Olympus

Chapter 32

The steady hum of the Chariot in flight was the only thing that Megan could hear as she looked at the faces staring back at her around the battlestation. Ricardo, Adolf, Jay, even Kei; none of them spoke as they awaited what she presumed was her reasonable explanation for what she had blurted out in Chersky.

Thing is, after Megan's confession, she had walked away from the warehouse to one of the SUVs and drove away without a word, leaving the others to catch up with her at the airstrip; and while none of them had spoken a word directly to her in return about her actions- Megan was actually surprised that Kei hadn't but she figured the others had forced her not to- she knew it was only a matter of time before they physically demanded an explanation.

Well, looks like that time has come, she realized when Ricardo stood up. Apparently, he was the one the others had elected to speak to her.

"Megan," he began but she stopped him with the raise of her hand.

"I know," she replied, sighing, "just working up my courage."

Kei's immediate reaction seemed to scream "Work it faster!" but she didn't say anything and Megan had to admit she admired her resolve not to speak; or perhaps more accurately, the other's resolve not to let her.

Megan finally collected herself after a while and stood up. "The incident happened seventeen years ago," she began, "when I was thirteen and my mother remarried after my father's death..."

Megan's father was the love of her life before his death. They did everything a father and daughter could do together: camping, fishing, playing soccer, riding bikes. They even sometimes had sleepovers in each other's rooms.

But just as she clocked ten, he was involved in a plane crash and didn't survive; and her life went down in spiral alongside him.

Thing is, her mother, who was before then having problems with her dad and was separated from him- Megan actually wondered if they would have gotten a divorce hadn't he died in the crash- was seeing another man, Dave; and receiving news of her husband's death, married him months after.

Unfortunately for Megan, Dave was everything her father wasn't. He hated her, hated her being in his house. In fact, she suspected that he hated that she was breathing the same air that he was; and all that hate he took out on her mother anyway that he could.

To Megan's surprise, her mother, who somehow couldn't stand her loving father, stuck with Dave enough to give birth to her stepbrother, Nathan. She had actually asked her why once and the response she got was love, but she suspected weakness, and perhaps self-loath, had a lot more to do with it.

Megan paused at this point and watched as the others watched her dab a drop of tears threatening to spill from her left eye. Everything was quiet around her, even the hum of the Chariot had faded from her ears like it needed to give her the space to voice what was undoubtedly the greatest story of her life.

"Are you okay to continue?" Adolf asked, the look on his face seeming to be the most empathetic of everyone else's. "I mean, you don't have to if you don't-"

"I can," she cut in with a small smile. "I will." It's about time the truth is told, she said to herself, about time I let it out.

"Dave continued his abuse in the house and my mother let him," Megan carried on when she was set. "That is, until three years later when I decided to step in..."

Thing is, she had been thinking for a very long time on how to end her stepfather's threat before she found what appeared to her as the most logical solution: to kill him.

To be honest, she couldn't recall exactly how she had reached such a drastic decision but at that time, she wasn't caring to understand. She thought to end him and went about her plan to. She watched him, stalked his activities, and knew where to strike.

Megan learnt all that could about cars on the internet and the other people she could learn from at her age; and when she thought she was ready, she went ahead and cut the brakes off Dave's car. He would ride it the next day, crash, and she, her mother, and her stepbrother would be free of him.

But things didn't go at all as planned.

Thing is, the night Megan cut the brakes, her mother and Dave got into an argument, and by some intervention that even she couldn't explain, she decided to leave him. In the haze of her anger, her mother had stormed out of the house with her and her stepbrother in tow and had taken Dave's car.

Megan looked out the plane's window to the clouds floating by then and recalled vividly the events of the night that changed her life.

"Mum, we have to go back," she remembered telling her mother as she pulled out of the driveway onto the road in a drizzle.

"Of course not," she returned. "Never."

"Mum, can't you wait till tomorrow? You've waited before, wait a little longer. Who knows, maybe something will happen and you won't have to deal with him anymore."

"I said no!" Megan recalled her mother had a furious expression on her face at this point. "I don't understand. You've been angry I didn't leave him all this while, and now that I do, you're angry that I do. What exactly do you want me to d-?!"

"Mum, watch out!"

The car had swerved onto the path of an oncoming truck in her mother's fury and in her attempt to control the situation, she swerved out of the road and engaged the brakes, which Megan had cut beforehand and so didn't work.

The car tumbled off a cliff and her mother and stepbrother died on the spot.

"I don't know how but all I got from the crash was a broken rib," Megan finally brought herself back to the present, closing her eyes against the tears that were flooding now and wouldn't stop. "A few days later, I got a news that my stepfather confessed to cutting the brakes off the car and now, he's serving a life sentence in prison.

"But I feared that he knew that I did it so I ran away from home, changed my name, and have been leaving under the radar ever since."

Megan wasn't sure exactly how she expected the others to react to her revelation, but it was definitely not how they did.

Thing is, they just stayed silent, like they had been lost somewhere in its middle.

Just as Megan thought that perhaps she should say something, Jay piped up. "Are you okay now?" he asked, surprising her. "I mean, do you still feel so much pain when you think about it?"

"Umm," she held a perplexed look on her face, "you're not going to blame me for what I did?"

"Of course not," Adolf returned, standing up to come over and give her a hug. "You were a child and desperate. You didn't mean for anything bad to happen to your mum and brother."

"Well, I won't say what you did wasn't horrible," Kei suddenly said and Adolf and Jay shot her very stern glares, "but it's understandable given the circumstance you were in." She shot the two a look back.

The situation was looking up for Megan. In fact, to her surprise, she was starting to feel better with herself than she had in a very long time too.

However, when she looked at Ricardo, the feeling froze in her gut. His look wasn't a happy one. "Ricardo," she called, her heart suddenly thundering in her chest. "Is there something you want to say?"

"I'm afraid Mr. DiSanto won't be involved anymore at this point," a voice suddenly interrupted behind them and two men came in to cuff Ricardo.

"Hey!" the team shouted at the same time but as they turned towards the voice, they stopped in their tracks.

Thing is, the Chariot had landed in the middle of their conversation and standing at the door was no other person but the principal officer in charge himself, Arthur Dean.

"Hello, Miss Months," he said, adjusting his glasses as he smiled, "looks like you and I have amassed quite a lot of things to discuss since our last meeting."