Page 34 of Dominion

Time passed, but we were frozen, engulfed in the miserable existence of our own making. My anger was a living, breathing thing, humming softly underneath my skin, threatening to erupt at any second, and I didn’t want to lash out at them. I didn’t want to push them further away. The sad thing was that if I didn’t do anything, I would still end up losing them.

And that couldn’t happen.

“So,” Zoe started, keeping her gaze downward. “I’ll be going back to Santa Monica tomorrow.” She looked up, her eyes clashing with mine. “Permanently.”

My heart thundered in my chest, threatening to jump out from the force of every beat, bruising my ribs in the process. She couldn’t leave. She… We needed her. I needed her here.

I needed her as a shield between the three of us. As the one person who didn’t try to push.

God knew what happened when Cillian and Indigo tried to push. It resulted in Indigo leaving permanently, after getting into a fight with Skylar, who told him, in not so many words, to go fuck himself.

“You’re leaving?” It was Skylar who finally decided to participate in the fucking conversation. God knew she was as quiet as a mule with everything else, completely ignoring every single attempt I’d made to talk.

“Yeah,” Zoe confirmed, not looking at any of us. “I have to go back to work, and Ophelia needs me as well.”

Ophelia, right.

We all needed someone to blame for the terrible circumstances we were in, and the person I blamed the most right now was Ophelia. If she only had kept her mouth shut and had kept to herself, Skylar never would have left that night. If only she had kept her opinions to herself, we wouldn’t be here, sitting like three strangers who didn’t want to be in this fucking room.

I wouldn’t have this noose around my neck, tightening with every passing day. Judah was out there, Danny as well, and we simply sat around, pondering over things we couldn’t change, lost in our own little worlds, forgetting what was important.

I wanted to see blood, to see Judah suffer for everything he had done. I wanted to see Skylar and Dylan smiling for once, instead of these bleak looks they were throwing my way. I wanted to hold them, to show them how much they meant to me, but it wasn’t happening right now.

Nothing was happening right now, and I hated sitting around and doing nothing more than I hated being lied to.

I turned to my left, to where Skylar sat. Her eyes were firmly plastered to the old journal right next to her. The one she wasn’t allowing anyone else to read. A day after the raid, Chiara came back, bringing in the diaries she found from the Blackwood family members who were part of the Order throughout history.

One of them was the journal of Medea, the first Red Maiden connected to the Order that existed today. I had no idea that she could read Latin, but I was obviously wrong. She wasn’t letting the damn thing out of her sight as if it could give her answers to all her questions.

But it couldn’t. I knew it and she knew it, yet she was choosing to completely clock out of this world, turning to drugs and the memories of a woman who died centuries ago. I thought we would be okay that first day when she let me hold her, when both of them slept wrapped around me.

And then everything fell apart.

The moment I opened my eyes, seeing Dylan standing at the window, staring in the distance, I knew none of our worries were over. Skylar was nowhere to be found for those first two hours after we woke up. When she finally walked inside the house, she ignored my questions about her whereabouts and went straightto the backyard, sitting in that motherfucking chair for hours on end, which continued over the following days.

The walls of this house were slowly getting painted black, the tar of our souls tarnishing the once bright and open area.

There was no cure for the sickness spreading through our veins. There were no words strong enough to erase the damnation we went through. Nothing would ever bring us back to the way we used to be. It was as if the fight that lived inside of us before the Red Manor had suddenly died, leaving these three people who had no idea what their place in the world was.

“You’re not coming back?” It was Dylan who finally spoke, his voice raspy from the lack of activity over the past couple of days. This was the most he had spoken at this table since he came back, and I noticed that everyone looked at him as if he had grown two heads.

But Zoe… Sweet, patient Zoe, just smiled at him and slowly nodded, the empathy written all over her face. I was obviously not the only one who needed other people between the three of us—Skylar and Dylan needed them too.

The clatter of the cutlery sounded from my left, and I could see the already standing Skylar. She barely ate anything, if two spoons of soup could be called eating at all, and judging by the look on her face, she was about to run away.

I wasn’t going to let her.

Not again.

We could hide and cry, and moan about this terrible destiny that was bestowed upon us, but that wouldn’t change a single thing. We could break apart, tearing our souls with every new teardrop, but the villains would still continue living and breathing, spreading their sickness all over this planet. We could wait for somebody else to do the right thing, to stop them, to end this grip they had on every single aspect of our society, butthat somebody else usually never came, and it was up to us to do something.

To change something.

To save those who would come after us so that they wouldn’t have to go through the same things as we had. Maybe it was selfish of me expecting Skylar and Dylan to wake up from this stupor they were stuck in, but something had to drive them. Maybe I was fooling myself, and this need for revenge of mine was just another coping mechanism, but I would take it.

I would rather take this and feel all this rage wrapped in a messy ball in the center of my chest, waiting to explode, rather than letting myself succumb to the darkness. Because if I did, Judah Blackwood would win, and that was something I would never accept.

The Devil had many faces, and often he wasn’t a small man with the red cape, tail, and horns—it was those voices in our heads, telling us that we would never be enough. Blaming us for the terrible things that have happened when it wasn’t really our fault. The Devil was a cunning bitch, appearing out of nowhere, when you least expected him. But we were stronger than him.

---