Chapter 2
Chapter Two
DORIAN
~ One Year Later
“All I’m saying is that you have a wonderful house outside the city.
And a perfectly reasonable apartment in the city.
With a doorman and an elevator so you don’t even have to take the stairs.
Not to mention my home has a space for you.
I do not know why you need to stay and involve yourself with your brother and that woman. ”
I leaned against the back of the armchair, rubbing my temples.
Aston had decorated my guest room to be soothing while I recovered.
Dark blues and grays, memory foam pillows and fluffy duvets.
A walker in the corner. A medical tray to the side so my former nurse could change my bandages.
The bandages and nurse were long gone, but the tray remained.
Aston had tried to take it away multiple times, but I’d refused.
I needed the reminder. The symbol. The dreams ensured I’d always remember.
The fact that I would never be getting on a fucking plane again deserved something more than a forgotten time of healing.
Or hiding.
Yet I hadn’t hidden deep enough in the cave if the woman in front of me could so easily find and annoy me.
I loved my mother. I didn’t like her, but I loved her.
Perhaps it was only out of necessity some days, but sometimes my mother was a good person.
Sometimes she cared for others. I would like to think that her incessant need to put me where she wanted me, and to control the situation, was because she loved me too.
And wanted what was best for me—and wanted me to keep her secrets.
Only I had a feeling it was partly because she wanted to be a raging bitch and stick it to my brother Aston and his amazing and take-charge wife, Blakely.
My mother had it in for Blakely, and I still didn’t know why. Of course, a reason could be because one of my favorite people in the world, my sister-in-law, didn’t take my mother’s shit.
And yet here my mother was. In my room. And I had no idea why I even bothered anymore. I’d kept her secrets for years. I’d let the burden wear on me, stripping me of who I was until I was just the playboy the world thought I was. That went up in flames the same day the plane did.
“Mom. Leave off, will you?”
Melanie Cage blinked at me and took a step back as if surprised I would dare speak out loud to her in any way. She shouldn’t be too surprised considering this wasn’t the first time I did so. It was just that I was usually the person she listened to.
I had an idea why, hell, anybody who knew the truth knew why she called me her favorite, and why she actually paid attention when I spoke usually, but in this moment, it had nothing to do with that.
She let out a long breath and rolled her shoulders back. “Dorian. Don’t talk to me in that way.”
“In what way? Mother. Seriously, breathe. You’re talking so quickly without inhaling, you’re going to pass out at some point. There’s only so long you can stand there with that stick up your ass and pretend like you care about me in this moment.”
Okay, that was probably a little too on the nose.
Her eyes narrowed, the pink stains on her cheeks darkening.
Thanks to a wonderful surgeon, and Dysport versus Botox, my mother did not look her age.
I was all for doing whatever you wanted to your own body.
As long as you had the money, and were doing it safely, go for it.
Hell, I might even try it one day if I ever ended up with crow’s feet.
Why not? It didn’t hurt anyone but myself if I chose to do it.
My mother’s attitude on the other hand, that hurt.
But in this moment, she didn’t look like a woman in her fifties, let alone a woman who had birthed seven kids.
She looked like a terror. “Dorian Cage. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I guess answering with the whole ‘Daddy had a secret family and then I almost died in a plane crash’ is a little too on the nose?”
Even as I said the words, I knew I had gone too far. Not with mentioning the plane crash, because I was too numb to even think about that.
No, it was Daddy’s secret family.
A secret family my mother had known about.
Because of course the Cages could never be simple.
My father apparently had quite the stamina. Not only had he decided to have seven children with my mother—he had a whole other family. One that my mother had known about and had colluded with the other woman in order to make the timing work out.
Considering my father had been a CEO of a billion-dollar company, one that not only worked in real estate and property development, but countless other assets that were all tangled up in his will, he had somehow made it so that he could have two sets of families.
The main one, as my mother called it, had lived in decent wealth.
I hadn’t quite been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but adjacent.
And now the silver spoon was right next to me, and I wasn’t hurting for money anytime soon.
Especially with the settlement that was coming out of the plane crash.
