Shadowplay | Tony Stark

TWENTY THREE - HATE

"Mila! Here, your phone is ringing."

Jumping up from the arm of the couch with her eyes still fixed on watching Tony chase Tristan around the kitchen, Mila grabbed her phone from Peter's hand as he walked past her, thanking him with a smile before wandering out into the hallway with a smile on her face.

The four of them had done exactly what they'd planned that morning, taking the boys to the Mets game across town. Tristan had loved every second of the big city experience and Tony spared no expense when it came to letting the boy pick out a jersey and baseball cap from the store, taking endless pictures of him as he attempted to eat a foot long hotdog that was almost too big for him to hold.

It made Mila's heart swell to watch her son's eyes light up as bright as they did when he was around Tony, and Peter, too. The boy absolutely adored both of them and it was almost a sensation similar to that of relief that Mila felt to know that people genuinely cared about him, about them.

Tony had commented how much Peter had come out of his shell around Tristan, noticing a change in the teenager's behaviour and soulfulness of his laughter when they played together. Since neither of the boys had siblings, it seemed like fate that they'd been brought together and had bonded like brothers in such a short space of time.

Together, the four of them felt nothing short of perfect.

"Hello?" Mila cleared her throat as she answered the phone without checking who was calling, too consumed in her bright thoughts as she paced to the end of the hallway and watched the sun set over New York.

"Mila? God, I didn't think you'd pick up. H-how are you? How's Tristan?"

The voice on the other end of the line made Mila's warm blood run cold. It slowly froze her veins, wrapping her beating heart in paralysing numbness that turned her mind from colourful happiness to nothing.

She became empty in a matter of seconds, feeling her soul strip itself from her bones after scratching and clawing desperately to cling on, though succumbing to the overbearing power that was held in just a handful of sharp words.

Mila fixed her eyes on the glowing moon hung in the Manhattan sky. It felt as though the world around her was crumbling but as long as she held her gaze on something, she wouldn't fall along with everything else.

"Mila? Are you there?"

His voice haunted her. It screamed at her in her deepest of sleeps and in her brightest of days, constant torment consuming her mind since he'd made her shed her first tear, leaving her unable to feel silence again ever since.

"Please don't call me again."

Mila wasn't sure how she managed to get a single word out, but somehow she did. Even the sound of his breathing down the line resurfaced cold memories that she wished she didn't keep in her mind, desperately wishing there was a clean slate she could wipe across every bad thing she remembered in painful, vivid detail.

"M, I'm sorry. Please, just give me the chance to see you, to talk. I really want to see Tristan again, he deserves to know his fath-"

"His father? Is that what you think you are?"

The fear that had initially paralysed Mila's body and soul diminished in the blink of an eye once the fiery rage melted the hard ice, turning her blood scalding hot. She saw red, and not the kind of red that she saw when she looked into Tony's warm eyes, the type of red that made her want to hurt someone, the type that embodied rage and pure anger, the type that only someone as close to the devil could possible ensue on another person.