"That jade pendant necklace looks expensive. Let me guess, you conned my mom into buying that for you too?"
Before I could move, she lunged forward and ripped the necklace from my throat.
Cora was fast and vicious. I didn't even have time to react before the chain was in her hand.
The blood drained from my face. "Give it back!"
My panic only sharpened her cruelty. She studied me with cold, calculating eyes.
"This worked up over a necklace? Must've cost my mom a fortune."
"It was my mother's," I said, my voice cracking. "It's not worth much money, but it means everything to me. Give it back. Now."
I reached for it.
That jade pendant was a talisman my mother had paid for with her life.
I'd been sickly since birth. When I was ten, I was hospitalized in critical condition, unconscious, unresponsive. The doctors told my parents to start making arrangements.
My mother refused to accept it. She went to a temple to pray for me. To prove her devotion, in the scorching heat of a summer that hit a hundred and four degrees, she knelt and bowed her way from the base of the mountain to the summit. One step, one prostration, over and over again.