Page 36 of Dominion

“Hello, Sis.” He smiled softly at Skylar, and all hell broke loose.

10

SKYLAR

I couldn’t rememberthe last time I was happy.

Not just smiling, but truly, truly happy. You know the feeling, when there was this fluttering around your heart, when every single nerve ending in your body was doing its best to make sure that the feeling lasts. It was as if the center of my brain in charge of releasing endorphins took an impromptu vacation and it never came back.

Like those stories of fathers who went out to buy cigarettes and never came back to their families… it was the same with my brain. It just wasn’t working properly. My reactions, my actions, none of it suited the situations I was in, and my reaction to the words that came out of the mouth of that man was not the one anyone expected to see.

I laughed.

I laughed, and I laughed and laughed until my stomach clenched so painfully that I had to stop. Every muscle in my body wanted me to laugh again, to release all the worry that burrowed itself inside my brain, but judging by everyone else’s look on the face, I shouldn’t be laughing.

But I couldn’t cry again. There were no tears left to cry.

In the past seven days, I went from being comfortably numb to being uncomfortably angry, and I had no idea what to do with myself. Anger, sadness, numbness, they switched from one to the other, pushing me into this abyss of misery that I couldn’t escape.

And now this.

Sister.

Or sis, as he called me.

My knee bounced, the nerves getting the best of me, but I didn’t try to stop it, nor did anyone say anything. Dylan was… I had no idea what Dylan was anymore. His eyes were empty, hollow, and every trace of the guy I loved was gone.

Some people could simply flip the switch, distancing themselves from everything and everyone, and I wished I could. Even when I thought that the apathy snuck back in. It didn’t last long, and I both hated it and loved it. But at least it meant that I could still feel something, even if that something was more fucked up than not feeling at all.

Dylan might have been sitting on my right side right now, holding his hands between his knees, but his mind wasn’t here. I was pretty sure that if I asked him what any one of us had said in the past fifteen minutes, he wouldn’t know. The robotic movements of his body were both worrying me and pissing me off, but I couldn’t do anything to bring him back.

I couldn’t even save myself, not to mention him, and I hated the fact that Ash noticed. He knew there was more to my disappearance than I let on, but I didn’t want to talk about it. I also knew that my bouncing knee didn’t appear just because my nerves were going haywire, but because I needed to forget again.

I needed my happy little pills, the bitter reminder of what I was turning into, but I didn’t want to stop it. This self-destruction, this self-deprivation was the only thing that was keeping me standing right now, and I clung to it with my entirebody, holding it like a holy grail that could make me forget about this miserable existence of mine.

But I couldn’t leave now. I couldn’t disappear like I wanted to.

Zoe’s eyes were firmly plastered on me, while Ash held his hand on my other knee, kneading the muscles there. I had a feeling it was more for him than me. And Cas, or Casimir, my newest brother, sat opposite of us, drinking the coffee that Zoe made, with the two of his henchmen on either side of him, watching us all like hawks.

My brother.

I have another brother.

The laughter ensued again. From the corner of my eye, I noticed Ash looking at me, but he said nothing as I laughed and laughed again. Every time I stopped, that single thought made me laugh again.

Casimir was my brother.

A brother I never knew existed, but he knew about me. From the looks of things, Ash knew about him. Well, he knew about Lars, the man he worked with, which was just an alias Casimir used to hide his true name.

I had no idea what to think, what to say. What could I have said?Oh, hey, it’s so nice to meet you. I had no idea that another kid existed in this fucked-up family of ours.

He had Gabriel’s, my father, last name, but there was not a single trace of Gabriel Lacroix on this man. I assumed that he looked like my mom, but his eyes were paler than mine, his cheekbones more chiseled, and judging by his height, his father was someone much taller than Gabriel Lacroix.

He was here to help us, or at least that’s what he said.

The problem with the things I lived through was that I had a hard time believing people, even those that seemingly didn’t have sinister intentions. But one look at Casimir told me that hewasn’t a man you wanted to cross. He definitely wasn’t someone you wanted as an enemy. If he could help us to take down Judah, we wouldn’t lose anything to listen to him.

From the moment he stepped inside the house, he didn’t take his eyes off me, which Ash didn’t really like. Oh, he didn’t like it at all. I wanted to think that maybe Dylan didn’t like it either, but from the moment Casimir came in, it was as if Dylan disappeared even more, if that was possible. He was planning something, and while I couldn’t bring myself to talk to him, to uncover the truth behind those late nights when he would go outside the house, I wanted to think that he wouldn’t disappear completely.

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