Chapter Seven - Tia

Home, sweet home, I think sarcastically as I step through the door. Oh fucking joy.

I don’t want to be back here, this is the last place in the world I want to be, I just don’t have any choice. Now with the cruise behind me, I really need to start focusing on my real life. There are no more excuses, I need to get back to reality.

I drop my bag on the floor in the hallway and run my eyes over the mass expansion of house that lies before me. I’ve always thought that we have far too much room for three people, especially when there are plenty of homeless people in the world, but just like the rest of my opinions it means nothing.

I run the pick around in my fingers, trying to draw some comfort from it. The orange guitar pick that Stephen pressed into my hand with a promise to return… a promise that he obviously had no intention of keeping. I woke up eventually the next morning, still naked, still alone, with only the pick for company. At first I tried to make some excuses for why he didn’t come back. I told myself it didn’t matter because it wouldn’t be long until we saw one another again anyway. I naively assumed that there wasn’t anywhere on the boat that he could vanish to until we docked somewhere… but it seems I was wrong. Somehow, he managed to vanish forever, leaving me with only this pick to remember him by.

I should chuck it out, I know that would be the wise thing to do, but for some reason I can’t. When I do I’ll be accepting that it’s over forever. Silly as it is I just can’t let it go.

“Mom?” I call out, actually hoping that she isn’t home. Really, I want to be by myself for a bit. “Dad?”

No one answers me, so I walk through the house aimlessly like I used to do a lot as a child. I always had a lot of friends, but I wasn’t ever allowed to have them over at the house… obviously because of my dad and his dodgy dealings. I went to their homes, but I couldn’t all the time, and because I was an only child I just used to walk around the house looking for something to do. Sure, I had all the toys, but what fun are they with no on to play with? That’s just boring. So, I would wander around aimlessly, just like I’m doing now.

I guess some things never change.

Maybe this is where the loneliness started actually. I’ve been blaming it on other things but there’s a very good chance that it started right here in this very house. It came for me early on and has stuck with me ever since. For one brief naïve moment, I thought my wild night with Stephen might be about to turn into something to cure that, especially when he said that he wanted to talk, but that – like everything else – turned out to be bullshit.

I sigh loudly and shake my head. I need to forget about Stephen now, I need to push him out of my mind if I actually want to get my life in order. He’s gone, he made sure of that, and there’s no way in hell I’m getting him back. I don’t have his cell phone number or his address and he doesn’t have mine. We met on the cruise ship, we had one wild night, and that’s the end of it. I just need to shake off this sadness and start moving my life in a positive direction. That’s all. Easy peasy.

“What do you think, boss?”

All of a sudden I’m shocked by a voice floating down the hallway. I assumed I was in the house alone, no one answered me as I yelled out, but clearly I didn’t do it loud enough. I recognize the man’s voice well. It belongs to Adrian Walker, my father’s ‘business partner’. He’s always been a familiar face in this house, but I still don’t know what he does. Obviously, something dodgy if he works with Dad. Plus, there’s also the fact that he also refers to my dad as ‘boss’. That seems weird and mafia like to me.

I can’t stop myself, I sneak along to the room I can hear the voices coming from, needing to know more. I’ve always been kept out the way of these business meetings, for obvious reasons, which has only made me more intrigued. Now I can discover what I think I know, what I need confirmed, without anyone giving me shit for it. I just need to make sure I’m not caught eavesdropping. No problem at all.

I like the idea of a mystery anyway, it gives me something else to think about other than my broken heart, my aimless life that feels pretty pointless at the moment, the fact that I feel like I’m years behind my friends… I can forget it all for just a minute.

“I don’t think we can leave him, you know. It just isn’t right.”

Through the heavy wooden door my dad doesn’t sound impressed. I recognize that grave tone well from the times I did stuff wring as a kid. The funny thing is when I started to get older and into doing things that were worse, such as underage drinking, he had gotten so wrapped up in his business that he didn’t really care about me at all.

“So, you think we need to kill him?”

My blood runs cold. I know I’ve always assumed that my father isn’t a nice man, but to hear the word ‘kill’ tossed about so causally makes me feel sick. Maybe this is a bit mafia like in a way that I really don’t want to think about.

