Run Away With Me (Korrasami)

Chapter 2

There were three silent knocks from the doorway of the office. "If it's about the board, don't even bother," I said, never turning around from the window.

"Still?" Varrick said, baffled by my stubbornness. "Come on, kid. "You gotta talk to them at some point, or they'll put Future Industries right into someone else's hands. I know you don't want that." When I didn't say anything, he continued. "They're going to keep pushing, you know. And as someone looking out for you, they're going to push me to get to you."

The board was quick to turn to me. It was almost immediate, trying to put me in his seat without wasting a second. I wasn't ready. I was only eighteen, still in high school—I hadn't gotten to feel young yet; now, they wanted to make me CEO of Future Industries. The whole thing was almost laughable.

"When they do that, you can tell them I want nothing to do with them."

"Asami, come on-"

"Varrick," I snapped, my nerves on edge. I hadn't slept, not since the moment I'd been left alone in this large and empty place. I had let all the staff go, even the housekeeper, with enough money so even their children wouldn't have to work a day in their lives. Figured they didn't need to be in a place that housed a person like him. And now it was only me, along with the dust and my thoughts. I took a breath before I continued. "I just need...I need a little more time."

Time for what I didn't know. It only took me a week to come to terms with who my father really was, after all the interrogations and the pleading. Of course, when I witnessed it firsthand, I hadn't believed any of it. Even as I stared right into its wild eyes.

"Asami, please...please listen to me, i-it isn't what you think." His voice was so panicked and desperate, so loud in my ears. I had been so distraught by it all, from the moment the SWAT team kicked down our door to the moment they had found a bunker under the dainty little garage my father abandoned years ago. I saw the crates that held weapons no one in their right mind would own. I saw my father, there with his hands above his head before the police brought him to the floor, hands cuffed behind his back. I saw it all in the span of ten minutes, and I still couldn't admit that this was my father.

Hiroshi Sato was the man who raised me—cherished me. The man who did nothing but smile around me, even on his bad days. The man who would wake me up at odd hours of the night to have pancakes with me because those would be the times he would get back from business trips. The man who would spend countless hours going on about the inner workings of a car, teaching me all he knew. The man who held me at night when I had nightmares of Mom. The man who I completely looked up to. He was my dad, a man who could do no harm.

I knew his care for me was genuine; I knew that all too well, and that's what made it so much harder to believe that my father had turned into the same man that broke into our home years ago, the same monster who had held that gun to my mother with shaky, gloved hands. He was gone. In the midst of it all, I had found myself in his office, curled up in his worn seat and staring down at the courtyard from the window behind his seat, watching nights turn into gray mornings.

I heard Varrick sigh as I kept my gaze on the horizon, watching the morning fog creep through the mass of pine trees. "I know, kid. I know," he said, his tone quietly sincere. I spun the chair to face him. He was closer now, his hands resting against the chair across the desk. I could see the bags under his eyes. "I'm just worried for you, is all. I don't want you to just throw it all away and have you regret it. I know how much Future Industries means to you. I mean, you grew up in that building, worked in that building," He turned quiet. "right alongside him."

I snickered. "Yeah, I practically did everything with him, and I still didn't see any of it."

"Don't blame yourself."