It’s always starts the same: tightness in my throat, pressure in my chest. It feels as though if I don’t remove myself to a place where I can be alone, that I might die—even though sometimes I wonder if that would really be the worst thing. So I run. At least this time, I had the wherewithal to put on tennis shoes and not run out in my slippers.
That penthouse. The glamorous sterility of it makes grounding myself damn near impossible. I can’t find something to name in the room of different colors when everything is either white or various shades of tan. That vanilla existence literally sends me into orbit. There is nothing in that environment to distract from the darkness swirling inside me.
When the panic sets in, like it did tonight, I pace the entire minute-long elevator ride to the ground floor. Like a caged animal, I ping four steps from one wall, then four steps to the other. Back and forth. I can’t stop moving. Sweat beading on my neck, my damp hands fidgeting as I beg for the ding of the doors before they open. I desperately anticipate seeing those big plate glass doors that let me run from their expectations. I can put a pin in my father’s predetermined future for me, at least until they find me.
Funny how the path he’s chosen for me has changed so drastically over the last few months. Before, it was law school, working for him, breaking my back to make up for the fact that I was born his meek little girl and not his goddamn respectable son.
Liam Betancourt is far from father of the year. Everything with him is a business transaction. He wasn’t always like that, but one day he woke up and slipped into his god complex like a perfectly tailored suit and hasn’t let something as emotional as fatherhood color his judgment since. His priorities changed quickly. All that matters to him anymore is power, and he only bothers with things that will give him every ounce that he feels entitled to. Now that an opportunity for a fistful of it has come his way, or more specifically, in his daughter, he won’t let it slip away from his insatiable grasp.
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