18. Lia

18

LIA

Remember that part in Roadside Riders when Jolee had to hide in her tub with her mattress over her head because the tornado was heading her way and she thought that Grant was dead because he'd been coming to save her?

Today was a lot like that.

Gotta read my way out of it—recs? No trigger warnings!

Thanks in advance ladies!

From @rosepetalromances

I'm so sorry babe! Have you read the latest Jane Birdy? My daughter recommended it, I'm halfway through and it's so good—it'll make your brain ease up for a few hours.

From @lightinthedark2026

I wasn't in the dark, but I was a little girl again, staring at the message on the screen, until I threw my phone across the room with a shriek.

After that though, I'd curled into a ball on my bed for the rest of the night, pretending that the floor was lava. I knew if I got off of its small island of safety, among the nest of my covers and nightlights, something bad would happen to me.

My throat was tight, my heart was racing, and it didn't matter how bright it was. I couldn't shake the feeling that something horrible was on its way.

I didn't know how long I'd stayed there, pinned like a spider beneath an upside-down glass, tormented in turns by my memories and a million and one what-ifs. All the decisions I should've made but didn't that would've changed things. All the times I could have spoken up, before I lost my voice.

I wanted to destroy everything and everyone because it wasn't fair that this had happened to me. And then, because I couldn't—and because it felt like I'd let it happen to me, no matter how many therapists would've told me that I had not, if I could have ever squeaked a word out—I wanted to destroy myself.

I'd tried both things before, with varying degrees of success, but I knew that neither were actually helpful.

So there was nothing for it but immobility.

Staring at the wall.

Hearing the distant ticking of my hall clock.

Until my body ran through all of its adrenaline and collapsed.

I got to Corvo Enterprises at 1 p.m., let myself into Mrs. Armstrong's office, and then tentatively knocked on Rhaim's office door to apologize for my tardiness. I'd broken my phone's screen the night prior and it'd run out of battery before the morning, so I'd lost my alarm.

But Rhaim's office door was locked, and he wasn't in it—I knew because I pressed my ear against it and listened for quite some time.

Maybe he'd done a late lunch with his new girlfriend.

But my PI had told me he'd come to the office like always, alone.

And if he was with someone, why would he have been at Vertigo the other night?

Maybe because he was a scoundrel, like my father.

I didn't want to believe that, though.

And much as I tried to pretend my current discombobulation was related to him, I couldn't—my phone was sitting in my pocket like a hot coal.

Of course my dad had told my uncle I was coming back into town.

My dad had probably even gone and bragged to him that I'd been valedictorian of my class—which he always forgot to mention had only had fifteen people in the program. It was an exclusive, accelerated program so that the fucked-up children of the crème de la crème could get degrees. Not that I hadn't tried? But...it hadn't really been all that hard.

And it wasn't like a piece of paper could shield me now.

It wasn't like anything could have, then, either.

Uncle Freddie had gotten shot in some stupid lowlife dispute. My father was always having to bail him out; he was definitely the family's black sheep.

But when I was seven I hadn't known that. I'd been left alone at home in my family's stately mansion, my dad was off doing what I now knew to be "mob business" and my mother was either sleeping off a hangover or acquiring a new one in a different wing.

But Uncle Freddie was awake, recovering from his injuries, and he wanted to play hide-and-seek with me. Which had seemed amazing, up until all the parts in dark rooms when it wasn't, but if I thought about those for too long I'd?—

The outer office door opened, and Rhaim eyed me with surprise. "About time," he said, before walking past to his own office, completely ignoring me again, before he turned inside the next doorway. "I expect punctuality, Ms. Ferreo."

I seriously thought about bursting into tears, which had nothing to do with him and everything to do with my current situation.

I'd spent a month after graduating weighing my urge to get close to Rhaim versus my absolute terror over ever seeing my uncle again. Both of them were inextricably linked in my past, in a way that I'd never be able to excavate or free myself from.

And in the end I'd made the potentially rash decision to let myself go and hope: that because Uncle Freddie's job was overseeing Corvo's interests in Asia he'd never come home to hurt me, and that even if he did, that Rhaim would have scooped me up by then.

Rhaim had protected me once, and he would do it again, was my working theory, up until having actually met him for real this time, not just for a few shining minutes on a staircase with a skinned knee.

But I hadn't factored in my father's upcoming birthday, which it seemed everyone would be coming home for—or the fact that Rhaim hated me now.

I swayed a little behind Mrs. Armstrong's desk, feeling very lost, like the darkness was closing in, and dearly wishing that I held a box of matches.

"Did you hear me?" Rhaim said slightly louder, his heavy brow furrowed—and I knew if I cried right now, I would be as good as done for.

I sniffled everything that might shame me back. "Well, I expect to learn things!" I protested in return, making my emotions pull a bootleg turn from pathetic sorrow into vibrant anger.

One of his eyebrows rose precariously. "Do you think you deserve to learn things?"

His ridiculous question somehow helped me dodge another emotional crumple. "What the fuck does that even mean?"

He quickly frowned and his eyes narrowed. "Don't curse around me." I inhaled again, ready to tear into him with a sailor's tongue—I knew how to curse eloquently in three different languages—but then he cut me off. "Yes or no?"

I squinted right back at him, feeling like we were on a western, about to have a shootout. "I tell you yes, you call me a spoiled rich girl and that I'm wrong. I tell you no, and you think I don't have what it takes in me to learn. So I think you'd be better off asking why you feel the need to ask me that."

His gaze held mine for longer than it should have, but I didn't back down. "Sir," he added, on my behalf—and I was tempted to throw Mrs. Armstrong's ridiculous elephant paperweight at him.

"Sir," I said, as spitefully as I could manage.

He went back into his office then, without saying another word, and I sank unsteadily into the chair behind me to put my head in my hands.

And then thirty goddamned seconds later he burst back out. "Why were you late?" he demanded.

I blinked, utterly disarmed. "I had a bad morning."

"Why?" he pressed.

"I—I just overslept." He kept staring at me strangely, and I was suddenly worried that he could really see me —the real me that lived underneath my designer clothes and my makeup and my long sleeves, the me that'd been hiding in her bed half the night talking herself out of doing something stupid, like taking a knife from her kitchen and cutting at herself or other things she owned.

I had coping skills.

It was just that they were woefully inadequate.

I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to center myself, and was surprised to find him there still when I reopened them.

"Don't let it happen again," he said. But his tone was kinder now, even if his gaze was not.

"I won't, sir," I apologized bashfully, and he nodded once, before really leaving me alone.