Creed Manor is the quietest I've ever seen it when I walk through the front doors, which is to say that there's only a half-dozen people passing through the main hall. Contractors and interior designers rotate the manor's furnishing for the new season, install art and run maintenance on security. I don't see either of my parent's assistants among them and my stomach tightens. Beneath the guilt and fear, I'd underestimated how much I want to see my mom's face again.
When we were first dating, Nim had always made fun of the manor's size. She'd nudge me and talk of overcompensation, attributing the expanse of marble floors and high ceilings to ultra-rich showboating. Nobody understood the importance of space like my family and I. To come home from the public, where you're crushed beneath the weight of a hundred stares with barely a single breath to yourself, finally being able to stretch your wings and breathe in a world of your own.
I'd bought her family a hunter's ranch for her seventeenth birthday, somewhere I could visit without the claustrophobia of their shrunken apartment. Even then, she considered it a luxury she could decline and not a necessity just to relax. She's lucky humble beginnings look cute on her.
"Mom?!" I call, ascending the central staircase of the foyer and kicking off my tennis shoes as I walk. As usual, the staff make themselves scarce at the sight of a Creed among them. "Mom!"
"Zagan!" An unfamiliar voice rings out from behind me. Sharp heels click across the marble floors as a woman approaches from the lower gallery in a crisp white suit. "You're home."
She takes her time crossing the foyer, ascending the stairs with unhurried steps. As soon as I realise she expects me to wait for her miserably slow pace, I turn my back to her and continue on my way through the house impatiently. I'm not in the mood for another lecture from staff today. The time to see my mother has finally come.
She's not in her room, nor the study and I know my mother enough to know she'd never choose any other area of the manor over her laboratory at Creed Development Headquarters. Instead I abandon my search and return to my bedroom. Before I've even fully crossed the threshold, flames burst across my scarred chest to immolate the cheap clothes Aries brought me.
Disintegrating the coarse fabric is so satisfying that I don't even notice the change in my room until I reach for the lights for the walk-in closet. Half my clothes are missing, replaced with a wardrobe I don't recognise. In the adjacent study my old game console remains with my monitor, but the rest of my PC has been removed from beneath my desk and my laptop from it's drawer. There's no tablet on the nightstand where I left it and even the thickest necklaces and heaviest rings I own have been taken from my safe.
I tear my room half to pieces in search of my belongings, upending my desk for some semblance of technology. Fuming, I pull on what's left of my clothes and the nicest chain I have left. Someone's even purged my sneakers, taking anything that's high-fashion and leaving generic lace-ups instead.
This isn't how my parents punish me. My mother increases my media appearances, she puts me on diets. Sometimes she even makes me talk to my father. Nobody touches my stuff.
I scorch the marble as I thunder back through the upper gallery, the glow of my skin reflected back at me from the gleaming columns. At the top of the central staircase the woman rests against the balcony railing and raps her pointed nails obnoxiously against the clipboard in her hands.
A nymph in her thirties, with skin the powdered texture of a butterfly's wing, mottled purple and grey. From her spotless suit to the biting smile she offers, everything about her screams of the polished assistants my parents usually employ.
She turns around as I approach, spindly lashes fluttering as she offers me a simpering smile that doesn't reach her shimmering eyes.
"Where's my mother?" I snap, not bothering to start out with a positive introduction. Vainglorious, new-grad help don't deserve half the respect they consider themselves entitled to.
YOU ARE READING
The Prodigal Son (Book 2)
FantasySequel to 'The Edifice' _ Zagan Creed has lost his world. His reputation, his money and his entire future stripped away by the same people that call him God. The world, however, is not finished with him yet. The Edifice- both planet and prison to...
