Mind Games

Chapter Twenty-Two: Just Getting Started

It took the quiet journey of the car ride home for Lucca to feel some sense of normalcy. To feel the reality of her world set back in. Nate had tried asking her questions, but she hadn't answered him. Had barely managed to restrain him for breaking Kanas's door down and doing what her father so leniently paid him to do.

The car pulled to a stop outside the main entrance of the Alpine in what either felt like an eternity or the slow blink of an eye. She felt as though she was missing a chunk of time, and simply sat and stared at the mahogany doors for a moment before she climbed out of the car and walked toward them, her steps unconscious, her eyes glazed, as if to show that she was still living within another reality. Perhaps even walking halls of her mind palace, stuck in a trance.

Every move to unlock the door, to push it open, to close it behind her was unconscious. Muscle memory at its most basic, most fundamental.

"You're home."

The voice echoed in her head, sounding distant and unreachable. She looked around in a state of confusion until she found that the voice belonged to her uncle, the man sitting dispassionately on the stairwell. Too far down to be classified as halfway.

Lucca grimaced by way of a greeting, blinked her eyes several times before walking over to him, joining him on the steps.

"Had to come home sometime," she managed, moved to rest her elbows on her knees and then frowned as she noted that they were sitting on the cold steps in her foyer rather than one of the thousand comfortable chairs and lounges that she had strewn throughout her house. Like this was somewhere that he sat regularly, that it was something no longer questioned. "Sit here often?"

"I was thinking," he tells her. "Got lost in my thoughts."

Another grimace. "Know the feeling."

He looked at her as she stared straight ahead.

"You're not at the university?" he questioned, his words concerned and quiet. Like he was wanting to ask something else and had held back.

She wondered if he could smell the alcohol she had consumed. If he could smell the different liquors leaking from her pours as nauseatingly as she could. Or if he could smell the cologne Kanas wore that had infused itself into his shirt - if he recognised that this wasn't her shirt. She wondered if he could smell the antiseptic coating her fingers, could smell the iron in the blood on her hands. If he recognised the bandages and bruises on her body as being new wounds, or something that she had picked up the day before.

She wondered if he knew where she had been. What she had been up to. If he knew her at all.

Did he know how reckless Lucca could be?

Was that something that she wanted him knowing?

She shrugged her shoulders. "I don't even know what day it is," she huffed at him humorously.

"You didn't come home last night," he says, reached for one bandaged hand, his empathy for her overflowing and embedding itself into her, healing her slowly.

For a moment, she wanted to tell him that she didn't come home because this mansion was not her home.

But how did she explain to him that home had been long since forgotten? That home had never been a place? How did she explain that without resulting in endless questions she would find no easier to answer?

Simple answer, she couldn't.

So, she says, "Had some trouble," and took her hand back, carefully interlaced her fingers together.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

Lucca sent him a small, and she hoped, reassuring smile. "I'm good."

They breathed in the silence of the house. Leaned on the foundations. On his empathy for her, and her strength for him. There was understanding between them. A sense of honesty, or something close. Familiarity that came with the blood tie between them. No matter their differences - legally, biologically - they would always be family.