Paper Roads

7 | ♤ | Lethal Combinations

CHAPTER SEVEN
- Sinclair

I DREAM OF THAT night.

After years of trying not to spare it a single thought, it rears up on me in vivid detail and catches me by surprise.

Once again, I find my friends and myself back in Florence for summer break just before our senior year of high school, once again we get buzzed on wine and stumble our way into a skirmish with a very dangerous crowd and just like all those years ago, we get kidnapped and find ourselves in the hands of men with mafia ties, but this time our parents don't find us.

This time, the Vultures put me in a cage and force me to watch them shoot my friends, one by one. Each of their bodies hit the floor with sickening thumps, blood pooling around them through the hole right in the centre of their eyes.

And I scream, I scream for them to kill me instead, so much that when I wake up thrashing against the sheets, my throat feels hoarse and dry, sweat clings to my bare skin and my breaths rush out of me trying to subdue the nausea and panic.

I hastily throw away my comforter, my heart beating so hard I hear the thumps in my ears as I try to convince myself that it was a dream, that I've long been free of cages.

But not even after chugging a glass of water and finally getting a handle on myself can I forget how all those years ago my father had refused to bail me out as punishment for going on that trip and getting involved in the whole mess.

Nothing can erase the desperation and agony I had felt when my friends and my twin sister were forced to walk away from me, to let me rot in jail for two months while they go back to Hilshire to continue their lives-all but Aaron, who had been proclaimed dead but was actually still in the clutches of the gang and Jasmine, who couldn't bear to return to a town that reminded her so much of everything she had lost-her boyfriend and her brother.

I never blamed them though because it was not their fault and I would always it rather have been me than them. All that blame and hatred fell on Dominic Sinclair, my asshole of a father.

I had taken the gun Adelin had used to shoot Vulture-our captor-so that she couldn't be charged for illegal possession of a gun and that had apparently been the last straw.

Dominic Sinclair straight up refused to be there for his only son when I had needed him the most, he had simply turned his back on me and left without any explanation.

And so my Monday morning had been akin to my own specifically curated version of hell. What I hadn't realised was that the nightmare would serve as a trigger, it had ushered with it an awareness of all the things I had stacked on my plate and how I was running out of time to bring them to fruition.

The plans I had for my father and the never ending amount of unfinished work I had due to balancing both my majors were all accumulating into one big mess.

Falstaff's leave had pushed me to take a more active role as his TA which meant neglecting many of my assignments, I hadn't even started on the romanticism vs idealism project and contacting and scheduling meetings with potential business clients had proved harder than I thought.

Not to mention how taxing it was to keep all this a secret from the people that were quite literally my family. I wasn't even going to try to sort out whatever had been brewing between Cynthia and me.

It had built up gradually as if an hourglass had been tipped over, a steady stream of sand now gathering and as the days had progressed that small pile had turned into a considerable peak, going harder to ignore.

I felt mentally and physically drained, going through the week absently, not really paying attention to anything except sorting and focusing on getting through the long list of things I had to do and by the time I realised that all the time I kept for myself had gone into work and catching up, it was too late.