nothing about Kaleena’s cheerful cadence made it sound like she was actually glad to see her sister. It still baffled Nadia how much Kaleena had changed. The moment she became the Wishmaster, her entire personality had twisted. It was uncanny, like the title had created a whole new version of the sister Nadia had once looked up to.
“You can go, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” Kaleena addressed Val bluntly. A smile formed on her lips. “I mean it—the hinges need fixing. You should probably get maintenance on that.”
“Yes, Wishmaster.” Val bowed and shuffled backward out of the majestic double doors, as though she were in the presence of legitimate royalty.
“Take a seat, little sister,” Kaleena instructed, gesturing to the end of the long dining table. Luxurious cashmere throws were draped over two of the high-backed golden chairs at the far end. Presumably, they’d been fastidiously arranged for this meeting—the chairs pulled out ever so slightly, the throws positioned just right, and a bespoke cream-and-gold glazed teapot set out with two matching cups, the faint hint of cinnamon in the air. Everything was far too casually perfect not to have been the product of careful preparation.
Nadia held her ground, despite the cacophony of thoughts that echoed in her head. “Thanks, Kaleena, but I’ll stand.”
Her sister rolled her eyes. “It’s a pretty name, for sure, but it’s Wishmaster now, as you well know. That’s who I am, and you can thank Basha for that. But I could wear a name tag, if it would make it easier for you?” She went to the dining table, pulled out the chair to the left of the table’s head, and flourished a melodramatic hand across the vacant seat.
“I’d say you’ve got a lot to thank our babcia for,” Nadia said, reluctantly sitting down. “You wouldn’t have a thriving little business here if it weren’t for the wishes we pour into your enterprise.”
Kaleena took a seat at the head of the table and swept a perfectly manicured fingertip toward the teapot, ignoring Nadia’s comment entirely. “Normally, I’d offer my guests tea, but seeing as you have no spent wishes, there’d be little point. Unless you like the bitter taste? That would suit you, since I am sensing a lot of bitterness.”
“How do you know I haven’t spent the one I took from Val already?” Nadia shot back, hating how the sister she’d once adored had become so blasé, with a constant need to assert dominance.
Nadia still remembered the times she’d perched by her big sister’s stereo, ready to push down the Record button when a song came on that Kaleena wanted on cassette for her crappy first car. Or when they’d built a fort out of blankets and scarfed down a whole tin of Polish cookies that they’d stolen from the kitchen one Christmas Eve. Or when, albeit reluctantly, Kaleena had helped Nadia build an entire town made out of books for her bevy of toys to live in, then humored her for hours with conjured dramas that would’ve rivaled any soap opera. The stuffed rabbit being caught in a love triangle with the handknitted squirrel and the knockoff Ken doll had been a particular highlight.
Now, after years of barely any contact, Nadia couldn’t help but feel abandoned. Like an iceberg, Kaleena had broken off and drifted away from the family glacier, and while Nadia could understand the desire to
cut ties with a sometimes suffocating homelife, she wondered if her sister understood just how hard it had hit Nadia to have her one ally drift away from her as well.
Worse still, Kaleena had never shown a sliver of remorse for shouldering them with an immense debt, even when the wish had been needed to save Nadia’s life. It wasn’t that Nadia had expected a handout, but 101 wishes seemed excessive to demand of your supposed loved ones. She had always suspected that Kaleena wanted to make an example of them to prove her ruthlessness as Wishmaster—to show that she didn’t make exceptions, even for her own family.
Kaleena smiled, though it reminded Nadia of the fixed, eerie smirk painted on porcelain dolls. “One of my associates can sense the number of wishes a person has remaining. You have three, little sister, so let’s not pretend, hmm? We’re not children anymore, though I’ll always be sad that you missed out on your growth spurt. Do you still hem all of your jeans, or have you finally started shopping in the petite section?”
Instead of smarting off like she wanted to, Nadia shrugged and said, “I thought I’d find out what you already know, instead of going over old ground. That’d just be boring for both of us.”
