Millicent POV
A kind nurse with tired eyes finally pressed my coat into my hands. "There's nothing more you can do here, Miss. You should go home. Get some rest."
Rest. The word was a foreign language. How could I rest when I was the cause of the issue that had nearly resulted in a murder?
The door to the visitors' room in the hospital where I was sitting swung open. It was my parents; they stood there and watched me with burning anger in their hearts. Mom's face was a mask of both anger and fear. Behind her, my father stood in the hallway; I was too scared to look him in the eyes. I had some questions to answer concerning my disappearance on my wedding day, and now this, another difficult explanation of how I got entangled with a Mafia, to the extent of fighting to have me.
"What happened?" Mom's voice was a low, dangerous wire.
Just before I could utter a word, she interrupted, sounding thunderous.
"The hospital called. A Miss Millicent was listed as the emergency contact for a Pascal Washington, who was admitted with critical injuries. Assault." She spat the word like it was poison. "They said the police are involved, and that her… her fiancé is a person of interest."
I tried to push past her, my body heavy with a fatigue that had nothing to do with sleep. "I can't do this right now, Mom."
"Oh, you will do this right now!" my father roared, finding his voice. It echoed in the quiet hallway, a sound I hadn't heard since I was a teenager.
"We have spent the last six months watching you change. The secretive phone calls, the expensive gifts you could never afford, the black cars that pick you up. You told us they were your wedding planners, that some were your old friends and CO-Staff, and that the gifts were for the wedding. We said nothing; we gave you space, thinking it was true, a richer, older men… but this? A Mafia Millicent! Of all the people in the whole world, a Mafia. Is this what I raised you to become?
The word hung in the air, ugly and final. In my world with Locas, it was a dilemma. Why would everyone blame me for this when it was Pascal who got me involved with a Mafia in the first place? But it was never spoken aloud. Everyone would blame me, thinking I am the bad influence that has let gangsters into the family.
"He came to our house saying he loves me, that ….." I didn't finish the statement when my mother interrupted again.
"Love?" My mother let out a sharp, broken laugh. "Is that what you call it? Look at you! You're shaking. You have circles under your eyes so dark they look like bruises. You think we don't see the fear in you? The man you're defending put a man in the hospital! He is fighting for his life because of him!"
"It was a misunderstanding," I said, the tears starting to fall hot and fast. "He lost his temper. And…
everything got messy."
"My God," my father breathed, his anger dissolving into a horrifying, profound disappointment. "Listen to yourself. You're making excuses for a monster. You're parroting his justifications."
"He's not a monster to me!" I screamed, the sound raw and torn from my throat. "He is kind to me! He takes care of me! You have no idea what I have been through. Can you all just listen to me and let me explain everything?" I screamed at them. At that moment, my head was swollen with so much anger, ready to explode.
"He is not a monster?" my mother shot back, her voice cracking. "Millicent, this is not a life! This is a gilded cage! A cage where women get beaten to a pulp if they step out of line. Are you next? Is that the 'life' you've chosen? Because very soon, you will be his new target and sniffing heavy drugs."
My father, Mr. Adofo, stepped forward. His shoulders slumped. His face, usually creased with a warm smile, was pale and filled with a fear I recognized instantly; his face was ashen. "I will not have it. I will not have my daughter, my little girl, associated with… with that filth. You will end it. Tonight. You will call him and you will end it, or you will walk out that door to my house and not come back."
The ultimatum landed like a physical blow. I looked from my father's rigid, heartbroken face to my mother's tear-streaked one, and hot tears didn't stop rolling down my cheeks.
But Locas' world was a drug. The intensity, the power, the feeling of being chosen above all others. The memory of his arms around me, his voice in my ear telling me I was his everything, warred with the image of Pascal on a ventilator.
I didn't choose any of the options I was offered. The fight broke out between my parents then. I saw it leave them. My mother's shoulders slumped, and she looked at me not with anger, but with a grief so deep it was as if she were looking at my corpse. My father just turned and walked away, back outside from where he came, like a man who had lost a battle he never knew he was fighting.
I stayed on the floor, curled into a ball, the floral pattern of the rug blurring before my eyes. The hospital was a nightmare of sterile violence.
My home was now a battlefield, strewn with the wreckage of my parents' trust. And the only place left to go was to the man who had caused it all, back to Locas, to vent my anger to him and warn him to stay away from me. But Pascal was the source of the poison, because the terrible, shameful truth was that after everything, I was going to tell the truth to everyone. The struggle to get home wasn't about the distance from the hospital; it was about the impossible turnaround between the woman I was raised to be and the woman I had become. And today, I had lost my way completely.