ROMA KING: Book 1 in the Roma Royals Duet Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by CALLIE HART

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  GLOSSARY

  OFFICIAL DISPATCH TRANSCRIPT

  1. ZARA

  2. PASHA

  3. ZARA

  4. PASHA

  5. ZARA

  6. PASHA

  7. ZARA

  8. ZARA

  9. ZARA

  10. PASHA

  11. ZARA

  12. ZARA

  13. PASHA

  14. ZARA

  15. ZARA

  16. ZARA

  17. PASHA

  18. ZARA

  19. PASHA

  20. PASHA

  21. ZARA

  22. ZARA

  23. PASHA

  24. THANK YOU FOR READING!

  About the Author

  GLOSSARY

  Gadje (gad-jeh): An outsider. A non Roma person.

  Marime (mah-ree-mey): Spiritually unclean.

  Prikaza (pree-KOH-zah): Bad luck.

  Vitsa (vit-sah): A Roma clan, formed of numerous extended families.

  Vardo (vardo): A painted Gypsy wagon.

  OFFICIAL DISPATCH TRANSCRIPT

  Incident No. 17-3886391

  Date: 12-12-2018 18:22:46

  Operator: 911. What is your emergency?

  Caller: Hello?

  Operator: Hi, there. Is everything okay?

  Caller: [PAUSE] Um…I don’t…I don’t know. My big brother is…he isn’t moving.

  Operator: Where are you, sweetie?

  Caller: We’re at home.

  Operator: Where are your mommy and daddy?

  Caller: I don’t know.

  Operator: Oh, okay. And what’s your name, sweetheart?

  Caller: Corey. C-O-R-E-Y. That’s how you spell it.

  Operator: Well, hi, Corey. So, you said your big brother isn’t moving? That’s pretty weird, huh? Did he just go to sleep? Did he say he felt sick?

  Caller: No. [PAUSE] A man came. He was shouting at my brother. He was [PAUSE] very angry. Jamie told me to go to my room.

  Operator: And did you go to your room, sweetheart?

  Caller: Yes.

  Operator: And then what happened?

  Caller: And…and then, I heard them fighting. And Jamie was shouting. And I was scared.

  Operator: How long ago were they fighting, Corey honey?

  Caller: Um…I don’t know. I was scared, so I was hiding. And when I came out of…from under the bed, Jamie won’t wake up.

  Operator: Is there any blood on him?

  Caller: [PAUSE] No.

  Operator: Can you tell if he’s hurt anywhere?

  Caller: No. But his eyes are open.

  Operator: Is the man still there with you, honey? The one who was fighting with Jamie?

  Caller: No. He went away. It’s just me and Jamie.

  Operator: “Okay, baby. Someone’s coming to help you. They’re gonna be there real soon. Can you open the door when they knock?”

  Caller: I… No. I can’t reach the handle.

  Operator: “Okay, baby. That’s okay. You don’t need to worry about that. Corey, can you tell me how old you are?”

  Caller: Yes. I think I’m four years old. But [PAUSE] maybe…I am five now. I’m not really sure.

  1

  ZARA

  HITCHIN’S

  ‘During her sleep, she dreamed of him and wept. He was light. He was sound. He was the ever-loving beating of her heart.’

  Being in love with someone you’ve never met before isn’t as uncommon as you might think, y’know. The internet connects people from all walks of life, maybe even thousands of miles apart, and enables them to communicate and get to know one another in ways they never could before. Women fall in love with prison inmates incarcerated on the other side of the country. A business man in Japan loses his heart to a neurosurgeon in Sweden. A shipping clerk in Fairbanks, Alaska tumbles head over heels for a museum curator in Wollongong, Australia. People find each other. They talk. They ask questions. They learn, and they develop complicated feelings for each other. It happens all the goddamn time.

  Sitting at the poorly-lacquered, extremely sticky bar in Hitchin’s, following a very long, emotionally draining shift, I present this argument to the four other patrons, who all nurse their drinks, eyeing me with fairly open pity.

