Page 34 of Where We Began

- Chapter 14 -

Dominic

Imarch across thecarpet at top speed, as if I'm running from some cataclysmic event.

But just like an avalanche, running from my reaction to Laiken is impossible.

Turning her down should have been easy.

It wasn't.

For some reason, in spite of my common sense telling me to keep my distance, I'm instinctually pulled to her. Even now, when I can't see her, I feel like I know where she is. I could close my eyes and find her in the dark. Her heart and her warmth calls to me.

It's distracting me from what I need to focus on. When she told me she had to find a way to keep my mother happy, I was sympathetic. I know too well what it's like to be on the other end of her wrath. But I meant what I said; we'renoton the same side.

Yet her comments made me realize that her situation isn't so different from mine. We have similar goals right now, though our methods for reaching them are probably different. I don't know what she was hoping to achieve by asking me for information about my family company. I doubt that anything I could tell her would change her fate.

For all I know, six years have passed and she's still the same wild girl from the woods. I don't know what she's been doing. I never came home during the holidays. All my information came from the occasional phone call and an extremely rare meeting with my father. Bringing up Laiken to him was nerve-racking.

He'd told me a lot of vague, hand-waving bits about how she still had all her limbs, nothing major having happened to her. It was a fucked up way to tell me she was fine.

I clung to every tidbit that had to do with her like a madman.

Maybe that's why it's so hard to be around her now. It's been six years but it feels like we're back to square one.

Except were not.

The way she shivered while I was leaning over her last night... how intoxicating her hair felt wound around my hands... We've never been in a situation like that. Our childlike innocence is long gone.

Focus on what you need to do,I tell myself angrily. Laiken really is dangerously distracting. I go through all the details I have as I walk faster. No one knows anything about Joseph's location. Everyone we've talked to hasn't been much help. The security at the complex has no footage, Joseph clearly hacked the system to keep his escape invisible.

The car he took was found early this morning, only ten miles away. He abandoned it in the middle of nowhere. Him, and our money, have both dissipated into the ether.

I need someone to tell me what to do next. I'd prefer it be my father, but I saw him leave this morning. Much as I don't want to admit it, I have to talk to my mother. I wouldn't say that I'm afraid of her. Fear isn't the right word.

What I have is a massive sense of self-hatred whenever I'm in her presence. My mother has never hidden her disappointment in me. And after what happened yesterday with Joseph, I know I'm on her shit list.

She didn't want me coming home. I wonder if she'll make me leave now, convince my father that this is a waste of time. It doesn't matter that I took control last night, interrogating Laiken like I assured them both I would. To my mother I'm a useless piece of trash.

I suspect I always will be.

Squeezing my fists, I force myself to pull it together. I'm stronger than this self-doubt is making me out to be. My instructors in school drilled me, along with the rest of the student body to learn how to focus and disconnect from stress, so that we could perform.

I channel that as her bedroom comes into view. On the small table outside the room is a fresh vase of daffodils. The door is mostly open; I tap on the doorframe, alerting her to my presence. “Mom?”

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