Shattered: A Dark Romance

I'M BARELY AWAKE WHEN THEY come for me. I had drifted to sleep only hours earlier after the images of her flashed through my head like a fucked up slideshow. The aftermath has left me limp and tired. I don't have a chance to calm my puffy eyes, the clear indicator of my tears, when my dorm room door is flung open.

I don't need words to know why they’re here. The two men stand in the entrance to my bedroom like they own the place, and in some way maybe they do. Vaughn’s family donates a lot of money to my small state college. He could set a building on fire and the staff would smile and wave, not one would bat an eye.

They dwarf the place, tall and lean bodies hovering over me, making my dorm room feel small and crowded.

I always feel small around them.

“It's time, Mik.” Vaughn says. Thick arms cross his body as he fills my doorway. He’s intimidating in his black slacks and button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His ripped forearms are showing, he displays them as if the sight alone is enough of a message to tell me to behave.

The sheet falls off my body when I stand, exposing my pale and bare legs to them. I tug at the hem of the oversized sleep shirt, attempting the smallest amount of modesty and failing.

I’m glad that it’s just the two of them, a small miracle. There should be four, but half of the pack is much more manageable. Beckett stands behind Vaughn, leaning his own large body against the frame of the door. I’m thankful for his presence, he was always the nicest.

“Can I pack a bag?” I ask sheepishly. I'm surprised I wasn’t hauled over a shoulder and dragged from my apartment kicking and screaming, so even though my heart is clenched and my stomach is threatening to betray me, I feel just the smallest amount of gratitude.

“Quickly.” Vaughn spits.

“Shower?” I try. Why stop when I’m ahead?

Beckett rolls his eyes but it’s Vaughn who answers me. “Not enough time, Mikaela.”

I nod solemnly and head to my dresser. I pull a pair of skinny jeans up my legs, a feeble attempt to hide some skin from them, not that they haven’t seen it before. They’ve seen every inch of my body, and now I feel their eyes watching me as I grab a duffle bag from my closet and throw clothes from my dresser into it.

Footsteps thud behind me, a glance over my shoulder shows Beckett pacing through the small room. He jabs a finger at a framed needlepoint reading: be someone who makes you happy. “What’s with all the quotes?” he asks, a single brow lifting in amusement.

“My mom.” I mutter. Beckett only laughs and moves on from the needlepoint to the corkboard filled with inspirational quotes printed out on paper and secured to the board with thumbtacks.

Every cliché you could think of is pinned there.

You got this, girl.

You can do anything you set your mind to!

You are a strong, independent woman.

My mother has scattered the quotes all through my dorm room. Little sayings she finds online and prints out with an old inkjet printer. When that wasn’t enough, she started the cross stitching and then framed the finished products. She hangs them on the walls, sets the frames up on bare surfaces, pins a quote to the fridge with a magnet. She fills the blank spaces of my room with her little bits of positivity.

Anything she can do to keep me hanging on.

My mother is a firm believer that what you think becomes your reality. She lives in the world of The Secret and tries her hardest to drag me along with her.

But she doesn’t know these men the way I do.

She thinks there's a war to be won here, that the truth always comes out in the end, but she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know this family like I do.