  None of them say anything. Well, no one except Henry, the bartender, but he doesn’t count—a slightly unfair statement that undoubtedly forms in my head because I don’t like what he has to say. “Zara, sweetheart. It’s true. Stuff like that does happen all the time. But your situation’s a little different. Your mystery man doesn’t actually exist, does he? How can you be in love with someone you made up in your own head?”

  I roll my rocks glass between my palms, my cheeks prickling with embarrassment. “I never said I was in love with him. I’m just saying…people are weird. Strange things happen all the time.”

  “You’ve had a few dreams about a guy, and now all other men are ruined for you? Don’t you think you might want to try going on a date or two? Never know. Someone might end up surprising you. No way you’ll find someone as perfect as dream guy, but hell. A few compromises here and there…” Henry shrugs. “You could be happy. You’re too damn young to have given up this easily.”

  Ha.

  A few dreams.

  I’ve known Henry, along with the people sitting at the bar with me, for the past three years. Long enough for them to know plenty about me and vice versa, but I’ve kept this one thing to myself. Kept it close to my chest. Too personal, too private, far too intimate—the dreams starring my mystery man haven’t been a one-off kind of thing. Far from it, in fact. They’ve been a two-or-three-times-a-week kind of thing for the past three years—occasionally even more often than that—and I can’t possibly share that with my friends.

  They’ll think there’s something wrong with me.

  They’ll think I’m fucking mad.

  I grumble into my drink, making half-hearted noises that, yeah, he might well be right, and maybe, we’ll see, while the others still watch me with confusion and curiosity. Hitchin’s is closed, but that doesn’t matter to any of us. We each sip on our drinks. Short drinks, without mixers or ice. We’re professionals and don’t waste time on such frivolous accoutrements. Our beverages are sacred, and heaven forbid anyone ever try and dilute them.

  Henry knows precisely which amber elixir to pour for each of us. We’ve been coming to Hitchin’s for a long time now, creatures of habit, never deviating from our poison of choice. For Andrew, the retired stock broker: Laphroig. Balvenie for Sarah, the sixty-three-year-old nail technician. Garrett, the mute bus driver: a Jack Daniels. It’s Kentucky Bourbon for Waylon, the night manager of the Franklin Luxury Apartment Building. And for myself, Zara Llewelyn, twenty-six-year-old emergency dispatcher and collector of quirky postcards: apple juice.

  An outsider might take a look at the collection of souls gathered at the bar and see five people so vastly different in every way that they might assume it was pure coincidence that brought us all here tonight. They’d be wrong, though.

  Yes, Andrew dresses in a suit and tie, and very obviously has a little money he’s squirreled way. Garrett has the sallow, sunken look of someone who might knock over a convenience store for a pack of smokes. Sarah wears way too much leopard print, and insists on six-inch heels, even though she can barely walk in them. Waylon i
s still starched to the point of rigidity from the twenty-nine years he spent serving in the US Marine Corps. And as for me…I am younger than anyone else in the bar by a solid ten years. Our backgrounds, our families, and the trials we’ve faced on the individual roads that have brought us all here, to Spokane, Washington, are as diverse and conflicting as can be.

  However, there is one thing our motley crew has in common: we are all residents of the Bakersfield Apartment Building—the bland-looking six-story structure across the street from Hitchin’s.

  Sarah’s lived at the Bakers’ for close to eighteen years. Andrew’s been there for ten. No one knows how long Garrett has been around since he never speaks, but the general consensus is that he’s been a resident for around five years. Waylon, for five. I was the last to move in, just shy of three years ago. By some unspoken agreement shortly after my sixth month living in the building, we all began meeting at Hitchin’s every Tuesday at ten pm, and we’ve been doing so ever since.

  It's almost two in the morning, technically now Wednesday, when Andrew turns his attention on me. “Speaking of dating, my grandson’s coming into town at the end of the week. Maybe you could show him around or something, Zara.”

