Protective Secrets (The Protective Series, Book 3)

Chapter Fourteen

[Dominik's P.O.V]

Moorpark looked a lot different to how I remembered it being. I was still heads or tails on whether or not I liked it, considering the change was pretty drastic for someone like me who grew up there.

The suburb surrounded by nothing but tall green trees on hills featured more roads than it used to, running through the town centre in all sorts of crazy directions as if a toddler had drawn up the plans. The local stores, once simplistic stone-clad buildings, stood glamorous and renovated with flashing signs instead of old faded ones painted by hand.

This town had nurtured me, but had also cruelly broken me; I lost my mother here, I lost Janne here, and I lost the love of my life here.

Not many people knew about my past, but those who did would have undoubtedly known the name Kelly. She was my everything when I'd been a teenager trying to fit in with the cool kids at school. But as fate constantly reminded me on a day-to-day basis, she was taken away from me way too soon.

I would have done anything to save her from the psychopath who shot her in the head that night. Oh, I would have leapt in front of those bullets myself if it meant Kelly got a chance to live and show the rest of the world her beautiful smile. But alas, her so called "best friend" had fired the second shot to "put Kelly out of her misery", as she put it.

I would never be able to understand somebody who thought that shooting somebody else in the temple was the best way to help them. I would never be able to comprehend the mind of a cold-blooded killer, and nor did I want to. Whatever cogs, or whatever dysfunction they had inside them that made them into crazed blood thirsty killers was inexcusable, no matter what the reason.

"We're here, Dom," Michelle's tired sounding American voice spoke from the front of the limousine.

Glancing out through the purple tinted windows, I noticed long, dying yellow blades of grass swaying in the breeze on the block of land we'd pulled up beside. The earth looked rich and brown again, showing no evidence of having ever been scorched from an explosion.

Inhaling a deep breath through my nose, I grasped the door handle.

And paused.

When I'd pitched the idea of coming here to Michelle, I was certain that I would be fully capable of handling the confronting scene I would be seeing. But now that it was in front of my eyes, only separated from me by 5 millimetres of glass, any confidence I had built up earlier disappeared into thin air.

The question I needed to ask myself was: Could I handle being on the same land where my family's house had once stood? Part of me wanted to believe that I possessed the self-confidence to do so, while another, deeper part of me argued that was far from the case.

"You'll need to be back for your performance with the guys soon," Michelle's voice sliced the silence hanging in the air like an unwanted, annoying insect. "If you're going to do this, you'll need to do it sometime soon."

"I know," I breathed the words, thinking back to old memories of me, Janne and Juha all playing in the front yard. We had no idea of what life would hold for us back then; we were just carefree children living our lives to the fullest each and every day. "It's just hard. It's actually a lot harder than I thought it would be."

She didn't reply to me. Taking a peek towards the front of the limo, I saw her applying a thin layer of mascara to her lashes, using the rear view mirror to help her see what she was doing.