She didn't know what she expected from him. But it certainly didn't surprise her.
They were both sitting in the living room alone, the tension palpable enough to cut with a knife. Ten minutes later and they were still both staring into nothing as the silence cocooned them with cold hands.
Callista noticed how he kept closing and opening his mouth, dragging his tongue across his lips. It was the only sign of discomfort he showed. Other than that, he was completely and utterly still with his blank eyes staring at the wall.
She wonders what excuses he would give her, if he'd say sorry for lying, for pretending, for practically poisoning her.
After he'd asked her how she was, she'd resorted to silently staring at him until Cliff and Richard had left the room. The awkwardness was intensifying that Laura had come in with a metal tray in hand. She placed what looked and smelled like iced tea on the glass table before eyeing Callista with her look; the look that said 'sit your ass down and don't be weird'.
She internally scoffed. None of it made any sense to her whatsoever. But the truth didn't have to make sense.
Like how her uncle married his dead brothers' wife. Who does that? Lucius Desiderio. Who hunts and kills people who have the ability to tear into someone's skin and completely bite their heads off? Lucius Desiderio. Who was sitting in this suffocating room with her with nothing to say and was fidgeting? Lucius Desiderio.
See? No sense at all.
"Well then," Callista loudly claps her hands before standing up from her seat. "This was fun. We should do it again some time. Probably in the next fifty years or so. When even my hearing aids can't aid me into hearing what you have to say." She could feel his eyes boring into her skin but she kept on darting her eyes everywhere he wasn't.
He stands from the one seater slowly. Cali crosses her arms and watches as he stalks toward her with a grace that she could now see belongs to a hunter used to catching his prey.
Cali refuses to be his prey.
"Leave." She pushes back her shoulders and stares straight at his chest.
Lucius sees her keeping a defensive position and he didn't know he'd say it until the words were out of his mouth.
"That was your mothers." He nods toward the silver pendant hanging in front of her sweater.
Without her permission, her hand grasps the wolf head and almost immediately, warmth flowed from her cold fingertips and spread itself across her chest until her body was relaxing like a cat lazily stretched across a warm fire.
Still gripping the pendant, she looks up until those all too familiar eyes meet her own. Staring at those gunmetal gray pair, she could feel as though she was staring at the mirror contemplating why her life revolved around a lie.
"Why did you lie to me?" The words were whispered into the wind but somehow felt as though the entire house could hear her broken plea.
"Believe me when I tell you, child that it was to protect you and your mother." He raises his hand as if to comfort her but drops it before he could touch her. She looked so much like Cara, his chest seized at the thought.
"But she died. In your home. Where you weren't. Because you were out murdering someone of her kind!" Her voice trembled with emotion and Lucius only barely flinched at the accusing tone.
She spoke of the days he was always gone, too busy to notice her mother slowly sinking into herself. Too busy to notice she was always staring at walls becoming as blank as he was.
"She died at the hands of a wolf too consumed by his own bloodlust to realize that he was just as much human as he was an animal." The mechanical way he spoke let on how much he'd said it to himself.
"She died because you," She pressed a finger against his chest. "Weren't there. Because you were never there." She turned to leave, afraid he'd see her pain behind her façade of empty eyes and cruel words.
"Callista, listen to me." He grabbed at her arm but she twisted out of reach. Always out of reach.
"I hate you." Her gray eyes were alight with flames and the embers that slumbered in her veins burst alive with the rage coursing through her. She could feel her nails digging into the palms of her hands and soon enough the distinct smell of iron assailed her now amplified sense of smell.
"It was for your own good." Stone faced and controlled, Lucius stood in front of a fuming Callista out in the foyer.
"Bullshit! I am tired of hearing those same six words from you ever since my mother died. My mother, whom you married, widowed from the death of your brother!"
"You've lied to me my entire life. How do you expect me to believe anything you say to me now?"
Lucius had no words. Cali knew only their half of the story. He debated on pleading she listen to him; tell her from his perspective. But his hesitation cost him.
Callista was suddenly tired. Not the one where her muscles ached physically but the kind of tired when everything had finally finished sinking in and all you could feel is the weight of a thousand worlds resting on your weary bones.
She sighed and Lucius was aware of the defeat in her otherwise blank eyes. Sometimes he cursed that particular trait in their family. How, no matter what he was willing to give, he couldn't read her emotions and what she was thinking.
Sometimes he wished she had her mother's eyes instead; expressive and bright as the morning sky. Not sharp and cold thunder clouds.
"Please just leave." She resumed her defensive stance, but this time less confident as her shoulders caved in and head bowed down to the ground.
Lucius knew he might never be able to talk to her again. And for the first time, he found a reason to be afraid of what would come next. He wouldn't survive if he lost her too.
