Chapter 2
REIGN
It’s time.
The two words stared back at me on the phone. I didn’t need clarification. I knew exactly what my father meant. My time here at the university where I cosplayed a twenty-something-year-old paving their future was coming to an end. To be honest, I was surprised it had lasted as long as it had.
If I thought I could get away with it, I’d have left it unopened and unread.
But I couldn’t. As it was, I was taking too long to reply—too long being three minutes.
Waiting any more would result in a shitty situation becoming shittier.
I knew what lines I could cross and by how much, and this wasn’t one I should even toe.
I’d been dreading this moment since I started my grad work.
Heck, since I first pushed to get my undergrad degree.
At best I had been buying some time. No part of me was foolish enough to believe otherwise.
Using school as my excuse was never meant to last forever, but it had been the best thing I could think of at the time.
I’ll be there, I typed back and hit send.
A car will be there at four came back almost instantly.
Crap. Four o’clock. So much for being able to tie up loose ends.
My father wasn’t even giving me a whole day to vacate.
I’d be lucky to pack a suitcase and try to catch my advisor before I left.
Professor Dean was going to be pissed. He’d worked so hard to get me the financial package he did, and here I was walking away from years of education less than a year before graduation.
Knowing this was coming was one thing. Feeling the pressure of it happening was another. If I had thought for even a split second I could flee and get out of his control, I’d have done so years ago. But I knew better. No one escaped my father. No. One.
He had power and money and the lack of conscience to use them all to their fullest extent. He didn’t care who he hurt along the way so long as he got what he wanted when all was said and done. Being his son didn’t make that any less true for me.
I’d always been his possession, a way to get ahead.
Not once in my entire life did my father look at me and say, “I love you.” Why?
Because he didn’t love me. The only person he might possibly have loved was my omega dad, but even with him, I had my doubts.
My dad had simply been a different kind of possession.
I knew from the time I was old enough to remember that I was nothing more to my father than something to own and use to his advantage, a means to an end.
Looking back, it was probably easier that way.
If I’d thought he loved me to discover he cared only about what I could give him, it might’ve destroyed me.
For a long time, I thought my omega dad felt the same about me. He left a long time ago, something my father must’ve allowed, because if he didn’t, there was no way my omega father would’ve gotten away.
I hated him for a long time. I was his son, the one he carried for nine months, the one he held in his arms as a newborn. How could he leave me? Why was I not good enough? Did he never really want me in the first place?
It took me years of anger before I saw for the first time it wasn’t that I wasn’t good enough for him or that he didn’t love me.
It was that it had been his only way out.
He didn’t have school to give him space to figure life out.
He was trapped in our estate, every move noted by someone, having to play the role of perfect husband and being suffocated by it.
I doubted I’d ever know how he managed to convince my father to allow him to leave. Maybe it was money. Maybe it was leaving me there. Maybe he had something on the bastard. But somewhere along the line, it no longer mattered.
His freedom had been short, and I hated that for him.
He got sick and passed away, something I didn’t learn about until years later…
another thing I hated my father for. It was bad enough I’d felt abandoned by the person who should love me most, but then to not be able to grieve them properly.
If I hadn’t looked him up while on a campus computer, the only ones not being monitored by him, I’d never have even known.
When it came to my alpha father, it was hard to think of a single redeeming quality.
My job was to follow his rules. I played my role well.
I even dressed college up as something to benefit him.
I got my perfect grades in school, and I excelled at my sports—not that my classmates considered them sports.
I wasn’t playing football or track. No. I was a marksman and an archer, and I was really good at both. At one time, I’d even been actively recruited to prepare for the Olympic teams. For a split second, I thought it might be my way out. I’d been wrong.
My father wanted no part of that and forbade me from any competitions that year.
He said it was bringing too much attention to me.
At the same time, he demanded I practice and practice and practice.
I did, but nowhere near to the extent he wanted.
Both sports came naturally to me, like I was born to hit the targets.
But just like my omega dad years earlier, I was looking for a way out, and my skills gave me that…
at least temporarily. In my dreams, I would go to college, get my degree, and break free.
The break-free part wasn’t something I ever believed would come true, but I needed it there, dangling like a carrot to keep me from giving up.
I hadn’t been under any illusion that my father would pay for my college, at least not one I’d want to attend.
He’d have me go local so he could keep his thumb on me.
That was where all that practice and skill paid off.
I not only got a full-ride scholarship that included my room and board, but I got a stipend too.
No longer was I making A’s to avoid my father’s wrath. I was doing it as my way out. Four years in, I got my degree and immediately rolled that into a master’s program.
My father didn’t like it. He said I had family obligations.
I knew exactly what “family obligations” he meant.
He wanted me to be in a political marriage.
That was another thing he never hid from me, not even when I came home talking about a kid at school I “liked” in kindergarten.
I’d only meant I made a friend, but my father took it as an opportunity to explain to me that I was never to date unless he arranged it.
Who does that to a little kid? Only my father.
I was born to marry someone who would help him gain power. It was disgusting. It was also my fate. I spent years looking for an escape route. There were none. I was and would always be trapped until he took his last breath.
Every time I thought a door to freedom was opening for me, it would close before I could take my first step.
My father didn’t pretend it wasn’t him orchestrating the “missed opportunities.” He was making sure that I followed his plan and reminding me that I was only as free as I was by his kindness.
We had very different definitions of what kindness was. I hated him. I hated him so much.
He used school breaks as a way to shop me around the appropriate circles.
It wasn’t even that I hated the people. I didn’t.
In fact, I quite enjoyed spending time with the daughter of the local senator, in particular.
Under any other circumstances, we’d probably have become good friends.
But she, like me, was trapped in a social status that stole all autonomy from us.
That was the only failed pairing I was sad about.
We weren’t a love match by any means, but together we might’ve been able to have a decent life.
To this day, I don't know what went wrong with that particular negotiation, because make no mistake about it, we were part of a business deal. It wasn’t the two of us, though.
We’d have gotten married without argument for the sake of being each other’s safe space.
Whatever it was, something went terribly wrong, and needless to say, the senator was no longer a senator, and that had my father’s fingerprints all over it.
During my last trip home, it wasn’t the child of a politician or billionaire. Nope. My father went straight to the freaking mafia boss. There was no pretense of being a “match,” either. He sent his righthand man in his place. I never saw his face, but from what my father said, he liked mine.
Gross.
Please don’t let him be the reason I’m being beckoned home.