Armour of Vows

Chapter Seven

Christopher

The weather is notoriously unpredictable.

I check the live video feed from the CCTV camera stationed at the graveyard, now five miles away, on my phone as rain beats down on my car.

Inquisitive little thing, she is.

I noticed her in the graveyard visiting Aurora Graham's grave. I know enough about all the people buried in the graveyard as I have visited it every week for five years now.

I take a look at the video playing on my phone and see her on a call. She should really keep her curious mind on hold.

I wanted to stay and ask her how she knows about Aurora as her story has made a place in my mind. Human trafficking, strip clubs and then finally murdered in cold blood. It is baseless but I have always known in my gut that there was a connection between her abduction and my sister's. If there was one, the dots were never connected.

________

Family game nights are always loud. Insanely so.

I put the lasagna in the oven and look at the living room of Natalia's home.

Alejandro, Nat's bodyguard and our brother(although not by blood), sits on the sofa, his large body almost crushing it with his weight ,watching his husband, Darren, who is leaner and a little shorter than him, set up the game table with Chess, Uno, Monopoly ,Ludo and other board games. Natalia sits on the floor, playing with their daughter and her god-daughter Avery.

As Natalia calls in her bookish language, we are a found family.

Although I will never say it, I agree with her.

I met Alejandro 7 years ago when I was making a personal security detail for me and my sister. He was an Ex-Green berets soldier who had been working as a freelance bodyguard for a few years after retiring.

After a mission went wrong, resulting in numerous casualties and severe trauma, he met Darren, his government aided therapist and now husband.

We had worked together for years before I met Natalia five years ago.

Five years ago, fates intertwined and our lives began to take unexpected turns.

The accident provided a perfect way to introduce this stranger, Nat, as my sister to the world. She got her identity and the 'former addict' title from my dead cousin. Nonetheless, stranger or not, she is my sister and this is our family, despite the fact that we are not related by blood but the circumstances of our meetings were, in fact, bloody.

A tug on my shirt pulls me out of my thoughts, making me look down at my niece, Avery. It feels like yesterday when I first met her, she was just a few months old at that time and now she's almost three years old.

I pick her up and walk into the living room where the three of them sit, drinking cheap beers. The only thing they insist on doing on game nights is drinking these low quality drinks and I never understood why. They are lucky I don't drink.

Alejandro tries to kiss his husband and gets a slight push in return, Natalia sets up the chess board. A beautiful, normal moment, it would not be nice to ruin it by saying something about my day.

But I have never been a nice person anyway.

"I went to meet Lizzy today." I tell them in a low murmur.

Lizzy Knight, as in Elizabeth Knight. My twin sister, who passed away five years ago. There remain no records of her ever being alive as our father wiped away every evidence of her existence after she passed away. She only exists in my memories and is buried under her unnamed headstone.

There is no point in announcing my visit to her but this is an unspoken rule that we have.

At my words, they pause and give slight nods and soft smiles.

"Aunt Lizzy?" Avery asks me in her sweet, baby voice. She is the first kid I have seen to start talking this early.

"Yes, princess, I met Aunt Lizzy." The fact that she will never get to know her clogs my throat with unnamed emotions I can't understand.

That is the thing, I never understood emotions while Elizabeth was an empath. She completed me.

My twin. My other half.

When I lost her, I lost a part of myself .

"I will go meet her tomorrow." Natalia says. She is the second person who never got to know Elizabeth. Upon meeting her, the first thing that caught my attention was the shared eye colour between her and Lizzy, the same dark brown eyes.

Silence falls for a long moment and it is abruptly disrupted by Avery's happy squeal and Nat's grimace as Billy, my cat, enters the room and sits on the black couch which matches his fur, camouflaging him.

"Can you stop hating on a cat?" Alejandro says to Natalia who is scowling at the feline, while laughing as he has told the best joke in the world.

He has had only two beers. Lightweight.

"The same cat who pulled my earring and split my earlobe into two? Never!" Natalia shoots back and glares at Billy.

"Take your cat away from me, Chris!" she shouts as Billy gets close to her and sits near her feet.

"He's trying to make peace, Nat, give him a chance", Darren says. He is the only person who has a brain and knows how to use it correctly. Don't get me wrong, Nat and Ale are smart too but they are...stubborn,

"I. Will. Not.", She says.

As I said, stubborn.

"This is going nowhere, let's play" I say and sit with Darren, facing the white chess pieces.

Looking at all the games set on the table, I wonder what game I am playing. Offering a job to Amara, coming down to the R&D department because subconsciously I wanted to see how she was getting on with her new job, not telling her to go away from Lizzy's grave even though no outsider is ever welcomed there.

However, the thing is, she's not an outsider, at least not to me.

I shouldn't be thinking about her. I did what had to be done and after that, my job was completed. Nothing more, nothing less.

I set my focus on the game and away from the red head who seems to have moved back in the place I always had for her in my mind.

The teams are divided between the whites, including me and Darren and people of colour, Natalia and Alejandro, which is bullshit because Darren is Spanish.

Nonetheless ,Alejandro calls him diluted as he grew up in Britain and is basically British.

His words, not mine.

I initiate the game by making the first move with my Knight.

We have another unspoken rule.

Never capture the Knight.