Polaris

Revelation

-Blaine-

"Of course not. Of course I wouldnt..." My father trailed off. "I-I wouldn't ask that much of you, not after..."

Ugh. I felt sick.

Sick like when those men had their way with me—

Sick like when I was used like nothing but a slave.

My vision blurred slightly, and the physical ache in my chest stung me like a million pinpricks.

This could've all been avoided if— if just for a minute, just for a sliver of his time, he had come to visit his so beloved woman and child.

Then—

Then all my pain wouldn't have come, and I would've been able to live a normal life, fall in love with Luka in a normal way, and not have put him through the arduous process of piecing me back together carefully, only for me to fall apart in his arms again the moment I relapsed.

To all the people I knew now, to Luka and his family, I was someone gentle, kind, scarred by my life experiences.

I wasn't.

The amount of times I'd wanted for tragedy to befall others instead of me, the amount of times I'd wished on the demise of others were enough to make me a sinner worthy of hell. But my fear of being abandoned, by my saviour, my lover, was enough to stop me from ever voicing out my inner feelings.

Why? Why was I the one condemned by the heavens to suffer so much? Why couldn't it be— why couldn't it have been my bullies from high school? Why couldn't it have been another person on the other side of the goddamned earth?

"God... if only for a moment.... Just a single second..." My own father could've exchanged a second of his time for 18 years of my peace, and yet, he didn't do so.

That realisation was such a crushing weight on my heart, that I couldn't even lift my hands up to clench at it. All I could do was feel, feel, feel.

Please stop.

How I wished for my heart to just stop.

__________

-Luka-

I remember asking Blaine if I could kill his adoptive father once.

What if I asked him if I could kill his real one too?

I gently wiped his tears away from his face as he slept, but my heart ached endlessly.

I called up Avery to ask what she had heard from the monitors, because the guest room Blaine's father was staying in was monitored and the audio was recorded as well.

"Look, Blaine's had to stop us both from going in to murder his dad. I fear that if I let you hear it, I'd be the one to open the doors for you to kill him. You know your little gem wouldn't like that."

Ugh. I hated the fact that she was making sense.

"But... he mentioned... the Brennan family."

"Shit. Seriously? The Brennans?"

"I've informed Aiden already. God, we have an ex-executive with us. The Brennans are gonna storm this place to either kill him, or all of us."

The Brennan family was a century-old crime family, along with two other bigger families. However, compared to them, the Brennan family preferred to keep to themselves, and everything about them was excessively secretive.

In the early days of the Rivielio family, it was only because we followed after their secret-keeping tactics that we were able to survive as a crime family. Information was a powerful thing, especially in our line of work.