Page 32 of Seizing Control: Part Two

I kinda hope she sticks around though...

Like a barnacle, she’s grown on me.

“Jeez, Laz...” The goth girl mocks me with her use of my shortened name. Speaking around a mouthful of half-chewed sandwich, she says, “You look like you’re about to cry.”

“Shut up.” I bump my hip to Layla’s leg as I pass by her to grab the milk from the fridge and the sugar cannister from the pantry. Popping the lid off the takeaway cup, I add a dollop to the black coffee she ordered me, and stir in three sugars. When I fit the lid back on my cup, she rolls her eyes at me. “I’m not dumb, I know you better than you think.”

“Yeah... and the fact you won’t even give me the satisfaction of watching you gag over it is frankly annoying.” Layla swings her legs while she finishes her sandwich. I flip a few more pages in the binder, looking for the fridge she mentioned. A greasy finger directs my attention to the appliance when I reach the right section, and when I slap her hand away, she says with a laugh, “God, you’re so precious over this.”

“Need it to be perfect.”

“Perfect smerfect, Lily’s gonna kill you for buying a house and renovating it without her input, then selling it to her for well under market value.”

“Bullshit.” I snap the binder shut. “I’m being romantic.”

“You’re being a control freak.”

“And you’re basing that on, what? Your extensive history of successful relationships...”

With a snort of derision, Layla slides down from the kitchen counter. She grabs my breakfast roll and tosses it in the bin. My reflexes are quicker than hers, so I grab my coffee and hold it high in the air to stop her from disposing of it too. The angry woman stretches to her full height and swipes her arm to knock it out of my hand.

Steadfast, I avoid her slaps and step out of her way when she attempts to elbow me in the gut. “Calm down, goth girl... it was just a question.”

“It was fuckin’ rude.”

“Truce?” I ask when she tries to kick out my knee from underneath me. “I’ll apologise if you do?”

Layla stills. Sneering at me, disbelief in her black-ringed eyes, she cocks her head to the side. “You apologise first.”

“Fine. I’m sorry I teased you about your lack of relationship experience.”

“Apology accepted.”

Quirking an eyebrow, I say, “And?”

The dark chuckle that Layla offers makes me narrow my eyes. “And, what? You are being a control freak, and it’s going to blow up in your face. I’m not apologising for being right.”

“Fuck me. You’re impossible.”

When my gaze darts around the kitchen, an instinctive and very appropriate response considering Gabriel’s favoured punishment for cursing, Layla laughs. “He was in his office when I left... pretty sure he can’t teleport so your safe from the taser.”

Avoiding her scorn-filled expression, I grab my car keys from the rack and head toward the internal garage door. “Shut up... meet me at the facility.”

Her sporty convertible zips past me as I exit my street. It takes all my willpower to stop from taking the exit that passes by the house Lily shares with her husband on my way out of our suburb. The rows of gated homes, all of them toeing the line between classy and obscene, mock me. I was never the kind of man who aspired to live like this.

For most of my adult life, I was happy with my Harley and a room at the compound.

Give me a motorcycle engine to fix, beer, cigarettes, and a game of Rugby whenever I needed to burn off energy, and I was set. Things changed when Lily was released from the hospital after Alex’s attack on her eighteenth. I gave Nadia carte blanch with my bank account, and she purchased a home for us around the corner from the house Sander and Cub moved into to attend university. My sweet thing’s best friend furnished it for me, then she moved in all of our belongings while I maintained my bedside vigil for my broken metukà shelì.

Lily seemed happy when I showed it to her, and we lived there until she was kidnapped.

When I left her after the miscarriage, I sold the house without a second thought.

Purging everything that Alex had tainted felt right.

Not that I ever checked in with Lily to see if she agreed.

As I picked up speed on the freeway, I’m struck again by what Layla just said.

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