“I have his emails and bank statements; I’m just waiting on his phone records. When you get here, I’ll have them ready for you to go through.”
I nod, but I know he can’t see me. “He needs to go down.”
“Is this about him or the girl?”
My father’s question catches me off guard, and I want to tell him about Rukaiya, my little wolf, but I don’t mention her.
“I’ll see you in an hour.” I hang up before he can say anything more. And my non-answer may have given him the response he wanted, but I no longer give a shit right now.
3
Etienne
Present day
I recall the moment my life changed.
I was fifteen.
Heartbreak held me in an icy grip when I watched my father pack his bags and drag them down the staircase. I escaped to my bedroom in time to see him shove them into the trunk of his Lexus SUV. He glanced over his shoulder, meeting my pained stare through my bedroom window. Seeing the defeat in his eyes was too much for me to bear. He’d finally given in to my mother’s constant nagging for him to choose.
She didn’t want him to be a Crown. She didn’t agree with the way he lived his life, but even then, he never asked her to change. And he could’ve. I didn’t understand it at first. I questioned why he would walk out when all he had to do was tell her he’s unhappy. He could make her see that her actions pushed him away, and his focus became the Sovereign instead of his family.
The moment he was gone, she became the type of mom I never thought she could be. But, then again, it was only when my friends were over. She enjoyed having Ares and Tarian here, so she could fawn over them.
When my father walked out, my mother blamed me. There’s one thing I learned about her in those early years, she enjoyed keeping up appearances. None of her friends knew Dad left; she would tell them he was away for work, or he had important matters to deal with in London.
Home was in Tynewood, but I never felt as if I belonged. That is until I met my two best friends. They offered me a safe haven from the shit I had going on at home; only, they didn’t know how bad my mother was.
I guess I’m more like her than I care to admit. I’m keeping up the appearance of the perfect son, but deep down, I know I’m far from it. I realized that love is not something you can buy with the millions we have in our bank account. It’s also not something that can be forced. If it were, my folks wouldn’t be living half a world away from each other.
Dad was always a prideful person; he never allowed his feelings to show. Ever. And that’s where he went wrong. But it all came crashing down when he told mom she wasn’t the woman he married. Of course, she’d changed. She was older, a mom, someone who spent her mornings at the salon getting her gray hair colored and afternoons at the local bistro drinking wine with her friends.
Dad didn’t like it.
Mom didn’t care.
I grew up with role models who showed me just how volatile love can be. They didn’t hurt me. It was how they treated each other. With disdain, frustration, and anger.
I vowed to myself to never fall in love.
All it brings is unhappiness and heartache, that’s what my folks taught me.
It shouldn’t be easy to love or to hate someone. It should be challenging, demanding, and it should push you outside your comfort zone. Questioning your sanity at times.
But before you can ever love someone else, before you can give them your heart and soul, you need to accept who you are. You should love yourself before you can ever have someone to share your life with. And I don’t know if I’m someone who could ever do that. I may want to save Rukaiya, I may care about her, but I wonder if I’ll ever be able to give her all of me, to love her because I certainly don’t fucking love myself.
As much as I truly believe that, I also found out early in life that emotions are merely things to hold us back from what we truly want. Growing up, I always got what I wanted. Every girl I flirted with would drop her panties within hours of meeting me. Whenever I needed a good grade, I’d get it, without putting in too much effort.
Life was easy as the son of one of the founding families in Tynewood. The Durand name gifted me privilege; it offered me opportunities to work anywhere in the world, to do anything I wanted.