Absolution and Fragility

XIX

She had to change. 

They didn't stay there long. By the next day, they were somewhere nicer where the power worked and more of Theo's people were. This home was high up on the high outside a city where the lights were bright at night downtown. There was an expansive garden with a fountain in the back that still glowed at night with shimmering lights only adding to its enchantment with the water.

Lexi wondered who the gardens had been built for all those years ago and who had kept them neat and tidy before Gordon had come along or who had done it before and then Gordon was hired because they were no longer here anymore. Well, and now Natalia – a sweet girl who was part of the house staff that left in the evenings. No one talked to her or about her as far as she could tell, and Theo wasn't around for her to ask the inner workings of the estate.

Speaking of, he had disappeared days ago – eleven to be exact – without a word to her or even a letter to leave behind. If he was truly anything like Sebastian Alexandros Drakos, then he was eliminating his enemy as they stand before they can attempt to hurt him and his family again. And, that's what his organization was to him – his family.

This was the eleventh day since he had been gone. For some reason, the lack of his presence weighed heavily on her today more than the other days. She tried to stay busy by helping Natalia clean and tend to the garden, but she could tell the woman was used to working on her own and preferred it that way. Many of the people she had come to consider friends were either busy with rounds she wasn't allowed to help with or had gone with Theo. So, she was more alone than she had ever been. The her before all of this would have praised this time, but she was unsettled.

Lexi had to settle for something – anything at this point. The boredom and the thinking had trapped her in the dungeons of her own mind. Anything could be happening out there and the anything aspect worried her to the ends of time. The possibilities she conjured up with every ticking second threw her emotionally in a new direction.

After sitting on the floor of her room for an hour and staring at the blank wall, she decided to change into some of the workout clothes one of the people had been forced to go get her. Day by day, her closet was slowly being restocked, but none of these clothes were the ones she had come to know, except the clothes she had had the night of the invasion.

Shoeless, she trotted through the house to the back garden. With the sun high in the afternoon sky, she began her stretches. The warmed grass from the sun in between her toes and underfoot with the fountain's rushing waters sounding from behind her began to calm her. Her mind slowly began to wonder to what her life could be like as her breathing began to center with every gradual movement into a new position.

Today alone she could be swimming in the waves off the beach of the home on the little island she grew up on in Greece. Her eyes would be seeing the reefs below the surface that have changed so much since she was a little girl. She would dry and return back to her little home where her guard was always posthumously offering her a cup of coffee so she could begin her work on her next article. Her normal day, but never the day she wanted.

Lexi would want to come home from her shift at her horrible job that she hated so much to her husband that she loved so dearly. He never cleaned, but he could cook and his Baklava was so similar to her Giagia's. He was a family man yet knew to never ask her about the family she grew up in. They were normal. It was fine.

The woman she daydreamed about was not Alexia Drakos.

In real time, she faltered as her eyes opened and she tumbled to the ground. Lexi rolled to her back and stared at the sunny sky once she had come to rest. Due to the high intensity of the sun, she had to narrow her eyes until she gave up and just closed her eyes. The sun was still unrelenting and created purple and blues spots behind her lids so she threw her arm over her eyes.