Chapter 23 Shrouded In Isolation #2
Mae saunters off ahead of me, and I hurry to keep up as Tanisira’s cursing fades away.
Mae doesn’t so much as look at me again until we reach the bridge, where she steps aside and waves me ahead.
Having expected her to follow me in, it takes me a second to notice there’s no one else here.
It’s just me and, projected across the room, the face of a person I once loved.
Dominik is a handsome man, with sharp cheekbones, expressive green eyes and thick hair.
When I first met him, he oozed charm, but he doesn’t need to depend on that anymore, so now he exudes wealth.
His loosened tie suggests he’s off the clock—as much as he ever is.
I can see his office in the background, hear muted activity.
It’s the first time being face to face with him in years. I feel only loathing.
“What do you want, Dominik?”
“Imagine my surprise when I found out you were aboard my ship,” he says.
His voice is cold and impersonal and, as always, strikes me with dissonance.
There was a time when it was all youthful arrogance, warmth and excitement; when he still dropped his t’s and stumbled over certain words.
He looks entirely uninterested, and I can’t imagine why he wanted to speak to me.
I try my hardest to stay calm; I want to coax him, not rile him. “The ship you used to abduct my son?” My tone is carefully deadpan.
“Our son.”
“Okay, our son. The son that you had your assistant drop off at the hangar in secrecy. The son you’re trying to relocate to another fucking planet without my permission, which is, again, abduction.”
Dominik does that thing I despise, where he narrows his eyes and tilts his head just enough to make me feel like a bug under a microscope. The older Vee gets, the more I see his father in his features, and the more I dread the day he starts to adopt these affectations.
“I knew you were up to something; you were too quiet. Do you know what I can do, now you’ve done this?” Dominik asks.
I hold my head up and wait, something I know pisses him off. His lips tighten infinitesimally in the corners, a grimace that he’s usually very good at suppressing. Still, his voice is soft, almost silken, when he carries on.
“You’re trespassing, Lowe.”
The nickname almost pulls a flinch out of me. Those wounds aren’t raw anymore, but when Dominik looks at me with Vee’s eyes and calls me that, it’s like a knife to the gut.
“I could have you detained the second the Midas touches down at Red Horizon. That’s a hefty prison sentence, but even if it wasn’t, I’d still win custody of Harvey.
If I tell the authorities that you trespassed and tried to steal the ship?
” Dominik shrugs those expensively clad shoulders and leans back in his chair.
“You’d never see daylight again. I certainly wouldn’t allow Harvey to visit you. ”
It takes all my willpower not to react. I bite down on my tongue and taste blood, let the pain ground me. Cursed stars, why am I surprised?
“Do you even care how Vee is?” I force through my teeth. “You set a team of thugs on us like a pack of dogs.”
Dominik’s eyes narrow. “That’s my flesh and blood. I wouldn’t have needed to hire anyone if you had an iota of common sense; if I could rely on my staff to do their fucking jobs.”
“Turns out other people object to abduction. What do you know?” I shrug.
“Will you look so smug when I’ve fired them all and made it my personal mission to ensure they never work in this galaxy again?”
“The crew have nothing to do with this! It’s between you and me, you arrogant bastard. You claim to care about Vee? Prove it.”
“The days of me proving myself are long behind me, Lowe.” Dominik says. “You’re in no position to make demands. But, because I respect you, I’ll offer a trade.”
My stomach clenches, my face hot. A trade? I will burn this fucking ship down before I let him use Vee like a pawn.
“What kind of father uses his son—”
“This isn’t about Harvey. This has always been about you.”
I freeze, trying to make sense of his words. Me?
He sits forward, almost eagerly.
“Come home. Be by my side, where you belong. We can be a family again—as we always should have been. You’ll like the house; I left plenty undecorated so you can make it right for us.”
I stare at the face that looms above me with new eyes.
Wide eyes. I hate how fucking hungry Dominik looks, and I can see that he really, truly means it.
Now, I realise Dominik wasn’t disinterested: he was restraining himself.
With the facade stripped away, his skin has pinkened, and his eyes devour me.
He looks at me in a way that feels invasive, that rakes me all the way down to my bones.
Sweet Gaia. All this time?
“Dom—”
He slams his fist on the desk, and something goes flying, landing with a harsh crash. I wince, stepping back. He was never violent, but I don’t know this version of Dominik. My nerves are strung taut.
“Don’t,” he warns in-between heavy breaths. “Don’t pretend you didn’t know. I’ve given you more than enough time; it’s been a decade, Lowe. We have a child together. Whatever you needed to get out of your system, it ends now.”
When it comes to first loves, I’ve always found it nothing short of a miracle that some people stay together.
In my experience, being young and infatuated rarely equalled good decisions.
The way we loved each other was fast and intensely, but mostly, it was immature.
The kind of love that convinces itself nothing else will do.
If it weren’t for Vee, I’d regret ever meeting Dominik Gryphon.
“I don’t belong to you. You’ve never been able to order me around, so what makes you think you can start now? And what the fuck, Dominik? What, you’ve been hoping I’ll come back to you this whole time? It’s been years since the last time I even spoke to you.”
He unclenches his jaw. “You never stopped belonging to me! If you weren’t so stubborn, Harvey wouldn’t have ended up in the middle.
You gave me an ultimatum, and I made the wrong choice—I’m man enough to admit that now.
I could have fixed whatever went wrong if you would have just let me.
Every time I’ve tried, you shut it down. ”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I cry. “We can’t be fixed. When did you ever try—”
Dominik interrupts me. “Here’s my ultimatum: come home, or the only ground you’ll touch on Mars will be a prison yard.”
I stare. Something pulses through me, though I can no longer tell whether it’s rage, disgust, fear, or shock. Whatever it is, it moves sluggishly through me, weighs down my limbs and my heart. I can hardly make sense of what I’ve just heard.
“Are you blackmailing me?”
“Yes,” he says matter-of-factly. “And if you choose to be difficult, don’t expect the crew to leave unscathed.”
“Do you even love Vee? How can you threaten his well-being and use him like this?”
“Marlowe.” Dominik sighs, and in this moment, he suddenly looks weary.
A man older than his years; bone tired and at the end of his rope.
I resist sympathy, turn away from the soft underbelly he exposes.
He pinches the bridge of his nose and rubs the skin until it’s red with agitation; an old habit of his that makes my heart hurt. A habit that means he’s stressed.
“Your problem is that you want to believe I can’t be capable of love just because I can also make the hard decisions. I love you both. That’s why I’m taking charge of our future; everything’s in place, except you,” he says.
But Dominik doesn’t love us. He thinks he owns us, and that’s so far from love I don’t even know where to begin.
I think back to Vee telling me how he really feels about Dominik.
I think back to something I remember saying to Tanisira: that Vee sees him and loves him, that he wants a relationship with his father.
But I never asked him, did I? I assumed…
because he went where he was told to and didn’t complain.
In the end, I did the exact same thing to him that my parents did to me.
And that makes me feel sick to my stomach.
Dominik never let us forget his place in our lives.
He always had the power, the wealth, the sway.
I was the idiot who thought—for Vee’s sake—we could at least be polite whilst co-parenting.
Yes, he’d tried to reach out to me occasionally, but it was always through Opal, and it was never about Vee.
I had no reason to respond. That should have been deterrent enough, but a man like Dominik has never understood rejection—it’s what his legacy is built on.
The reality is, I would do anything for Vee. I’ve already failed him. I won’t do it again.
There’s no question what I have to do, and Dominik knows it.