“I’d forgotten how funny you could be,” Kaleena deadpanned as she took a wooden compass coin—emblazoned with her wishbone flower insignia—from her pocket. She rolled it effortlessly across her knuckles. “I don’t even need one of these coins to tell that you’ve got an unspent wish inside you, nor do I need an associate to give me your total.” She flicked the coin upward, watching it spin before it came back to land between two knuckles. “You’ve become quite the renegade. The wishing grapevine is rife with gossip about what you’ve been up to at Bonaventure and on the river.”
“All good things, I hope?” Nadia replied dryly.
“It’s curious to me,” Kaleena said, rolling the coin again. “You’ve always been the loyal, reliable, steadfast Kaminski child. Why would you suddenly flip the script like that, betraying your family after years of toeing every line? Don’t mistake me, I’m impressed that you followed in my footsteps, but it does pique the old interest. Or did Basha put you up to this?”
Kaleena flipped the coin into the air again. Perhaps this was some heads-or-tails scenario, and Kaleena was waiting for it to land on the side she wanted. With every upward toss, Nadia’s nerves skyrocketed. She had no escape route. Those doors were shut, and even if she could get past them, she’d have a mind-boggling labyrinth of evasive hallways to navigate before she could even think about reaching the outside world. And after that? Still more of Kaleena’s minions waiting to drag her back, kicking and screaming.
“Mom and Babcia had nothing to do with me taking that wish,” Nadia said. “I made my own choices.”
Her sister gave a low hum. “I’m sure you believe that. You’ve seemed perfectly happy to do their bidding up until now. And you were even living with them under the same roof. It’s obvious where your loyalties lie.”
Nadia was a little taken aback. Her desire to pay off the debt hadn’t been some act of loyalty to their grandmother. Yet Kaleena eyed her as if she were a lowly agent of the real enemy—as if she might report back to Basha about this meeting.
“Is that the reason you’ve never once contacted me directly these past three years? Why you’ve never answered my calls?” Nadia asked carefully. “Because of some misguided paranoia about Babcia?”
Kaleena’s eyes widened. “You think it’s misguided? How adorably naïve. There’s a reason I put ‘This is not a game’ at the top of the debt contract. Our grandmother—and by association, our mother—will do whatever is necessary to avoid paying what I’m owed. Now, we need to talk about what you owe me.”
Nadia tried to prevent the spike of fear from showing on her face. She’d rather beg and plead for clemency than let this debt consume the rest of her life. It was time for her last, and only, trump card: trying to get Kaleena to soften up through their shared past.
“Do you remember that violent drunk guy we stole a wish from when we were kids?” Nadia began. “That must’ve been around twenty years ago now.”
Kaleena stopped flicking the coin. “What about him?”
“He could’ve killed you, but you refused to stop trying to pry that wish out of him,” Nadia went on. “We were young and stupid then, with no real idea of how to steal secrets. But you kept plying him with booze, asking him every question under the sun to try to snatch his wish. Even when he grabbed you around the throat, you kept asking him things.”
They’d been ten and seventeen years old, having only just started to capture wishes on their own, after their dad left. Working as a mismatched team, they’d used their young charms to coax people into giving up their heart secrets: Nadia would play the sobbing kid who’d temporarily lost her mom, and Kaleena would prey on sly-eyed men whom she’d caught gawking at her. But this one memory was the clearest in Nadia’s mind, since it was the first time she’d realized how dangerous the wishing world could be.
Kaleena had asked the man if he’d ever put his hands around his daughter’s neck when she’d pissed him off. He’d let go of her so fast he nearly fell over. Kaleena had still been gasping for air when he’d drunkenly blurted out, “I put her in the hospital.” He’d had tears in his eyes, and so had Kaleena, although hers had probably been tears of victory.
“Do you remember what you said to me that day, after we took his wish and left him sobbing?” Nadia pressed, certain there was some fragment of her compassionate big sister left in this cold-hearted woman.