My pulse races harder and faster, my stomach churns and twists upside down, my blood runs icy cold. I raise myself up onto my tiptoes and I push my ear right up against the door. Screw worrying about getting caught now, I have to know what’s being said.

“You have his picture, don’t you?” Dad replies, a little scathingly. “So I can’t imagine it’ll be too hard to find him. He’s just one guy, you know? Barely out of his teens by the look of it. Just find him, kill him, prevent any potential witnesses coming forwards.”

The words I’m hearing are straight out of some terrible gangster movie, but they’re being spoken in real life, in my house, by my family member. And not only are they talking about killing someone, but someone young too. Someone probably a similar age to me. An innocent bystander probably, someone who just saw something completely by accident. They’ve already had their life shaken upside down and now they’re going to lose it over God knows what.

I wonder what the person saw. I wonder what they witnessed to deserve losing their life.

I step backwards, clutching onto my chest as I do. This is wrong, it’s so wrong, but what the hell can I do about it? Maybe I can work out who they’re talking about to try and warn them… or go to the cops… anything to prevent this murder from happening.

But how can I? Realistically, it’s impossible. I don’t even know what I heard really and there are ways my father could play it off. Maybe he would pretend that he was joking. Then I’d be in for it. I know how private his business is, I’ve spent my whole life having that drilled into me. Dad will go absolutely mental at me for breaking his rule.

Maybe I’ll even end up on his hit list.

“Do you have a preference how we do it?” Adrian asks, his voice travelling even though I don’t want to hear anymore. He’s like a fog horn, he just booms. I don’t know how he’s ever managed to have a private meeting in his entire life! Maybe that’s why it’s always been here. “Shooting, stabbing, something a little more… fun?”

He sounds twisted and excited, which only makes me feel sicker. How can he be such a messed up man? How can my mother and father have let me be anywhere near all of this? I’m certain Mom knows and she just doesn’t care, but how twisted of her to let it affect me. If Dad is a criminal, which I’m not sure he is, then that life could have come back to haunt him. Someone could have kidnapped, harmed, or killed me just to get to him. Unless everyone knows he doesn’t really care about me of course…

“I don’t care,” Dad replies dismissively, as if he’s talking about what to have for dinner rather than cold blooded murder. “He’s a pest, just get rid of him before he becomes a squealer.”

Then I hear footsteps which is my cue to leave. I spin on my heels and take off running as quickly and as quietly as I can manage. I need to get up to my bedroom, I need to hide and lock myself away from the world while I try to process this. I cannot deal with being caught listening in, especially not to that conversation.

As I reach the front door, I grab my bag to bring it up to my room with me. Maybe Dad will guess I’m in anyway, but I don’t want to give him any clues to my whereabouts. I race up the stairs, taking some of them two at a time as I go, and soon I find the room I’m looking for.

I tear inside and lock the door behind me, before collapsing breathlessly to the ground. My lungs are constricted, I can’t seem to suck back enough air for them, and that only gets worse the harder I try. Even a tear runs down my cheek as I think about the horror that I’ve just experienced.

My father is a criminal… a killer… the worst sort of man around.

I feel utterly helpless, hopeless, like I have a huge weight on my shoulders that I can’t do anything about. I don’t feel like I can just sit here and do nothing while someone’s life is in danger. I want to, need to, take some sort of action. Maybe I can’t go to the cops yet, but that’s because I don’t have any evidence. If I think about it, my father runs a lot of his business from this house, he always has done. He must keep something incriminating in here. If I find something and I take that to the police then I can stop him before someone else dies at his hands.

It isn’t right for my bloodline to be killers, I just can’t accept that. Maybe my mom doesn’t mind because she gets to wear fancy things, but blood money doesn’t do it for me.

I have to get out of this house, I think determinedly to myself. Once I’ve done this I need to escape. My family are hell and I have to get away.

I glance around the room, confirming that thought. My bedroom is a shrine to the person I was years ago before I left for college. Pictures litter the walls, all my old stuff is scattered everywhere, it’s been left exactly as it was as if to let me slide right back into the person who I once was, as if I never left her behind at all. The immature school girl who cared more about her friends and make up than anything else. In a way, I’m miles away from that person now, but in another way. I’m still just her. Insecure, scared of the world, no idea where I’m going to go. Only now I have new knowledge, and it’s the information that my father likes to kill people. There’s no coming back from that.