  I quit spinning my glass around and give him a wry sideways look. Garrett’s the only one who hasn’t tried to set me up with a family member or a friend over the past couple of years. They’ve been blatant about their matchmaking attempts in the past, but after months of polite refusals on my part, telling them I have no interest in blind dates or orchestrated meet-cutes with their delivery men, cable technicians, or nephews, I finally told them all in no uncertain terms that they shouldn’t waste their time. I’m never going to give in and ‘find someone to take care of me.’ I don’t need anyone to take care of me. That was also when I’d finally admitted to having the dreams, though I downplayed how graphic they were, and how they were the sole reason why I didn’t feel like I needed a damn boyfriend.

  “Sorry. Working this weekend,” I tell Andrew.

  Sarah snorts into her glass of Balvenie. “Now there’s a bare-faced lie if ever I’ve heard one. We all know you don’t work Saturdays.”

  “Schedule changed last month,” I fire back. “My Saturdays are now spoken for. I’m sure your grandson’s got better things to be doing, anyway, Drew. I’m a terrible tour guide.”

  Drew’s eyes roll heavenward as he slumps back in his bar stool. You never need to check your watch at Hitchin’s; you can always tell how late it is by how loose Andrew’s tie gets. The length of purple and black paisley print silk is now sitting in a coiled heap on top of the bar next to his wallet and his cell phone, which means it’s incredibly late indeed. “He’s gonna be crashing on my couch for three days. I’m pretty sure his mother kicked him out again,” he groans.

  “Then maybe he needs to spend those three days looking for a job instead of drinking coffee with me.” I give the man a wink to let him know I’m only playing. But seriously. How old is the kid if he’s still living with his mother? And why would Andrew think the guy is suitable boyfriend material if he keeps getting his ass thrown out of his mom’s basement?

  “Chance of him finding paid work would be a fine thing,” Andrew agrees. “Maybe you could ask at your place. He’s got a good phone voice.”

  A good phone voice does come in handy when you were answering emergency calls, but there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that. An emergency dispatcher needs to be able to think under pressure. They have to be reliable and reassuring, and they have to keep a cool head. I had to jump through numerous hoops to land my job, including countless rounds of psychometric testing. I had to really want it. A person doesn’t become a dispatcher because the job just lands in their laps and they have nothing more interesting going on in their lives.

  I’m pretty sure Andrew and the others see me as a glorified answering machine. I just nod and smile. “I’ll see if they have any vacancies. They usually post them on the website, though. Tell him he should check it out?”

  “How old is he?” Waylon asks.

  “Twenty-one.”

  I nearly fire apple juice down my nose. They must think I’m really hard up if they’re trying to set me up with a man-child five years my junior. Waylon sits a little straighter, adopting the stiff, rigid posture of an army recruitment officer. We’ve all witnessed him assume the role on countless occasions before. “Not too late to join up, y’know. I served straight out of school, but twenty-one’s still real young. The army’d make a man out of him in no time.”

  Garrett silently sips his drink, eyes roving from one end of the bar to the other as he waits for Drew’s response.

  “Doubt he’d make it through boot camp,” the old man sighs. “Parents spoiled the shit out of him. Turned him into a bit of a brat if I’m honest. I thought you’d be a good influence for him, Zara. Men tend to try and get their lives in order when there’s a beautiful woman in the picture.”

  Henry releases a bark of laughter that makes Garrett jump. “Sounds like unpaid babysitting to me. Our girl’s too smart to take on a twenty-one-year-old kid.”

  I can’t recall when it had happened, but at some point I became ‘their girl,’ as if I’m their communal property. Since my parents are two thousand miles away and don’t really give a shit about where I am or what I’m doing, I welcomed the position. Being ‘their girl’ has its perks. Sarah gives me motherly advice. Andrew makes lofty, vague promises about helping with my taxes. I never see him do it, but whenever I get a delivery for my water cooler, Garrett lugs the huge bottles up to my third-floor apartment for me and leaves them outside my door. Waylon insisted on giving me self-defense classes in my tiny living room and showed me how to shatter an attacker’s nose and shove the bone straight up into their brainpans. And if I’m sick, all four of them rally around in their own way, fussing over me in their attempts to make me feel better.

