Kylie Bray (Love, Hate and Billions) novel Chapter 55

When my father left me the message with his address I knew it was time.

It has been a long time since I have sat in the same room as my father.

Today as I take the car up to the fiftieth floor, his penthouse suite in Washington DC, I know I am done hiding and he is done waiting.

Doors open, with a familiar painting greeting me as I enter the passageway.

The red and blue splashes, twirled around a half-naked form remind me of the man I left a few hours ago.

Charcoal walls run through the house as I walk down the passageway and turn right into my father's office space.

I knock on the closed white door.

“Come in Kylie,” His voice takes me off-kilter, it has been so long.

I have always had a close relationship with my father until I had something to hide.

That was almost three years ago.

“Papa, you wanted to see me.”

My father sits behind his black desk. The room isn't that big.

Filled with pictures of us his children, is a long black glass set of shelves on the left, as high as the roof, down to the carpeted floor.

Everything else is hidden behind a closed cupboard that is stationed next to a door that leads to the bathroom.

His dark eyes and sharp features so much like my own stare at me as I look around the familiar room.

The old leather sitter still taking residence by the wall facing out the window. We used to sit on that couch watching the lights of Washington DC, it is one of the best views of the white house.

My father and I would sit on that couch, making up stories, guessing what they were doing inside of the white house, laughing when I started talking about the president actually been an alien, but that was so long ago.

The thought tugs at my heartstrings reminding me of my fall, of my new life.

How could life tumble in turfs that are unraveling to the human mind?

How could I succumb to this latitude of proportions that take me to this darkness?

It's breaking me.

I keep believing that the world is whole, that my mind isn't.

It's like my soul is pushing me to this place I can't see, but my heart is taking me somewhere else, to a place where I can't fathom.

How do I see it happening when my very existence is slipping from my fingers.

Yesterday, when I looked in the mirror, I barely recognized myself.

I am just empty, dying. I feel there are days again where I want to end it, end this treachery of these unknown parts, I am scared.

Oh god, help me.

This weight is beating me down, taking me in.

I breathe every second, telling myself I am human. I should feel something, but I can't because every time I think, every time I even consider it he goes and takes more lives.

He says I am his muse, yet all I see in the mirror, all I feel is a monster, a killer.

He kills them in my name, he takes their lives because they took me.

He makes me watch, he forces me to accept it

I know it's wrong. I know I should stop him, but when he touches me something awakens in me that I can't feel unless I am with him.

They say to be strong is to face your weakness, but how do I face him when he is also my strength.

I was raped, left to die, and there he was, the man I have given my heart to for so long, there he stood.

The only person to see that I was dead the day I left that dock, I was no more.

I was just a frosted robotic version of myself.

I wasn't the person who was captured all those months ago, I was now Frost.

A woman capable of much worse than him.

“Kylie.” My father says my name, the name he gave me, the name I have come to hate.

Yet, as he utters it, there is so much in that name. All his love, all his understanding.

At this moment, in front of the man that is half me, the man that has raised me when my own mother abandoned me, in front of this man, my father, I feel it. I feel it all.