What's home, if not the first place you flee from? What's love, if not that blazing, unexplainable feeling born from the ashes of hate?
Reputable for her appeal, servility, and obsession with cartoons, Alaina is a workaholic immigrant doctor who's s...
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Ariana Grande - supernatural.
🌼
I'M STARING AT THE MASTER'S BUILDING like if I glare hard enough, it might sprout wings and fly off into the night—freeing me from the burden of stepping inside to check on my boss.
Not because I care. God, no. Far from it.
I'm doing this for self-preservation. If I don't go in, I might lose the one lifeline anchoring me in this hellstorm of a contract. And I wouldn't even know it.
My gaze shifts to my house. My feet twitch with the urge to bolt across the yard, sprint through the door, crash into bed, and finally drown in the silence—anything to escape the chaos my mother and grandfather unleashed tonight.
But no. I have to speak with him.
Just for a few minutes. Three, tops.
Mr. Ash, is our compromise still on?
Yes.
If so, I'll celebrate.
If not...well, he won't lay a finger on me unless I screw up. So all I have to do is not screw up.
Christ. This compromise has been oxygen for me. A rare, precious breath in the thick smog of this arrangement.
Like last night. He came back from wherever-the-hell and rejected dinner. I, foolishly—accidentally—murmured "arsehole" under my breath.
He froze mid-step on the stairs. Turned, slowly. That stare—grave, quiet—pinned me like a nail to a board.
The Grim Reaper waved at me from the shadows.
But I didn't apologize.
We stared each other down, locked in a battle of silence, until he finally turned and walked away.
That, right there, is the power of compromise.
Without it, I don't even want to imagine what he would've done to me. Just remembering makes my skin pebble with goosebumps.
I swallow hard and step into the mansion.
Steel fortifies my spine, and I whisper Psalms 23 under my breath like armor, summoning courage from the scriptures of old.
Past the foyer...through the living room...three more steps to the stairs.
Two.
One.
I freeze.
That backbone I forged? It crumbles to dust. The scripture falters on my lips when I see him in the kitchen. I'd expected him to be upstairs.
Mr. Ash grips the sink's edge like it's the only thing berthing him in this world. His knuckles glow white against stainless steel. Biceps flex like coiled thunder beneath bare skin. His eyes bore into the wall in front of him, unreadable, dangerous.
