[18+] His nickname was 'vicious', but she just thought he was a dick.
Matteo Vitale was an anti-hero through and through, his reputation as dark as his pressed suits. It didn't take long before blissfully unaware Alison Joy was pulled into his wor...
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The skyline of the city blinked up at me from the penthouse rooftop. Lamp posts and apartment lights shined like the stars on the night sky.
The city that never sleeps.
The rumours were true, and it thrilled me. I was always a night owl myself. It's so peaceful when the sun goes down and the moon enters with ease, without drawing so much attention to itself as the sun. It simply hangs on the dark sky, tempting us with the universe's mystique.
I hung over the railing, sipping on a glass of water. I'd just managed to put Jane to sleep. She'd struggled with sleeping alone since she was little, and it was still a problem in her big age of eleven years old. That night she kept asking for mother, something she hadn't done since we came to New York.
Jane was always a daddy's girl, which is probably why she managed the moving transition with such ease. But lately, her sorrow caused by the lack of mother had grown bigger. I didn't mind it, in fact it made me happy that she didn't take the presence of mother for granted, and realized that money could never replace the value of a person.
Jane was too little to understand everything that went down through our upbringing. We were three siblings, battling the everyday life of parents that hated each other, a mother that got depressed because of her cheating husband, and a husband that abused alcohol as much as he abused our minds.
Jane got out unscathed, still loving both her parents. Henrik being the oldest liked to say he was mature enough to handle it, but still got out of it with a raging hatred for father. And myself, I was left torn between my two siblings, trying to balance Henrik's hatred and Jane's love for him.
Mother used to say it affected me the most. I was old enough to understand their fights, to live with a constant suspicion of my father, to snoop through his things and hide his beer cans, but not old enough to be equipped with the emotional maturity needed to handle the stress. It took a toll on me. Stole a part of my happiness. Engraved itself into my mind, and the unhappy moments became dominant, causing me to forget the times when father was normal. He was always the tempered beast to me, chasing me around the house when I stole his keys to prevent him from drunk-driving. In reality he was just a drunk man, but in my young mind he had become forever a monster.
I held onto the fact that at the very least, he had never hit us.
The living room was empty in a total of five seconds when I got downstairs again, before father and my stepmother barged through the door, all drunk and jolly.
"Alison!" Harriet, the white-blonde thirty year old sung to me. "How glad I am to see you." She kissed my cheek, throwing her designer purse on the floor.
Father strolled in behind her, his face growing rigid at the sight of me. I could see him struggling to keep his composure. He was always like that when drunk around me. His face became overly focused on appearing normal, causing it to look awfully stern, yet his eyes danced around in the thrill of alcohol, exposing the poor lie.
