Tormented (Evolution Series Book 2) (10 page)

“I would have a hard time believing that even if I couldn’t hear your thoughts.”

I sighed and slumped back into the seat. It was depressing the hell out of me, not being able to use my abilities whenever I wanted to. And I especially wanted to know how to block my mind so that everyone around me couldn’t hear every damn thought I ever had.

Aiden scoffed.

“Oh, I don’t mean you,” I clarified. Strangely, I didn’t mind Aiden hearing all my internal ramblings. Yes, it was embarrassing at times, but I had kind of gotten used to it.

He put his arm around me, drawing me into his side. “You know it will come sooner or later.”

I rested my head against his chest, taking comfort in his embrace. “I know. I just wish it was sooner rather than later.” Aiden sent one of his feel-good thingies pulsating through my body, making me gasp. “Hey.”

“Sorry.” He grinned. “I just thought you needed a little pick-me-up.”

“Sure. I think you secretly hate seeing me all depressed.” I turned in my seat to face him. “Admit it. You really just want me all lovey
dovey
all the time. Don’t you?”

Truth was, at the moment, I was the one feeling all the love. For some reason, whenever Aiden sent some major feel good vibes through me, it always ended in me wanting to jump him right there and then.

Aiden let out a laugh. “So that’s all I have to do, huh?”

“Well,” I said, standing up, “it’s not going to work this time.” I turned my back to him and looked down at the screen. “So when can we watch a movie?”

“Whenever you want.”

I turned back around to face him. “Tonight?”

“Okay. It’s a date,” he said. And the funny thing was, although we were technically still in his house, it was actually going to feel more like a date.

We left the cinema room and slowly made our way towards the casual meals room, which was just another room off the kitchen that was a little
cosier
than the dining room.

I had half-expected, or feared, that everyone from the other night was going to be there again. But they weren’t. It was just Anna and Dave sitting at the table when we arrived. My stomach grumbled at the sight of the bacon, eggs, sausages, and bagels in the
centre
of the table.

“I see Aiden finally showed you around,” Dave said, then took a sip of his coffee.

I sat down in the chair beside Anna. “This place is amazing. I can’t believe you have a real cinema here.”

Anna laughed. “Well, we had to do something with all these rooms, and there was no use for a ballroom anymore, so a few years back, we decided to do some renovations.”

Dave scoffed. “I love how you now think it was a brilliant idea.”

Anna shot him a warning glance.

“It’s true,” Aiden said, coming to his dad’s
defence
. “She thought it would be a terrible idea to get rid of the ballroom.”

“It was either, ‘Who’s going to want to watch a movie here when we could just go to the cinema?’ or ‘What if we have an occasion where we need to have a formal dance floor?’” Dave said, imitating how Anna must have said it. “You see, Anna here still secretly loves all things old, but would die if anyone knew how old she really is.”

Anna rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said, trying to play down how she didn’t want to accept changing to the modern ways. She turned to me and said, “You’ll have to get Aiden to show you around outside.”

I shivered just thinking about how cold it would be out there. “Maybe when it warms up.”

Dave cut a piece off his sausage. “You know you can control your body temperature.”

I thought about the other day when I had stepped out onto the balcony when we came there from Thailand. I hadn’t
realised
then that I should have been cold standing out there in the middle of winter. Living on the Gold Coast, we had never really had cold winters. Most of the time, we would only need to wear a long-sleeved shirt or perhaps a light jacket. “Huh,” I muttered.

“It’s a funny thing,” Dave continued. “Your mind has been conditioned to think that in cold weather you need to put on extra layers of clothing to keep your body temperature up. But, and here’s the funny part, what you don’t
realise
is that by putting on the extra clothing, your body is actually working to
stabilise
your temperature to a lower degree instead.”

I thought about it for a moment, then asked Aiden, “So how come you always wear a jacket during cold winter days?”

He stopped short of biting into his bagel. “Well, it would look a little funny if I only wore a T-shirt when everyone else was wearing jumpers.”

“Point taken,” I said.

Bernard came in carrying a tray. He stopped to the side of me and placed a steaming cup of coffee in front of me, then another in front of Aiden. “White with one,” he said to me.

“Thank you,” I said.

Bernard then turned around and left the room. I picked up the mug and breathed in the fresh aroma. God, I loved coffee. I just about downed the whole lot in one mouthful.

Everyone fell silent as we dug our way through
their
breakfast. A few months ago, I would have thought nothing of it, but I got the feeling that they weren’t just eating as they wanted me to believe. No. I was almost positive that they were talking about me.

“Yes, we’re talking about you,” Aiden acknowledged. “But before you get upset, we were only doing it because we thought you might not want to talk about what happened back at your house.”

