It was never effortless to love Aaron Warner. He was a difficult teenage boy who seemed to forget a lot of the time that that was what he was-a teenage boy. He'd always felt that loving or even caring for him would be impossible for all the world to...
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MY HEAD IS throbbing. Someone keeps hammering an anvil against my brain and thrashing it around like a damn frisbee. I swear to God, if I've been kidnapped again, I'm going full Lunatic Mara.
I'm tied to something. To a chair, I soon realize. A steel chair. Panic floods me at a rapid rate, the sense of deja vu too strong. So strong I can practically taste it. I can't. This can't be happening again. If I see Anderson walk through that door—
No. I have to remind myself that's impossible. He can never hurt me again. And I need to calm down. I need to steady my breathing so that I don't have a full blown panic attack in what looks to be a lab. It's too similar, it hurts too much.
Breathe. Just breathe.
I just need someone to come here and tell me that I'm not in that same cold, dripping room where the walls talked and hallucinations followed me like ghosts from my past. I need someone to tell me that I can breathe and that I can focus. That I'm not back. Back there. Back where everything went wrong.
I'm not. I know I'm not back there, I just need to coax myself into actually believing my own thoughts. I'm someplace completely different and I know that much for sure. I feel paralyzed but I can see enough around me to know that I'm sitting in a bright lab with windows that look out onto that same gorgeous view that I saw. . .I don't know how long ago.
My mind is too disorientated. I can't make out what's real and what isn't. If all those memories are actual memories or maybe dreams? Of here? Of another life we might've had?
Maybe Aaron and I would've had a chance in another life.
Maybe we wouldn't have been separated so many times. Beaten down like losing dogs.
The door swings open but I can't turn my head. Seriously, someone drugged me. They have to have done—
A woman walks in. The same one that claimed to be my mother. The same one that called me Eden. Who the fuck is Eden? I ask myself but the answer isn't offered to me when she intertwines her hands before her, staring at me like I've severely frustrated her.
"Eden," she says with an accent. "How many times do I have to remind you not to fight your relatives?"
I flinch. "Who the fuck are you?"
Her eyes flash. "I raised you better than that. Don't swear," she tells me, grabbing a pair of white plastics gloves and slipping them on to match her lab coat.
"Seriously," I try to move my fingers but they won't budge, "who the hell do you think you are, lady? Are you another crazy supreme commander? 'Cause I've had my fill, thanks—"
To my surprise, she merely smiles. Like she's amused. Proud even. "My little girl. You should be happy Maximilian isn't here—he'd have had your head for that comment."
