The Lone Dove #1
Love and Trust are two very important ideals, but what happens when the moment you lose the two most important people in the world and are left with an inheritance, and a company you find you cannot trust anyone else with. That is P...
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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE:The Big Reveal
The best diagnosis I could provide in the unsettling sick-to-my-stomach pulsation against my ever-so-tired temples and the thrumming of my pulse against my clammy fingers. Clicking my fingernails like scratching a wet chalk along dry chalkboard. Like the clicking of a pen before an exam, before a nerve-wracking test and the eyes of many just penetrating my skull with pressure that was never physically there. If memory served me correctly-as it always had-my Mother was devastated whenever Dad hid something to protect her, or even if it was the other way round...protection-I was taught was to be prioritised first. Lies and deceit are left as collateral damage.
My parents could never prepare me for how I would feel when collateral damage came knocking on my doorstep...or rather flew from London to Moscow to retrieve the lies I placed in transparent glass jars like a cage of glowing fireflies where each one held a secret darker than the other. Each one more devastatingly beautiful and painfully deadly.
A never-ending curse with a snake-like rapture strangling around my neck and tightening with every step to the room with the door I didn't want to open, to the conversations I didn't want to have and the lies I had to open on cursive hand-written notes in a school project where the teacher reveals each one at random. A cursed lottery. Spin right-get all the answers. Say one wrong thing and the winner takes it all.
ABBA knows what I mean and so does Meryl Streep.
I'm so bloody screwed.
I take a very long, very deep breath. Stevens stands still, silent and completely stoic as Dion clicks on the top button of the elevator.
"I thought you said they were only friends?" Stevens sternly murmurs.
I sigh, leaning against the right side of the golden elevator, "They are, Stevens."
"Then, why did Maximus Myers claim to be your boyfriend? Do I need to start the 'talk'? Your father warned me this might happen, I just hoped it wouldn't be me that has to go to jail for murdering whoever convinced you to actually date. He raised...we raised you better than that, Poppy?!" He bites out, still refusing to look at me, while Dion and Jenkins look like two military guards and they act like it too.
Listening, but no emotion present.
I raise my fingers to my temples, a headache already coming on. He never uses my name, unless he's completely serious, and a bit angry.
"Honestly, did you think I'd stay single forever?" I ask him, incredulously as I look to him in disbelief.
He shakes his stern head at me, pinching the bridge of his nose, "I was hoping to get at least ten more years down the line before I had to even remotely mention it to you. I don't trust the Myers family, Poppy. His father is an absolute wanker and he's most likely to be one as well." He fires at me, trying to get me to consider it.
