Page 109 of Claimed By My Ex's Dad
She’s afraid, and you can’t live in fear when you’re raising a child. The fear rubs off on the infant, and before you know it, your kid is all grown up, sneaking behind your back, putting their own life at risk to make you pay for never being an active part in their life.
I down the rest of the scotch, staring at the bottom of the glass.
I’m fucking doing it again—avoiding.
I thought I was doing the right thing with Igor. My Bratva gave him an affluent upbringing. He could have anything he wanted, a nice apartment, all the money he desired. If he said the word, I was prepared to rub the genie and magic anything into existence for him.
There was one thing I couldn’t provide. And that one missing thing absent in his life caused him pain.
I was never present.
Just like I’m being now, existing halfway across the world, filling the gap in my heart with scotch instead of doing something proactive
Joy will shower our child with love, I have no concerns there.
But my kid is out there, and I want them to know I exist.
As long as my heart is still beating, second chances are still possible.
I exit the bar and pace back down the street, keeping to myself as usual.
I turn a corner, unlock the house I bought when I first landed here, and gather my belongings, preparing a bag.
I enter the lounge area, grabbing all essentials, ignoring the six glasses of scotch abandoned on the coffee table—all mine from last night to try and cure the insomnia.
I’m afraid Joy might be the only cure.
I slip my phone from my pocket and ring for a cab. Being slap bang in the middle of the mountains has its perks. Travelling hours to get to the nearest airport isn’t one of them.
I finish packing my clothes into a suitcase, and swing it over my shoulder, leaving the house unlocked when I walk away. Finder’s keepers. Someone needs this place a lot more than I do.
I cross the road, coming to a stop, approximately one hundred meters away from the bus stop—the exact stop I was standing at when Siguard sent my father away.
I stare into the road. A breeze blows through the street, slowing everything down. The rustling sound of trees disappears, replaced by a cold, haunting breeze that slaps me across the face, ice-cold, like that frozen January afternoon when the winter crawled into the very membrane of my bones and stayed there. Forever.
Even now I feel the chill, the trees behind me not bursting with color, but bare, stripped of life.
I know what I need to do, and how I want to live the rest of my life.
I let the wind take the memory from me. I no longer need to keep holding onto it.
The cab rolls to a stop, picking me up, and I jump right in without looking back.
30
JOY
I feed Hope,sensing his ghost behind me.
Four days later, I’m still buried in grief after finding out Valerian is gone.
I’m slowly starting to sink into the reality of what all this means, now the initial feelings of denial are over.
The weight in my chest triples. Hope will never meet her father, which is what I thought I wanted ten months ago when I walked away. Ignorance is bliss. Avoiding love can sometimes be the better option when you know the love is temporary, slipping through your fingers more each day until you’re left with nothing.
I walked away from Valerian to avoid the paralyzing heartache I’m feeling today. It makes the hurt cut twice as deep. If I knew things would end the same way, I’d have stayed.
I’d have spent every night falling asleep in his arms, savoring the small moments as a family.
