Deception. Betrayal. Mistrust.
It seems the closer Rayne gets to the truth, the more she finds herself wanting to run away from it. It's complex and terrifying-more than she ever fathomed.
New family members, good and bad, pop out at her like a br...
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𝗧he cold metal of the hospital room door knob around her fingers pulled her mind out of the desolate land she had created weeks ago to survive her painful reality. Her mouth rounded into a solid oh shape as she sucked up every free atom of oxygen; stealing it from the rest of the population because damn her for being selfish for once.
On the other side of the door was her life and her end.
Even now, after fifteen years of unparalleled pining, she had no idea which definition it was.
—which they were.
Twenty-one days ago, after being released from psychiatric care at the hands of the Oregon hospital they had been transported to, she was alerted to Blake's transportation back to Los Angeles. The first thought she had the moment the sun kissed her lips and the air caressed her cheeks was to run to the woman that she'd much rather have replicated the motions.
She didn't.
Upon request, Blake asked for no visitors—going as far as to ask Rueben for a bodyguard. Part of her knew it was more than that; that she itched to be under the watchful eyes of plentiful cameras than return to the home that left her so barren and broken on that dreadful night.
But despite that information, Emiko had no merit to attend an audience with her. Whether it was because her priorities blared like alarms in front of her eyes, or because somewhere deep inside, she still harbored that detest toward her for their teenage years, she didn't know—or rather, she did—but didn't have the gall to admit such.
Her eyes instinctually glanced upon the layers of white bondage across the length of her forearms, shielding the world, and most importantly, herself, from the danger she so carelessly placed upon her being for a woman she was unsure even knew about it—or wanted it.
It was a reminder—a farce she couldn't sprint from, no matter how much she desired to.
Years ago, left stranded in a dirty high school bathroom, her heart existed. In a pool of dirty water or possibly lackluster plumbing that permitted the occasional splash of urine over the porcelain rims, she still stood—impossible, small, and irrevocably incomplete.
She promised herself not to return to those memories—not to return to that version of herself.
And she held true to her promise.
At least, that's what she told herself.
Because reality was, the moment her heart was plucked from that dismay, the second it was cradled in the idea of requited love out of the mouth of the girl who'd captured her heart at merely ten years old, she risked it all. The premise—the promise—of recognition removed the little boy, her son, from her mind. Her brain dismounted, only to remount with a transplant of the person she no longer associated with—the one she'd left in that bathroom a millennia, it felt, ago.
