Fighting Chance
Page 73
The stairs creaked outside of her room, but Karin was too tired to react. There were only two people with keys to her home and she was one of them. Unless she had met a stranger on her way home and offered him a bed in return for whatever help they'd given her, Karin was alone.
She was always alone.
How did she get back home, she asked herself again?
Karin heard footsteps. They grew louder until they stopped at her bedroom door. She dipped under her blanket like a child waiting for the bogey man to appear.
Someone knocked three times.
It opened to reveal a man in a three-piece suit. His grey hair was swept over his forehead into a pony tail that was tied into a bun. He had a tanned face lined with age. His teeth had been fixed into perfect rows.
"There is blood on the carpet downstairs," he said.
"I got into a fight," Karin lied.
"Another one?" The man adjusted his shirt cuffs and forced a smile. It was a sight Karin had learned to dread.
"Why are you here, Dad?" she asked.
The smile was fixed on her father's face, but its warmth drained away. "I told you to call me Isä," he said in his Finnish accent. "I received word of a friend of mine who died recently. I'm here to pay my respects."
"You don't have any friends."
Her father smiled. "A colleague then. Someone who worked for me a long time ago."
He slid onto the edge of her bed and Karin recoiled from the contamination of his nearness.
"You'll be seeing a lot more of me until this business is concluded," he said.
Karin chewed her bruised lip. "I never see you even when you are here. You keep me locked up with no-one to talk to and nothing to do."
"It is for your own safety," her father said, "but as far as cages go, it is a pretty one, isn't it?"
The house. The bank accounts. Karin had swapped it all for human interaction. She had fought side by side with friends who had nothing but the clothes on their backs. She'd done drugs with them, shagged them and drank on street corners until it grew light. They were a gang, a unit, a family. They were the one thing her father couldn't provide, which was ironic considering what her father did for a living.
"So you're staying here with me?" Karin asked, wincing against the throb of her wounded chest.
"And while I am here, I may speak with your mother."
Ranta Mustonen patted the quilt covering Karin's dilapidated body. Despite the duck feather cushioning, it still managed to cause her pain.
"I told you, I want nothing to do with her," she said.
"The circumstances of your birth were complicated. You were born into a powerful family, but – "
"They didn't want me."
"Like I say," Ranta said, showing his perfect teeth. "It was complicated."
"You're keeping something from me," Karin said beneath her quilt. "I can tell."
"That wonderful gift of yours," her father said, tightening the knot in his tie. "I may have need of it."
"What do you mean?"
"I heard that someone in Newcastle is looking for me. He is more dangerous than he knows and I need to find him before he finds me."
Ranta rose in a fluid motion and smoothed out his suit with a steady hand.
"Who is it?" Karin asked. "Who is looking for you?"
Her father smiled and she froze.
"You know how special you are, don't you?" Ranta asked.
Her father had spun many a tale about her birth and how special she was. It had never made any sense, but after years of drip feeding her the worst of his stories, Karin almost believed them.
Karin had been blessed with fire in her belly, the power to overcome. Her recent experiences were testament to that, but her father had always intimated there was more to her creation.
That's how he put it. Not birth. Not conception.
Her creation.
"Do I know him?" Karin asked. "This man you're looking for?"
Ranta paused by the door, a troubled expression on his lined face. "I don't think so, but you will," he said, talking over his shoulder as he left the room. "Your brother will stop at nothing to find the truth."
END