  Yeah, it’s nice to have been claimed, to be part of this strange and unexpected family unit when I am so far away from the place I originally called home.

  Andrew blows out a deep breath and picks up his tie, wrapping the length of it around his hand. “Can’t blame me for trying, right? Maybe in a couple of years, when he’s got his ducks in a row, she’ll reconsider. You’ll still be single then, right, Zara? Unless your dream guy suddenly materializes out of thin air, that is.” He waggles his bushy eyebrows at me in a teasing fashion, and Sarah leans across the corner of the bar and whacks the top of his arm.

  “Don’t you jinx her, Drew. You have no idea what’s possible. Zara’s going to find herself the perfect man soon enough and we’re all gonna be cursing the bastard’s name.”

  Andrew’s eyebrows bank together. “Why on earth would you say that?”

  “Because! He’ll be rich and famous, and more handsome than Laurence Olivier. He’ll treat her like a princess and shower her with gifts. He’ll show her just how small and pathetic we all are over at the Bakers’ and he’ll whisk her away to a better life. And that will be that. We’ll never see her again.”

  Garrett’s dark eyes grow very round. He dips his head, tucking his chin into the collar of his jacket, and I’m struck with the overwhelming urge to give the man a hug. Sarah’s only screwing with Andrew, and, in part with me, too, but I can hear the worried note of truth in her words. She might not really believe that I’m going to be carried off by a handsome, rich, movie star, but I know the woman well enough to see that she’s worried. She probably thinks I’m going to move at some point and leave them all behind.

  The Bakers’ has seen better days. The paint in the stairwells is peeling, the pipes are always clanking, and the sinks consistently end up blocked at least once a month. The laundry room in the basement invariably smells like damp, too, and there are cracks everywhere in the walls, but I don’t care about that stuff. My pokey little one-bedroom apartment is the first place I’ve called home since I’d moved to Spokane, and I’m more than a little in love with the place.

 
What others might call age-worn and tatty, I call rustic charm. I’ve grown accustomed to the rattling pipes, and the sound of Mrs. Heffowitz’s cat yowling downstairs whenever she goes out to play baccarat at the YMCA. I repainted the walls inside my apartment a sunny shade of yellow and filled the space with books, and throws, and paintings, and I don’t plan on trading it in for the world. Plus, there’s nowhere I feel safer than surrounded by my people. I’m not just ‘their girl’, after all. I’ve claimed them as my own, too.

  “I’m not going anywhere, Sarah. Don’t worry. Not even for Brad Pitt. I love it here too much.”

  “Pssshhh. Nonsense. I’d abandon you all in a heartbeat if Brad asked me to,” Sarah laughs. There’s a warmth to her voice. A seed of relief, planted by my quick reassurance. Garrett untucks his chin and slides his glass forward, indicating to Henry that he wants another whiskey.

  Henry pours him his Jack, groaning as he stretches to place the almost empty bottle back on the shelf above the register. “That’s one for the road,” he says, when he turns around. “I got jury duty in the morning. Gotta be out by eight.”

  “Lord, not you, too. They got me last month. Sucked up two of my days off,” Waylon grouses. “Sat there bored to tears while they convicted some woman for not sending her kids to school. Complete waste of time.”

  Henry grins a partially toothless smile. For sure, he has enough money to replace the two teeth that are missing, but I personally think he leaves his smile that way as it leans him a particularly dangerous edge. The man’s a teddy bear, but he doesn’t want his other patrons to know that. The missing teeth help his cause. There are nights at Hitchin’s when things get a little out of hand, and far fewer of the disagreements would take place outside if people thought Henry was anything less than a stone-cold hard ass. “I’m hoping I get those Gypsies,” he says his eyes glittering.