All I Have

Chapter 13 ~ The 9 Circles of Testosterone Hell; A Lesser Known Herculean Labour

'You were where?!'

Ah, the lecture I've been waiting all night for. My grandmother slams the paper down on the breakfast table in front of me. My grandfather and father follow her, knowing there's nothing they could do to save me now. I am more dead now than any threat before this. They both look at me with a locked jaw, there's no humour this time.

I wince at the photograph, not because my hair doesn't look shiny enough, or because there's a spec of mud on my boots, two things I know my grandmother will have noticed already. I hate the front page because I'm ducking from the crowd, cowering from the cameras. I am running scared all over again.

'Alania?' I say weakly and Asher glares at me. My mother picks up the paper and begins to read to catch up as my grandmother's nostrils flare, furious at me, 'We didn't mean to go there, we were walking home and accidentally happened on it. We were leaving because we realised what it was.'

Well, kinda.

'A Moreau alliance rally?' My mother squints, Lars actually laughs quietly. I reckon he'd quite like to see us de-throned, it would benefit him in more than several ways.

'You should've told us before then we could've done some damage control Z.' My father says and my mother scoffs, her head in her hands. In my defence, I thought they'd know in seconds, I didn't realise it would come from the newspapers. An agent could have at least softened the blow for me.

'Percy, there's no damage control to fix this!' She says, also slamming down the newspaper even though this doesn't actually impact her or her family at all. It's not like dad's gonna have to bail on his child maintenance payments if he loses the throne, he doesn't pay any. It wouldn't make any sense, she's not taken care of me since I was a preteen, 'Honestly Marzia we talked about this. I was hoping you would've left this kind of immaturity back in London.'

I look at her, so does my father and my grandparents thinking maybe that was a little too far. To contrast, Lars looks quite proud of his wife, probably thinking the exact same thing as me. I toss my napkin onto my still fully loaded plate and glare at her.

'Maybe you should've just fucking left me in London then.'

Okay, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that.

I probably should have apologised out loud but I'm angry and so instead I storm upstairs to my room and lock the door behind me. No one tries to knock this time and I take a wild guess that no one appreciated my language or my opinion.

That's probably a shock for my mother, I've always sort of left my backbone out of our conversations because there's no point having an argument over Skype. I've just let her have her way all the time because it never really impacted me much. Plus I bet no one has cussed her out this badly since the last time she got a death threat before Adanna was born.

My phone goes off and assuming it's Asher asking me where I am, or Emilio calling to berate me for my stupidity, I ignore it until it starts to buzz several more times to an annoying amount. I go to mute the noise when my cousin Benjamin's face appears on the pixels.

'Benjamin Bordeaux, how's my sixth favourite cousin?' I smile into the receiver.

'We both know that I at least break top five, minimum.' He retorts, 'I just have one question for you. On a scale of one to ten, one being forgetting to do the dishes, and ten being telling your mother to shite off, how grounded are you?'

'I didn't tell her to shite off. I just swore at her, so I'm settling on a comfortable seven.' I reply, thinking I've probably been everywhere on that scale prior to today, 'How did you even hear?'