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WINTER
The first thingI do when I get to London is go to where my father’s office was. My emotions are all over the place after the headlines broke out.
I looked at some of them while I was on the plane and fuck, there were a lot of nasty things on there that people were saying about me. I guess I don’t have anyone else to blame but myself.
I was the one who put myself in that situation in the first place. That was the night I set Mason’s Bugatti on fire, and I guess I thought I could play in the big leagues. I ended up getting burned instead.
I’m also a dumbass for thinking that Mason wouldn’t hurt me again. Ugh, why the hell do I keep falling for his traps? The devil really is a charmer, that’s for sure.
I walk into my father’s old office and turn the lights on. When I left London to move back to Ravenwood, I left specific instructions that my father’s office was not to be used. The new office manager of this branch had to find another office to make his own.
I guess I didn’t want anyone else in his space. From the looks of things, they did as they were told. Stepping foot in here after so long brings a pang of pain in my chest. All the memories of being in here and spending time with my dad flood me and it makes it hard to breathe for a second.
It was here where he was starting to teach me the ropes of the business, and here where sometimes we goofed off more than worked. I’ll always cherish the memories we had together.
I may not have wanted to come to London in the first place when we first had to move, but somehow, it turned out to be the place with the best memories.
I take a seat in the chair that I always sat on when I was here. Sometimes, I’d just sit in this chair and watch Dad work for hours. It was amazing watching him work and doing everything all at once, or at least that’s what it seemed like when I was younger. He was definitely a superhero to me.
I don’t even realize tears are streaming down my face until my vision is too blurry to see clearly. The memory of him always hurts more than I thought possible. How do you get over someone you loved so much? Does the pain eventually lessen, or do you just live with it for the rest of your life?
With the way it’s been hurting, I don’t see the pain lessening anytime soon. I wipe the tears away and look up to the wall across from me where my father’s bookshelf is. I remember when he used to read to me as a child and that thought brings another wave of sadness and tears.
I slowly stand and make my way to the shelf. I stand there and look at all the titles, most of them bringing fond memories to the surface. I stop when I come to Beauty and the Beast. It was one of my favorite stories as a child growing up and my father used to constantly read it to me.
I lift to my tippytoes to grab it. When I pull it, I hear a loud noise. The book doesn’t come off the shelf and a second later the shelves open in the middle like a door. It reveals a room. Curiosity gets the better of me, so I walk inside.
The door promptly shuts behind me and a second later the lights in the room come on. There’s a computer that’s showing the feed to the outside of his office that will let me know if anyone is coming. There are also a few file cabinets in the room, and I open the one closest to me.
“What the hell is all of this?” I whisper out into the room.
The first file I grab is one that contains pages upon pages of all things Alister King. What the fuck? It’s too much to read through right now, so I put it aside to come back to later.
The next file I grab is one about my mother and I’m hesitant to even open it and read it. I have no idea what the hell I’ll find in there. I grab another one before I decide to come back to hers.
My jaw drops at the contents in this one. It’s evidence of my mom and Mason’s dad getting some kind of drug. There are images that look like they were taken from a video. It’s of them with a well-known doctor in Ravenwood. It looks like they’re in some kind of warehouse.
There are other images of tons of drugs stacked around the warehouse. Some of them look like drugs you would get from the hospital while others are obviously cocaine. Why the hell would they be getting that? I have more questions than answers right now.
I continue reading the paper and I feel chills go through my body. There, in black and white, they were talking about how they were going to kill Mason’s mom and how they also planned to do the same to my dad.
I feel sick to my stomach. How could two people be so evil? How could they be so callous and cruel to rob two children of their parents?
I’ve been living with fucking killers this whole time! I think about all the times I’ve come close to dying and wonder if they had anything to do with that too.
Who the hell am I kidding? They probably did but I just don’t have any evidence of it. I grab the file my father had on her and begin to read. As I’m halfway through, I feel nothing but the sound of my heart breaking internally at what I find.
Emilia Crowne isn’t even my real mother…
What the fuck? She didn’t want to have kids and my father did, so he went through with a surrogate. I stumble a step back at what this all means. My whole life has been a fucking lie!
No wonder she hates me so much. It’s because I’m not even hers. I never was. Why the hell did my father stay with her then? Great, now I have so many unanswered questions and no one to answer them.
I’m pissed and hurt at all the lies I’ve been told my whole life. She didn’t just not want to carry a child; she didn’t want to have anything to do with it either and that breaks me some more. I pull out another set of papers and this one shows an accident report.
It’s on a woman with an unfamiliar name and when I read more, it becomes clear on who she is. My birth mother. The report says her brakes failed on the car she was driving, but I guess my father had it investigated. It shows that Emilia was responsible for her death as well.
How the fuck is she not in jail? Why didn’t my father take all this evidence to the police? I’m so fucking confused right now.