"I love your mother." He started slowly in a low voice as his hand itched to grab hers. "The first time I saw her, I thought to myself how she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen." He heard Cali's breathing hitch and he gently lowered himself to sit on the cold tiled floor.
He watched her from the ground, leaning his head on the wall. The sight of silver trailing down her cheek made his heart ache. Callista only cried twice in his presence; when he found her crouched over her mothers' lifeless form, staring blankly at the forest with her gray eyes broken and crying, and when he first left her screaming and sobbing in that therapist's office to make a stranger lie for him.
"We were young, only about twelve years of age." Her ears perked at the revelation though she didn't dare interrupt.
"My family was on a trip up North. I was exploring the forest when I saw her." A hint of a smile blessed his face. "She looked like an angel. With the sun on her light blonde hair, and blue eyes were so bright and she looked so carefree in the clearing that I couldn't do anything but watch her. And every day I came back to watch her playing with the flowers and I left only after she did. I was growing more and more curious that one day I decided to follow her. I never thought that she knew I was there but she confessed that she did. One thing led to another and we both decided to become friends. To meet whenever the sun came down so our families wouldn't suspect anything. When the trip was over two months later, we had both gotten very close with one another. I promised her that I would be back next summer and she said that she would be waiting."
He watches as Callista sits down beside him, a good twelve inches separating them.
"I didn't come back. Not until four years later. But when I did . . . she wasn't there. I came back every time I could but when the time came for us to leave again, I stayed. For the last twenty four hours that I had before my family would drag me back home, I stayed in the clearing where I had watched her countless of times playing in the past. I hadn't given up hope. I knew she'd come, because she wasn't like me who couldn't keep a promise. And she did." A broken laugh escapes him. "I was a mile deep in the forest heading back to where my family was waiting when she tackled me to the ground. She pecked my cheek and said that I better come back next summer or else. And we did come back, for five years straight we came back."
"Our relationship was kept hidden from both our families and our origins were hidden from each other. It wasn't until she told me she was pregnant that I found out she was a shifter. I told her that I love her regardless of her genes and hoped that she'd still love me as well. We decided that we didn't want our families to find out about our child and that we run away together. But my brother had seen me. Anton was tired of living his life killing people he wasn't sure were the enemy. We both grew up with the kind of environment that we knew was far from normal. And we both wanted out. He knew Cara was a shifter and that she was pregnant with my child." He looks to the side, wanting to see what she could possibly be thinking about. Again, her gray eyes betrayed nothing. Clearing his throat, he resumed his story.
"Anton had come up with a plan about how he'd pretend it was his child instead. We were young and desperate and our parents had always trusted me more than my brother. It was only a year later that I found them here, at La Terra Valley. For five years we were happy. Until they came in the night with stun grenades and . . ." Shame coated his features as he remembers how the five-year-old Callista was crying and screaming in her bed with blood flowing from her ears. No amount of healing could have restored the damage.
"He died that night. Because they thought he was my father." Shock wasn't the right word to describe the horrible feeling curling around her very soul.
"I don't know when or why we decided it was best if you still thought of him as your real father but . . . it just happened. He was with me at the living room as your mother ran stumbling to your room. We were deaf and blind and barely functioning for mere seconds and in those precious moments, you became deaf, and my mother had shot my brother in the head."
"I don't understand." Her head was shaking, her eyes wide with horror, hands trembling, voice wavering. "Why would they kill him but not you? Why not my mother? Or me? Why keep us alive." She looks to her father for an answer he doesn't seem too willing to give. "Tell me."
"Because I bargained my life for yours. To keep you alive, I'm supposed to hunt down shifters they need and I'm to give you small doses of Aconite to keep your wolf at bay. And to never let you find out about any of this –"
"Well too damn late." She furiously wipes the lone tear with the back of her hand. She didn't know what to feel as a hundred dozen questions raced through her mind.
Why keep lying. Why keep killing. Surely there were ways to keep them safe that didn't involve hunting down people who did nothing wrong but to be born the way that they were which was in no way in their control.
She sees the faces of the people she cares about most and couldn't fathom the thought that if Adam, or Laura, or Jason, or Cliff or anyone else was being hunted down by her father . . .
"I can't." She stands from the ground and puts her hand against her forehead refusing to look at the man now standing beside her with a plea on his lips and an apology in his eyes. She struggles to breath and finally looks at him through her tears. "I can't look at you and not think murderer."
~*~
long time no update sorryyyy to my silent readers LOL please don't be silent anymore
now we see Lucius airing out his dirty laundry
been thinking about maybe writing a novella or short story or prequel or whatever in f its called about how it all began. as in start from Lucius and Cara and when they first met.
please don't forget to vote . comment . and share this story with your friends it would truly truly really mean a lot
Thank you!