Cursed-epub Read Free

afternoon, sewing tiny pieces of glittering white beads onto the bikini top of a Carnival costume. Dianta, the bitchy, blonde girlfriend of Carmella’s boss, was the Rainha da Bateria of the Ramirez Samba School this year. Dianta’s role as the Drum Queen was to march at the front of the samba school drum section during Rio de Janeiro's Carnival parade and showcase herself on behalf of the school. No matter how much Carmella detested the viper-tongued woman, she couldn’t bring herself to screw up the costume Dianta would be wearing so that it would have a wardrobe malfunction. She couldn’t sabotage Dianta without hurting the school her father had built from the ground up.
    Dianta wanted the best costume money could buy, and she wanted Carmella to make it for her because the bitch knew that Carmella couldn’t stand her, and she reveled in making Carmella do menial tasks for her amusement.
    My father never would have picked her as queen .
    She flexed her fingers in the bowl of melting ice and tried to fight back the tears that threatened anytime she thought about her dad. Last year, her father, Gustavo Ramirez, had died in a car accident on his way home after visiting her mother in the hospital. He’d left the samba school to his financial partner, Enrique, who died of food poisoning a few weeks later. The school then passed on to Enrique's son, Miguel, boyfriend to Dianta, minor drug lord, and just all around desgraçado .
    Fortunately Carmella and her mother kept control of the family estate outside of the city. She was supposed to train under Enrique after she’d graduated college and become part owner of the school someday. Too bad his son had refused to acknowledge this unwritten part of the will. Instead, he acted as if he was doing her a great favor by letting her work at the school as basically his slave. She did all the long, tedious, bullshit jobs and the sewing while he sat on his ass and did coke.
    Her father had tried to provide for them after his death, but in a cruel twist of fate, her mother had gotten gravely ill after her father’s passing. The life insurance money and inheritance had gone to pay the medical bills from her mother's breast cancer treatments—wiping out pretty much everything they had. Thankfully her mother had been declared cancer free after her double mastectomy, but by then they’d barely had enough money to get by. In an effort to keep her family home, Carmella had to abandon her dreams of an education with only three semesters to go. She’d searched for weeks for a decent job and had been rejected at every turn. When Miguel had offered her a job she’d had no choice and came to work for him as basically an indentured servant.
    Sometimes it seemed as though she was cursed with bad luck.
    She removed her hands from the ice water and examined the reddened tips of her fingers before drying them on a faded orange towel. Her feet ached too, and she couldn't figure out why. They felt as if she had been dancing for hours in her heels, but she hadn't danced more than two or three times since her father's death. As soon as she started to dance in her father’s studio, she’d become overwhelmed with sorrow at the thought that she’d never look up to see him in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors again, so incredibly handsome with her mother in his arms. She’d had the blessing of growing up with parents who truly, deeply loved each other, but it made her own lonely existence hurt all the more.
    Rubbing the back of her neck, Carmella walked to the small window over the sink and looked through its bars. The fourth-story apartment peered out over a crowded city block in one of the nicer sections of the ghetto of Rio…if there was such a thing. Clothes hung to dry from lines strewn between the dilapidated apartments, and the sun set over the distant glitter of Rio's skyscrapers.
    She lived in an overcrowded section of the city, on the west side of town. It was the only place she could afford