No, I didn’t want to think about that. I wouldn’t think about that.
The other woman, my dad’s mistress, was a pretty decent person. Once she had begun to shave off some of the bitterness of her own situation, Constance Cage Dixon was a pretty cool person. She’d been able to come back into her children’s lives and they’d all found a way to make it work.
All five of her children from what I could tell.
Yes, dear old dad had twelve kids. Twelve.
I would wonder how he could do it all. But it wasn’t as if he had ever come to any of our games, or cared about our school beyond making sure that we didn’t disgrace him.
He hadn’t been in our lives enough to care.
Of course, maybe he had been in Aston’s life a bit more considering Aston was the prodigal eldest. And he had been in and out of the other Cages’ lives enough that they barely knew him.
But the asshole had made it work for him.
Not us. But it wasn’t like we could ever make it work for us.
Not that I was bitter or anything.
Okay that was a lie.
“Why do you have to bring up your father?”
“You’re the one that married him, Mom. And stayed married to him.” I gave her a look that spoke volumes, but she just rolled her eyes. Because we weren’t going to talk about that, or the other thing. Or the other secret thing that we never talked about.
Secrets tended to add up, and my mother was the queen of them.
She was also the Queen Bitch, and I hated even using that word.
I didn’t use that word for women. My new sisters and sisters-in-law were the prime examples of what goodness could be.
Even if Isabella had a bit of an attitude, I loved her.
And I would never call another woman a bitch and degrade women in any way.
But my mother personified the word most days.
“I don’t understand why you’re here though. Dorian, it’s been a year. I know that you’re still hurt, and being crippled—”
“Fuck off. Don’t use that word. Don’t even go down a path where you’re going to say something so ignorant that I’m going to have to scream.”
“That’s not what I mean. But you don’t even go to physical therapy, Dorian.”
“I do. I just don’t let you take me. Because I’m not a toddler.”
“A toddler wouldn’t have gone up in that plane with that man to begin with. What were you thinking even getting in that small plane with a pilot who wasn’t even a pilot, just your friend?”
“Don’t talk about Joshua. Don’t even mention him.”
“I know. I know he’s gone. But his lack of skill almost killed you. And now you have all those scars, and you’re never going to be able to walk again.”
I had to count to ten, slowly, breathing in and out so I didn’t get up and beat my mother with my cane.
She had never understood my friendship with Joshua.
Because every time I went to Cage Lake, the small town that my family literally owned because we were ridiculous, she had always thought any relationship with the townies—in her words—would be slumming.
Also in her words because my mother could never look for the good in people. Only who could do good for her.
Because Joshua hadn’t been the rich boy in town. But there weren’t many rich boys in Cage Lake other than the Cages themselves. So I hadn’t known what my mother was thinking to begin with.
Joshua and I clicked from the moment we had seen each other and had been friends through everything. Some of the last things I had said to him were so cruel that I could barely breathe. I pushed those thoughts from my mind, because dwelling on them didn’t help anything.
And the more I dwelled, the more I thought about her.
No, I wouldn’t think about her. I couldn’t.
“Mom. I use a cane occasionally. Because sometimes my leg fucking hurts. But I’m fine. Sure, I’m going to be able to tell when the air pressure changes and a storm’s coming when my knee aches, so that just means I’ve reached a version of old age a bit earlier than some. But I’m fine.”
“Then why are you here and not at home? Why aren’t you working on any of your businesses? You’re just letting it go to waste. That is not what your father taught you.”
“We both know my father didn’t teach me anything. And I can handle my businesses. I have managers for a reason.”
“And they’re going to manage them into the ground without you there overseeing things personally. They need a Cage.”
“Contrary to popular belief, not everybody needs a damn Cage.”
“Is everything okay up here?”
I sat up straighter and turned towards the doorway as Blakely stood there, her dark blonde hair pulled back from her face. She glared at my mother for an instant, before her expression softened as she looked over at me.
I loved my sister-in-law, but I hated that look.
It wasn’t quite pity. Because she knew I hated a pitying look. But it was care. And I wasn’t sure what the hell I was supposed to do with that.