𝐆𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐬 𝐇𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐞 [𝟏𝟖+] ✔

35

We weren't allowed to attend the funeral.

It had been deemed as too dangerous for us to be there. Eric nearly snapped my head off when I suggested it to my dad, and for the first time, I hadn't retorted with a snarky reply or even said a word. Dad ordered that I have no less than three guards at my side for the foreseeable.

I'm currently in lockdown at the manor. I can't even walk to the kitchen on the ground floor without bodyguards behind and beside me, questioning where I'm going and what I'm doing while I try to open a packet of bloody biscuits.

Ainsley hasn't left my side. Literally. We have both stayed in bed for days, only going for a shower and food when needed. With neither of us allowed to work, all we can do is binge watch Come Dine with Me, until Ains breaks down and I hug her for an hour as my own tears flow.

She had told me quite a bit about her and Gareth, how it started with flirty messages, random days hanging out, and that the first time they kissed was during the movie when they snuck into the kitchen. He had put in a graft, to be fair. Ains refused him for quite a while, and teased him until his face and other body parts turned blue. Until she couldn't anymore.

Ainsley also, very kindly and annoyingly, informed me that she sucked him off before he'd gone down on her, and went into detail that had me covering my ears of how skilled his tongue had been and how thick and long his cock was. But no sex, because she was a flirt and enjoyed watching him suffer. Thank God I walked away from his room door when I did, or I might've witnessed it all in person. She had the biggest grin while telling me.

Then she burst into tears again. I'd hugged her until she fell back to sleep beside me, my own cheeks soaked, too.

Skye and Diesel are with us. Cuddled up under the duvet, comfortable, waiting on Eric making some sort of appearance after dropping them off to my dad two days ago and vanishing into thin air. My mum has been taking them out to the back garden, escorted by five guards while they run around wild after frisbees.

It's not the same for the dogs, though. Eric runs every morning with them, keeping them extremely fit. When he takes his trainees on exercises, the dogs go with him. The security room at the top of the dome, they join him. Anywhere he goes, so do they. So now, they've spent the last two days lying in my bed, or walking around with Ains and I while we stretch our legs in the manor.

I think they sense the grief hanging in the air. The dome has suffered a massive loss, and every day, another person is rushed into the medical building, thanks to the two batches that had been tampered with. There are three pregnancies, and my dad has been pacing his office, trying to ignore Hank, the main scientist, going through ways to deal with the issue.

He's more concerned and worried about Eric than anything else.

Still no contact in forty-eight hours. I know that doesn't seem like much, but considering he's the head of security, and the dome's population is currently sitting at two-hundred and fifty-six with no sighting of him, it's a huge worry.

For me, anyway.

Only Eric has access to the tracking system, which means nobody can locate him. I also snuck into the security room in the middle of the night and failed to log in to his computer. He'll lose it with me when I tell him, but what else am I to do?

Before he made himself invisible, he hadn't properly spoken to me in over a week, since that horrifying incident. When he came to get us from the bunker hours later, covered in blood, I could see in his eyes that he was holding on by a thin string, the broken man trying his hardest to be strong. For someone who said daily he hated Gareth, he definitely cared about him being shot.