I laugh again.
“Gone, poof!” Finn spits out. Having the nerve to look borderline offended. “Without telling anyone, not even me.” He sounds pained.
“I don’t owe you anything.” My eyes are alive and sharp. “None of you!”
“News flash, lil sis. Dad is still your legal guardian, so yeah. You do owe it to him.”
“Two. Weeks.” I grit out through clenched teeth.
That’s all the time I have left before I turn eighteen. Before I’m free.
Finn snaps his fingers beside him but never turns his head. “Eli, you’ve always been the smart one. How long is that?” Voice emotionless.
“…Uh, fourteen days?” Confused as the rest of us.
“Fourteen days. Ding, ding, ding! We have our answer, folks.” He pauses and my teeth grate. “You’ll be coming back with us whether you like it or not. For fourteen days, you don’t have a choice.”
He crosses his arms, pacified in knowing I’m trapped. My resolve splinters.
Finn is right and I hate it. Abram has every right to ship me back and there isn’t a thing I can do about it. Not for two weeks at least.
“Now…” His tone lowers. Adrenaline radiating off his high. “You can start from the beginning—”
“—and we’ll sit here and listen,” Abram coaxes in gently. “No questions asked. Let you talk, or you can come back—”
“—and be grilled relentlessly until I wish you happy birthday in fourteen days and then you can do what you want,” Finn finishes. Taking back over his monologue.
The muscles in his neck work.
“Consider it my early birthday present.” His smirk charged.
“We came back because we wanted to, Rory. I want my daughter back with me. Where she belongs.” Abram eyes Finn. “In our house.Yourhome.”
My eyelids stutter. I’ve never heard Abram speak so passionately about me before. In the past, he’d made me believe I’m not wanted. That I didn’t deserve his love.
Now he just sounds tired, strung out.
Always clean-shaven, I notice the thin layer of scruff along his chin. Sinking into the newfound hollowness of his cheeks. This isn’t the Abram I know.
Something unfamiliar passes then. An entire civilization worth of work passing, crumbling from his face. Decade’s worth of ruin washed away in a day.
How does that happen? One minute I want nothing to do with him and now I feel nothing but calmness as he watches me through stilled eyes.
Unhinged is what I’m becoming.
I shouldn’t be affected, but now I’m not so sure.
A shadow falls over his pupils. “I told you I’m done letting you down and I meant it.”
Finn reaches for my hand, and I let him. “We came because we care, lil sis.”
My eyes bounce around between the three of them. When they land back on my brother, he smirks but it fades into nothing.
I know then they are telling the truth.
They care.
They want me.