[Loretta's POV]
Home.
I looked up at the tower block as I crossed the carpark with my pathetic pack of belongings bouncing against my back.
Home.
This wasn't home. But Dr. Marsden had been extolling the virtues of home to me for at least the last month of my sentence. Sentence? Captivity? Whatever they wanted to call it. I had been released and I was returning to this. The two bedroom cage on the twelfth floor of this yellow brick, council estate hell. It had never been home. Home had been the house in the row of eight, with the little backyard and my golden retriever, Phoenix. But my mother gave Phoenix away when she gave the house away to the bank. Or perhaps that was actually another thing I have to thank my father for, when I think about it.
My mother had no hope of affording the house once he was gone, and he didn't leave anything behind to allow her to afford it. The buzzer was ice cold under my fingertips, and my mother's response even colder when she buzzed me in.
Of course, I didn't have a key. It was a bit of a catch-22 actually, just as much as I was not allowed locks, so too keys were now forbidden.
It was a condition of my return, to ensure that my location was always known and my curfew adhered to.
It mattered much less than I would let my mother think it did. Locks were plentiful everywhere I looked, and keys?
In all honesty I simply did not need them.
YOU ARE READING
Loretta of the Lamp
FantasyLoretta bit her lip and took a deep breath before she peered into the keyhole and slid the pick into the narrow opening. "You will open for me," she murmured. Loretta knows how to pick a lock faster than you can say "juvenile delinquent". But the si...
