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Probably that being on the road has finally caught up with me, and I've gone crazy.
Maybe they're right. I don't care at this point. I just care about seeing Mia again and making things right.
All the plans I had about resting, working, and maybe tinkering away on some new pieces with the guys in our studio back in LA suddenly mean nothing to me, and I don't know why it is exactly that I feel this way.
There's only one thing I do know for sure: I'm not going to be on my jet tomorrow night. I'm not leaving.
Rick and Sly can either stay and rest here or take my plane and go back home. I don't really care. I'm not going.
I half-heartedly strum and pinch the strings of my bass, my mind completely on her, when my phone starts to ring again.
Fuck, what now?!
I look at the screen and groan. It's Holtz again. This soulless vermin is the head of the legal department at Gabriel Group Global —my family's multinational corporation.
Hell is going to freeze over before I take his call. He should know better. I told him as much the last time we met face-to-face in New York three years ago.
Fuck me if I know what he wants. Sure as hell, there's nothing he could say or offer that would make me wade my way back into the loveless fold of what's left of my family. And we both know that.
Yet my parents keep up with their pointless demands, and he keeps acting the messenger. Like it's suddenly going to dawn on me that the shit they pulled was right, and I'm going to just march back into the nearest boardroom and beg them to put the mantle of doom back on my shoulders.
Not happening.
They know they lost their right to even breathe the same air as me after what they did, and still, they try to keep the lines of communication open as if anything they could ever say or give to me could fix things.
Being born the sole heir of a gigantic industrial empire can be a bitch.
You get no say whatsoever in your day-to-day life, and perfect strangers keep showing up to plan your future for you. Not nice.
My parents barely made cameo appearances in my routine, and yet, whether I was two or twenty-two, they still thought it was their right to strangle me into shape and bully me into turning my life into one of service to their greed and the glory of the family name.
After all, the family had to go on, the company had to go on, and there was only one of me. It was my duty, and it wasn't up for discussion. My wishes didn't matter.Ididn't matter. Not as a little boy, not as a grown man. Not as anything more than the instrument I was meant to be, anyway. It didn't take me long to figure out that the crown they kept offering wasn't to go on my head but to clasp around my neck like a yoke, a chain that would forever hold me back from being my own person, hell, from being any kind of person.
It still pisses me off.
And to think all the bullshit about responsibilities and expectations that they had crammed into my brain over the years had almost got to me in the end. They had their hooks into me with all that talk about duty, lineage, and how much I owed them for my privileged upbringing. Little did it matter that said privileged upbringing meant I was practically left to my own devices since birth. I mean, those mean bastards only had me because it wasrequiredof them, and they made no mystery of it. They didn't love me, didn't care about me other than the fact that I was the means to fulfill their own duties to their respective families, and they had to make me fit into the corporate mold that was waiting for me when I grew up come hell or high water. The loving and doting were not up to them. I don't think I've ever been hugged by those two. Actually, I'm pretty sure I have never been in the same room with my mother or my father for more than five minutes and only once a week or so at that in my first three years of life, and this despite living in the same house —sorta. We each had our private wing in that mausoleum. Being a child and all, I didn't have much use for a wing of my own, but that was how it was done, how it had always been done in the Gabriel family, so that's what I got.
By the time the sun had set on my fourth birthday, I was on my way to the farthest boarding school they could find. There, an entire posse of teachers and tutors could pick up where the nannies had left off and keep drilling into my head all about duty and responsibilities and the privilege of my position.
By then, the weekly assessment meetings I had with my parents turned into ten-minute-long monthly visits in which my academic plans, my grades, my sports achievements, and their expectations of me were discussed ad nauseam. Never once was I asked if I was okay, or if I was happy, or needed anything.
It was away at boarding school that I turned to music. I needed to find a purpose other than what they said I was meant to have in life. I needed something to love, something I could lose myself into.
At first, it was the piano, then I fell for the guitar, and finally, my real passion came along. The bass.
My parents seemed to be okay with me having an aptitude for music. Being a musical prodigy at four and a multi-instrumental player by the age of eight meant that they had something else to show off, plus they liked the idea of fostering mymathematical brain. Still, they never intended for me to pursue music seriously, not even as a hobby, and I could see they cared for my talents even less when I first realized I also had a voice and a love for singing, no matter what my tutors said.
I really tried to play by the rules at first and be the son they wanted me to be, but composing, playing, and singing were the only things that made me feel like myself. Music was both my refuge and my outlet, and I couldn't give it up for anything in the world, and it got worse when I met Sly and Rick at boarding school. They were kids with a background similar to mine that were chafing against the restrictions placed on them and wanted to just make music like I did.
I never could really see myself as a suit. There was no amount of cutting, molding, and brainwashing that could have really made me into what I wasn't.
I might have been raised in a family that only cared for growing money into more money, but I was born to make music, to sing, to play, not to buy and sell companies while arguing in some stuffy old boardroom. Music called to me, and I couldn't deny it. It was in my soul.
My parents, of course, didn't care.
I was willing to pursue two careers out of a sense of obligation when I was done with school. And I did just that for years.
By the time I was twenty-nine, I was kicking ass as President of Special Projects at GGG, even if the job bored me to tears, and in the meantime, the guys and I were working to makeBurning 21go mainstream.
