Softer Than Steel (A Love & Steel Novel) by Jessica Topper Read Free Book Online Page B

paychecks at Revolve for us. It’s only a matter of time before Sully sells that wreck of a building out from under him anyway.”
    “My uncle would never sell.”
    Would he?
    Charlie shrugged. “Everybody has their price, doll.”
    His words stung. That wreck of a building had been in her family for three generations. But what did Charlie Danahy know about legacy? He didn’t care about long-term or the test of time. And he certainly didn’t care about her.
    She’d hoped that the growing income from the yoga classes, combined with the cushy pay from her suburban day camp job, would convince her uncle to keep the building in the family, or to at least let her lease-to-own. She hadn’t shared her plan with any of her family yet. And she certainly wasn’t about to say anything in front of Charlie, who was currently prodding three fingers into her brother’s ribs like a trident.
    “Come on, Shay. You haven’t even told her the best part yet.”
    “We’re opening for Anam-Atman!”
    Another thorn spiked in Sidra’s side. Another memory tainted by Charlie. He had been the one to discover the energetic Indrish East Village band, but Sidra had connected with them on a cosmic level. “Their name means
soul
in Gaelic. And Hindi,” Charlie loved to proclaim.
    She didn’t need him to tell her what it meant.
    Anam-Atman fused bhangra and Celtic music into a fantastic sound track, one that had run through Sidra and Charlie’s first summer together. She had finally gotten used to listening to her favorite band without him, and now they were going to be joined at the hip, on the road, with him—and Evie?
    “You’ll come see us, right?” Seamus asked eagerly. “The first show is at Irving Plaza next month.”
    “Then on to the Trocadero in Philly, the 9:30 Club in DC, the Middle East in Boston . . .” Charlie began ticking the itinerary off his forked tongue, but Sidra was done listening.
    She willed herself to let it go.
Let it be the death of thoughts, of feelings that do not serve you; the release of everything you don’t need.
But it was hard to embrace a mantra when Charlie’s eyes were on her, grinding her focus down to brittle dust. He leaned back smugly on her cheap IKEA stool, and Sidra wished it would collapse to tinder under him. Then catch fire.
Burn in hell, Devil Man!
    She spied her lone flip-flop, the sole survivor from her adventure in the elevator with Mr. Import a couple weeks ago, in the jumble of sibling footwear by the front door. “Where’s our hammer, Shay?” she asked, plucking it from the pile.
    “Kitchen drawer, by the microwave.”
    Both men watched her as she marched past them, retrieved the hammer and a nail from the junk drawer, and made a beeline for her bedroom. While it would give her immense satisfaction to smack Charlie with the shoe—or with the hammer, for that matter—as she passed by, she refrained. She had bigger plans.
    Good. Riddance.
Two strikes of the hammer punctuated her thought and impaled the thin rubber to the wall above her bed. At least Charlie would be out of her hair—and nowhere near her zip code—this summer.
    But Seamus, too? She hated the thought of exporting one of the good guys along with the bad.
    She hoped the borough would make up for it somehow. Manhattan owed her one.

Sidra
    Goddess of Nighttime
    Sleep wasn’t coming easily. Sidra rolled her body to face the ceiling, listening for any evidence that her father was still awake upstairs. She had heard uneven footfalls and the squeaky protest of bedsprings about an hour earlier.
    It was the anniversary of a much noisier evening.
    Sidra sighed, kicking the sheet down before bringing the bottoms of her feet to touch each other. She kissed her shoulder blades together and let her arms fall away to a forty-five-degree angle. Inhaling deeply and exhaling fully, she felt her knees slowly sink to the bed. This was the pose she recommended to her students when they complained of insomnia. It went by