Hide & Seek - Daniel Le Domas.

🥀 Chapter Five 🥀

Its all clashing within him; tearing his heart and his tattered soul apart from the inside out. He hadn’t wanted any part of this and yet here he stood, assisting his family. It felt wrong but he had no choice. He couldn’t lose them for two women he had simply grown fond of.

So, with head hung low, he returns to the task at hand, leaving his emotions to fade back into his deep dark depths.

Meanwhile, further away, Monica and Grace run down the hall before turning into a large room they quickly identified as the study.

Monica clutches her arm as she does so, feeling the burning around her wound and the warm blood trickling down her arm. “Check the phone.” she whispers to Grace as she runs over and tries to pry open the windows, though to no avail. They were locked and sealed tight. They definitely weren’t budging anytime soon, which meant that Alex had been right; the house was on full lockdown.

Fuck.

“Nothing. Shit!” Grace puts the phone down carefully and whisper shouts in frustration.

She glances to her friends bleeding arm and rushes over, now only noticing that she had been hit by the bullet. “It’s fine, really. It's just a graze.” Monica whispers with a reassuring smile. She honestly wasn’t completely sure that it was a graze, but right now she didn’t care about her wound. She just needed to get Grace out of here and to safety.

Monica slowly walks over to the chair in front of the study desk and lifts it above her head, ready to throw it against the window in a bid to break the damn thing and give the two of them an escape route.

However, she stills at the small flashlight she catches sight of down the hall. Silently and carefully she places the chair back in its place and sneaks back over towards the wall, pulling Grace with her.

The two of them press themselves against the wall beside the door as closely as possible, all the while trembling with fear. Monica was honestly in more pain than she cared to admit, she needed to bandage her wound before the blood began falling to the floor. The last thing they needed right now was to leave a trail of blood wherever they went.

The door beside them opens suddenly and in walks Daniel, looking utterly awful. He stops just in the doorway, still holding onto the door and clearly as shocked to see them as they were to see him.

His eyes trail from a heavily breathing Grace, to an injured Monica. He frowns at the blood tricking down her arm and the clear bullet wound decorating it. Realisation dawns on him; she had been the one hit by one of the bullets.

He takes a subconscious step towards her only for her to take a cautious step back. She was scared of him. In this moment, he was her enemy and that alone broke his heart. He didn’t want to be the bad guy, to be the man to implement fear into her. He didn’t want to hurt her, he wasn’t even sure he could.

He drops his head shamefully and walks past them, making sure to close the door as he does so. He walks over to the pool table and scoops up the bottle of bourbon sat atop it, fully aware that both women were watching him anxiously.

Monica could feel it. That inner conflict was growing stronger as her beliefs in him took home in her heart. She couldn’t see him as a monster or as the enemy because to her, he had always been a friend; a source of comfort and security. Tonight, hadn’t changed that in some ways, though she couldn’t stop herself from being cautious around him in this moment.

She couldn’t help it because her body’s natural instinct was to shy away from him and his family. Perhaps because mentally she knew she had to be on guard at all times tonight. No matter how much her heart yearned to be near to him.