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Nieves not been listening to the explanation? Or was she suicidal?
    “Sure,” Alric muttered, not really caring the slightest. He had his right elbow propped up against the door, hand under chin while he stared out into the darkness. He seemed to be contemplating deeply about something.
    “Great!” Nieves turned to Wilhelm. “We should invite everyone. You’ll come won’t you, Wilhelm?”
    Wilhelm didn’t know he was nodding—his thoughts were too scattered. “Alric,” he thought to himself, “agreed to a birthday party? He must be ill.”
    “Where should we hold it?” Nieves asked Wilhelm while he was in deep thought. She quickly turned to Alric and asked the same thing. When Alric did not reply she grew a concerned expression. “Alric?” Nieves moved to see his expression more clearly. “Alric?”
    He glowered at her from the corner of his eye. “What?”
    “Nieves,” Wilhelm called, realizing that the Head Macter was not in the mood to be messed with. “For what reason are you living on Macter land?”
    Nieves had been asked that question many times—so many times that she began wondering why it was such an extraordinary deal. “I live here because of Boris.”
    “What relation do you have to Boris?”
    Alric returned to glower out the window. “He’s married to her sister.”
    “Oh. No.” Nieves shook her head. “My sister died a long time ago.”
    Both men looked at her with curiosity.
    Alric asked, “Then who is that woman living with him?”
    “That’s just the remnants of what my sister used to be,” Nieves muttered. “It’s just an empty body Boris commands around. Erika’s heart died when my parents died. Ever since she hasn’t been the same.”
    Alric huffed with arrogance—returning to stare out the window yet again.
    “I see,” Wilhelm stated. “That would explain…”
    “Explain?” asked Nieves.
    Wilhelm would have nodded his head if an icy chill hadn’t run down his spine. Alric’s little warning that no answer would be spoken. Alric had a plan of torture just waiting to bury the girl, Nieves, under.
    The car pulled to a stop, releasing Wilhelm of his anxiety. “I should head home to the office and clean-up. I’ll check up on the two of you tomorrow.” He threw the car door open and slid out as calmly but quickly as possible.
    “Bye,” Nieves’s small voice replied.
    The driver opened Alric’s door.
    The head of the family got out of the vehicle without a word and turned to the frozen Nieves. She was still trying to run over the ideas in her head. Nieves slowly slid out of the vehicle with a weak smile. With Wilhelm gone, she felt slightly afraid and abandoned. Alric was planning on harming her—much worse than Boris could ever accomplish. If that were the case, was she strong enough to run away, this time escaping to the city and away from Alric’s control?
    “You have nowhere to go,” Alric told her, obviously reading her expression.
    Nieves felt a twinge in her heart while following him up the rock garden steps onto the porch where the sliding paper door stood idly by. The doors seemed to sneer at her in a taunting way.
    “I have my sister,” Nieves argued as if the thought had just reached the front of her mind. “She’ll take me in.”
    Alric smirked with his hand on the door. “You said it yourself—your sister died a long time ago.”
    Nieves tightened her fists. “No. She’ll take care of me like she promised.”
    “That’s not what she told me,” he said in a whisper too morbid for a human to ever produce. “She never wants to see you again. You only get in her way. She begged me to take you away from her—begged me to kill you.”
    Nieves yelled, “That’s not true!”
    Alric spun around—he knew she was breaking under the heartache. In fact, he was enjoying it up until the moment he saw her eyes. They seemed to be the echo of a hallow memory trapped in Alric’s own mind.
    “She loves me,” Nieves mumbled. “I know she