19. June #2
“We’ll be wheels up shortly,” Frances says on his walk by us.
Dom reaches into his pocket to pull out a buzzing phone. “Shit, I’ve got to take this.” He gives my hand a gentle squeeze. “I’ll be right back.”
Isn’t he supposed to put that thing into airplane mode? Isn’t that why the damn button is there? Because we’re on an airplane.
“Adler,” he answers the call. He moves to the back of the plane where I can no longer make out the words he says into the receiver.
My heart thumps harder, and I grip the seat, no longer lulled by the presence of my strong man.
Instead, I'm left to consider the endless list of things that could go wrong.
I never should have watched Final Destination a month ago with Magnus.
The image of the side of the plane bursting open and my body being sucked out and mutilated by the rotating blade thingies fills my head.
Are those the engines? What happens if we hit a bird? Or a fucking goose?
I’m moved back into my seat as the plane picks up speed. I close my eyes, my fingers digging into the expensive leather seat. At least, I think it’s leather. I’m not really familiar with upholstery. It kind of looks like leather, but it’s much softer and plush than one would assume leather to be.
That’s it, focus on fucking seat upholstery to distract yourself from the ridiculous idea of death by a plane crash. I've been tied to a chair and tortured by a man I didn’t know the identity of, and yet this is somehow more terrifying.
A warm hand grips mine and peels my hand from the seat. Dom throws his arm around my shoulder and tugs me into his chest.
“I didn’t know you were afraid of flying,” he says softly.
“Me either.” I lean into his body and remind myself that if Dom truly thought I was in danger, he never would have brought me here. Because after all, that’s what he claims is his biggest concern—my safety.
“I’ve got you, there’s nothing to be afraid of.” He kisses the top of my head and his beard prickles me.
I breathe in his musky scent and savor the warmth of his embrace. Dom isn’t often very soft, but lately, he’s held me more than I expected, and I am so fucking grateful for it.
Things have been rough, with all the secrets, but it’s moments like this that make me hopeful that we might actually make it through this.
The plane finds a horizontal space in the sky, and I breathe a sigh of relief at having made it through one aspect of this flight. Now I have to manage the in-air time, and the landing. I swallow down the reminder that we’ll have to do this on the way back, too.
I peel myself from Dom’s chest and tuck my hair behind my ear.
“Have you never flown before?” Dom keeps his hand on my back.
I shake my head. “No.”
“Oh, June. I…I’m sorry.” He skims my cheek with his palm. “I shouldn’t have taken that call.”
“It’s fine,” I tell him. How was he supposed to know I’d be a big baby about flying? I didn’t even know until we were going a billion miles per hour on a runway and lurching ourselves into the sky. My stomach twists at how impossible it is that we’re up here in the first place. “I’m fine.”
Dom leans forward and latches onto the glass nearest me. “Here, drink this.” He pushes it into my grasp. “But don’t have much more. The altitude will make you feel drunker than you really are. This should be enough to calm your nerves.”
I sip the golden liquid and settle back into my side of the seat. “Who was on the phone?”
“One of my assistants. Small fire needed to be put out. Nothing to worry about.”
A generic and vague answer just like all the others he gives me. You’d think I’d quit asking by now but I cling to the hope that eventually he will be open and honest about what it is that consumes almost all of his hours.
This is usually where I make some smart-ass remark but I don’t have it in me. Not when we’re however many feet in the air and I’m unable to escape him. Jumping out of an airplane isn’t exactly on my bucket list.
I nod and down a little bit more of the bourbon. “I didn’t know you had access to a private jet.” I change the subject because if I don’t, I’ll stew on how secretive he is.
Dominic reaches for his own glass. “Mmhm. I bought it a while back.”
My eyes widen. “Oh, you like, own it. A whole fucking airplane.”
“Along with a few homes across the United States, and a Villa in Portugal.”
“You’re not serious.” I stare at him.
“Why would I lie about that?” Dom sets the glass back down.
It’s a valid question. Why would he lie about it? But how did I not know that? He’s such a fucking closed book, and it only makes me wonder what else I haven’t unearthed about him.
“Some days, it feels like I don’t know you at all,” I tell him.
“I don’t understand.” Dom tilts his body toward me.
“You wouldn’t, because you know my every move.
” I leave out the things that Simon and I do behind their back.
But maybe if they didn’t shut me out so fucking much, I wouldn’t be doing that shit with him.
“And I don’t have much history. I’ve never left California, let alone bought a house in another country. ”
“I’ll buy you a house wherever you want.”
I sigh. “That’s not my point, Dom.”
“Then what is it?”
“My point is, is that you’re closed off. You hardly ever actually tell me anything about you. I find out in these nonchalant moments where you just randomly say you have a house in France.”
“Portugal.”
“Same thing.” I throw up my hand. “I don’t even know if I could differentiate them on a map.”
“Well, Portugal is west of Spain.”
“For a really smart man, you sure are dense sometimes, Dom.”
He narrows his eyes for a brief moment, then relaxes them. “What would you like to know, June? Ask me anything.”
“Other than work things, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“What about how you got into the life? That doesn’t cover current events. And I already know the story of Magnus and Coen.”
“I grew up in it.” Dom latches onto his bourbon again.
“Great story.”
We hit a little turbulence, and I accidentally grip Dom’s leg.
“That was nothing to worry about.” He places his hand on top of mine.
“As far as my involvement, it began when I was a child. I don’t remember a time when things were any different.
I had family that were made men, and I idolized them.
Franklin had seen potential in me from an early age.
He shaped me into the son he never had, and in a way, he was like a father figure to me.
But even though his method was the only one I knew, I still questioned his authority left and right.
There were numerous times when I thought he'd cast me out and find someone else to mold into his protégé, but I was always able to reel him back in.
Franklin was intelligent and a damn good businessman, that much was certain.
He was also stubborn, hot-headed, and paranoid as hell. "
I hold still and hope that if I don’t move, maybe Dom won’t realize he’s sharing so much and he’ll continue telling me his story.
"I knew if I played my cards right, I would eventually take over his reign when he retired, I just didn't anticipate his demise when it happened.
It came to a head abruptly and without everything set in stone.
It complicated things and gave others the opportunity to take what I had worked my entire life for.
“Anyway, you know how things ended, but how things began? Nothing crazy. Just a kid who grew up on the wrong side of town and seized a chance to escape from poverty and homelessness.”
“I…I had no idea,” I confess when he doesn’t continue. “What about your parents?”
Dom shrugs. “Never knew them. They put me in the system when I was a baby. And the family I mentioned, I didn’t mean blood.
But we all know family is much more than DNA.
They were older kids in the system who aged out and had other friends older than them that were runners or soldiers or just people who would do anything for a buck.
I hung around them any chance I could. Some of them took me in when I didn’t have anywhere else to go.
It didn’t take long for me to pay attention and figure out who Franklin was. The rest was history.”
It's no wonder Dom is a cruel bastard—he quite literally had no parental figure in his life aside from a psychotic criminal who manipulated and brainwashed a child into joining their organization. He never got to have a warm mother, or a protective father.
I may have had a screwed-up childhood, but at least I have some memories from before my mother died.
She was the light of my life, and my dad’s, too, but once she was gone, she left behind nothing but darkness to swallow us whole.
My dad resorted to drinking, and I hid in the shadows as the booze turned him into something that eventually became completely unrecognizable.
My adult self sympathizes with his loss, but he never should have neglected his child, and that's unforgivable.
I was never safe, loved, or cared for, not until the equally broken blond-haired, blue-eyed boy showed up in that cemetery.
I felt his loss from a mile away and knew that only he could understand the agony of being abandoned.