Page 99 of Villain Era

I hold still and hope that if I don’t move, maybe Dom won’t realize he’s sharing so much and he’ll continue telling me his story.

"I knew if I played my cards right, I would eventually take over his reign when he retired, I just didn't anticipate his demise when it happened. It came to a head abruptly and without everything set in stone. It complicated things and gave others the opportunity to take what I had worked my entire life for.

“Anyway, you know how things ended, but how things began? Nothing crazy. Just a kid who grew up on the wrong side of town and seized a chance to escape from poverty and homelessness.”

“I…I had no idea,” I confess when he doesn’t continue. “What about your parents?”

Dom shrugs. “Never knew them. They put me in the system when I was a baby. And the family I mentioned, I didn’t mean blood. But we all know family is much more than DNA. They were older kids in the system who aged out and had other friends older than them that were runners or soldiers or just people who would do anything for a buck. I hung around them any chance I could. Some of them took me in when I didn’t have anywhere else to go. It didn’t take long for me to pay attention and figure out who Franklin was. The rest was history.”

It's no wonder Dom is a cruel bastard—he quite literally had no parental figure in his life aside from a psychotic criminal who manipulated and brainwashed a child into joining their organization. He never got to have a warm mother, or a protective father.

I may have had a screwed-up childhood, but at least I have some memories from before my mother died. She was the light of my life, and my dad’s, too, but once she was gone, she left behind nothing but darkness to swallow us whole. My dad resorted to drinking, and I hid in the shadows as the booze turned him into something that eventually became completely unrecognizable. My adult self sympathizes with his loss, but he never should have neglected his child, and that's unforgivable. I was never safe, loved, or cared for, not until the equally broken blond-haired, blue-eyed boy showed up in that cemetery. I felt his loss from a mile away and knew that only he could understand the agony of being abandoned.

It’s a harsh thing to say, that my mother’s death left me abandoned, but that’s what it felt like. I was discarded, thrown to the wolves, and meant to fend for myself. I was a child, and I had no one to rely on. I stole change from my dad’s coat pockets and walked barefoot down the street to buy whatever clearance food I could from the local mart. He bought groceries on occasion, but it was usually beer and chips, nothing a growing kid could survive on. I dug through trash bins behind the shops to scrounge for anything of substance. One of the shop owners near my house took pity on me, and when they set expired goods out to the trash, they would leave them on the step instead of putting them in the bins. It wasn't much but that act of kindness helped me through a time when I wasn't sure if I'd make it through or not.

The kids at school made fun of me for getting the free lunch but that was my only chance for a hot meal and there was no way I was passing it up.

It honestly wasn’t until years later that I realized how fucked up I had it. Because when you’re a kid and that’s all you know, you don’t consider much else. The memories of my mother faded into something from so long ago I started to doubt she had ever really existed. The only thing holding her in this dimension were a few of the Polaroids I kept tucked under my mattress.

One drunken night, my dad had set fire to her clothes in the front yard. He was carrying on about living with her ghost and that the only way to get rid of her was to burn her belongings. He ripped every picture off the wall, grabbed anything that remotely held any resemblance to her time with us, and lit it ablaze.

I ran to the drawer in the front room when he wasn't looking and snatched those few photos, hugging them tight to my chest as I ran out of the house and hid in the bushes next door. I watched with bated breath as the police came and arrested him. They searched the house, which I can only assume was for me, and I didn't see him for three days.

I was six years old, and that memory is only one of the few that is painted vividly in my head.

The rest of them are a muddled mess that makes me wonder whether I had any decent memories from my childhood at all. Or maybe my mind fucked up and repressed the good instead of the bad ones.

But even as bad as I thought I had it, I can’t imagine being indoctrinated into a criminal organization before I could learn how to read.

Dom might have a great-ish life now, but he’s lost so much in the process. His childhood, his innocence, his sense of self.

I’m fortunate enough that he’s capable of the love that he does give me. Despite his upbringing, Dom has moments of being soft and kind and good.

I see it when he does something for others without expecting it in return. When he took Magnus and Coen under his wing—sure he had a greater plan for them, but he could have killed either one of them. When he cut his call short because he saw I was in the middle of a panic attack during take-off. When he burst into the bathroom during our first major interaction to save me from that disgusting drunk who tried to force himself on me. He didn't have to do any of that. He could have looked the other way or carried on with his life without intervening.

“Did you ever try to find them?” I ask him. “Your parents?”

Dom’s jaw tenses. “I did, actually.” He averts his gaze like he’s recalling a memory.

“Were you able to meet them?”

He shakes his head slowly. “They had been long dead by the time I found out who they were.”

I cup his hand with mine. “I’m so sorry, Dom.” I am all too familiar with the pain of loss.

Frances approaches from the back of the plane, distracting us from the weight of this conversation. “Mr. Adler, would you like me to prepare something for you and Miss June?”

Dominic checks his expensive watch. “No, I think we’re fine for now.” He tilts his head toward me. “Unless you’d like something.”

“No, I’m good.” The idea of eating anything while stuck in this flying death trap is completely unappealing. I haven’t had much of an appetite lately in general, but being up here, it’s definitely nonexistent.

“Some water would be nice, though,” Dom tells Frances.

Frances does that tipping of his head and slow blink thing that he seems to always do before he dismisses himself and turns on his heel, trailing back in the direction he came.

“I…” I try to find the words to say but know nothing will be right, so I say the first thing that pops out. “I didn’t mean to bring up such a sensitive topic.”

Dom clenches my hand and forces a toothless smile. “That was a lifetime ago. No need to fret.”

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