“I’m sure you’re going to tell me,” Kaleena replied, looking entirely unmoved.
“You said, ‘Someday you’ll learn that certain people can’t be trusted with power, and it’s our job to make sure they don’t get to keep it.’ That was why you refused to leave, even when it got dangerous. You couldn’t allow that wish to stay with that man because he might’ve accidentally used it and hurt someone innocent.” Nadia waited to see some glimmer of softness in those hard, hazel eyes, but it didn’t come.
Instead, Kaleena tilted her head. “And what, may I ask, was the point of that sweet little anecdote? Are you trying to pluck at my heartstrings?” She pretended to strum what appeared to be a tiny, invisible harp.
“You might not be that person anymore, but there’s still truth in what you said back then,” Nadia replied. “The reason you stayed until you had that guy’s wish is the same reason you’re so paranoid about who you let close—you can smell when someone might become corrupt with power.” She paused. “But I wonder if you can smell it on yourself.”
It was a risky move to criticize the Wishmaster so openly, but maybe if her sister saw the hypocrisy in all this, she would change her mind about the harshness of her punishments. People really were capable of changing for the better—Nadia believed that to the depths of her soul, especially after all she’d seen in her counseling office.
“I know who I am.” Kaleena chuckled. “I permit corruption in neither my enterprise nor myself. Nor do I seek power. I enforce order. Save me the lecture, little sister. I’m not one of your clients.”
Nadia’s cheeks burned, though she wasn’t sure why. “I understand the need for order, and there’s more of it now. It’s less violent than when Adrian ran things, but . . .” She trailed off as Kaleena’s mouth turned up at the mention of his name.
“But?” Kaleena prompted.
Nadia sighed nervously. “There’s order, and then there’s vindictiveness.” She swallowed past the lump in her throat. “I’m not trying to usurp your place or mess things up. I just want one thing: to revive Nick, to have him back, so I can live the life that I thought I was promised when I married him.”
“Nothing is promised, unfortunately,” Kaleena replied, with maybe the faintest drip of sympathy.
Clearly, nothing could persuade Kaleena to dig into her humanity. All of Nadia’s usual counselor tactics of appealing to pathos, logos, and ethos weren’t working at all on her big sister.
>
Nadia leaned forward. “I know, but that doesn’t mean it’s out of my reach.”
“I liked Nick,” Kaleena said, resuming her coin-play. “How could anyone not? He was the kind of guy who saved runaway strollers and would mow an old lady’s lawn without her asking, but they’re usually the ones with the darkest demons. I imagine you’ve got countless psychiatry textbooks that say the same thing.”
Nadia’s expression hardened. “He didn’t cause those arsons. There was nothing dark about him. He was good, he was sweet, he was kind, and . . . now he’s gone.”
“Perhaps you didn’t know him as well as you thought, then,” Kaleena said flatly. “We’ve all got sides we hide from others, don’t we?”
A spark of anger ignited inside Nadia. Oh, so now Kaleena, who’d been living in her hidden lair for years, thought she knew something about Nick that Nadia didn’t? How could her sister possibly know anything that Nadia didn’t when it came to her own husband? She wanted to lunge across the table at her sister, to bash her face into that exquisite marble, to rip every last piece of expensive fabric to shreds.
Gripping the edge of the chair, she took a steadying breath.
“I don’t care what he chose to keep from me. He’s my Nick either way,” Nadia said at last. “Babcia wouldn’t let me bring him back. She says I have no right to want anything because our debt was my fault, and that should be my only priority.”
If there was one thing Nadia hoped would get her sister on her side, it was Kaleena’s raging hatred of Basha.
“I made the stupid mistake of crashing the car. I was the one who needed a spare organ in a tight turnaround,” Nadia went on, keeping her head down. “I was the one who forced Babcia and Mom to get into this debt, to save my life. It doesn’t matter to them that I didn’t ask to be saved. I’m grateful, sure, but if I’d known it would cause this much hassle, maybe I’d have asked them not to bother.”