My mind instantly went back to the disc. “The files,” I muttered. “I’ll be back in a sec.”

Without waiting for them to respond, I transported myself back to my house. I had to get the files. Somewhere in them might be the only piece of information that could explain what had been going on with my mother. She had obviously been doing something all those times she pretended to be working, and I could only hope that the answer was somewhere in those files.

I appeared in my mother’s study, which was where I had left the files, but they were gone. I rushed over to the filing cabinet and yanked it open. The drawers were empty. Whoever had left me the disc must have come back for the files, which only went to prove that something important was in them. Whatever information these files held was gone, along with any hope I had in figuring out my mother’s murder.

The more I thought about it, the less I actually knew about my mother. I had never met her boss or even any of my relatives. God, I didn’t even know any of my family members’ names. They had always just been the ones who had made her choose between them and me, and she had chosen me. She had decided to keep me instead of having an abortion, which meant they didn’t want anything to do with her. Apparently, they were not going to be the talk of the town with a daughter who had been knocked up at fifteen by a guy who abandoned her as soon as he found out she was pregnant.

So that was another mystery. My father was unknown to me. I had no name. No photo. Not even a description of the man. My mother never spoke about him or told me that I looked like him, but I could only guess that some of my features were his because of things like my hair was dark brown, and my mother’s was light brown; my skin
colour
was more olive than hers; my eyes were blue, whereas hers were brown.

“You couldn’t let us know where you were going before you disappeared?”
Aiden’s voice rang through my mind.

Crap. I couldn’t do a thing without him knowing, and I knew that he would be pissed at me for coming back without him.

“And there’s a reason for it,”
Aiden replied to my thoughts. The fear in his voice was real, and I didn’t get why. Yeah, I understood that some sicko was playing games with me, but the way he felt he needed to be with me, to protect me, was really something else.

“I’m fine,”
I assured him.
“I’ll be back in a minute.”

Before leaving, I decided to go upstairs and take a look around Mum’s bedroom in hope that I might find something, and I wouldn’t have to walk out of there empty-handed.

“Just stay where you are, and I’ll get Anna to bring me over.”
Poor Aiden hated not being able to transport himself wherever he wanted.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. Nothing’s going to happen to me.”
Anna must have agreed with me; otherwise, she would have already brought him to my house.
“Besides, if anything happens, you’ll be the first to know, and then Anna can bring you straight over.”

A shiver ran down my spine when I opened the door to Mum’s room and stepped inside. It felt cold, and not just because the days were getting cooler. The room had a forbidden feel to it. The thought of me finding my mother’s body somewhere in her room popped into my head, but I knew I was being silly. The only place her body would fit was in the wardrobe. I opened it just to be sure and found it empty… well, apart from all her clothes and shoes.

I tried to think of where she might hide something that she wouldn’t want everyone to find, and the only places I could come up with were where everyone in the movies hid things. I started on the top shelf of her wardrobe. She didn’t have any secret stash of hidden treasures stuffed in an old shoebox as I’d hoped. All I found was more clothes and a blanket.

I moved on to her dresser. I opened each drawer and searched through all her clothes and underwear. Nothing. I then searched under her bed. Again, there was nothing. And it almost seemed like all the places I had searched were too clean, as if someone had already been through them and taken anything that might give me a clue.

I was just about to transport back when I had a sudden urge to check between her mattress and the base of her bed. Whether through intuition or dumb luck, I found something. It was a black and white photo of a couple in their mid fifties. I had never seen the photo before, but I knew that those people meant something to my mother. Otherwise, why would she have held onto the photo for so many years?

I turned the photo over in hopes of finding an inscription on the back, but it was blank. That would have been too easy, and it seemed that when it came to my mother, nothing was ever easy.

Holding the photo tight, I transported myself back to England where I was met by a very anxious boyfriend.

CHAPTER 11

The moment I saw Aiden pacing beside the table, I instantly felt bad for disappearing without discussing it first, or better yet, taking him with me. The look on his face made me
realise
just how worried he had been. “I’m sorry,” was all I could say.

“Please don’t do that again.” He pulled me into a hug.

I hadn’t
realised
until I was in his arms how tense I had been. Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to go off on my own. “Okay,” I muttered into his chest as my body began to relax. “But I don’t get why you’re so worried about me. You know I can disappear the moment anything might happen.”

His body went rigid for a moment. “We can talk about it later,” he said. “Who do you think the photo is of?”

I broke our embrace and lifted the photo to show him. “I’ve no idea. I have never seen this picture before or the people in it.”

I passed the photo to Anna, who was still sitting at the table with Dave.