Prologue
Things didn’t look great, not only had I lost the last piece of my normal life, staring down at the foreclosure notice on my mother's house, but now I had to face the reality she would probably never come home. Watching someone wither away, knowing they were once full of life, once the biggest influence in yours and now reduced to skin and bone, bedsores, and a machine breathing for them as the life force slowly drained out of them, bloody sucked. I thought for sure that would be the hardest day of my life when they rang me to tell me there was nothing else they could do for her.
Yet, I still held out hope, held onto the possibility, no matter how slim it was, she would return to me, just wake up like nothing happened. Scrunching up the foreclosure notice, I tossed it in the trash before adjusting the box tucked under my arm. I walked to the trunk of my car dropping my mother's alcohol stash in it. I couldn’t leave it in the storage locker, no flammable liquids, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out either. Mum loved a drink. I hated that she was a drunk but now I would give anything to see her with her glass in her hand laughing and telling me stories. Sighing, I closed the trunk and hopped in my car gazing at my childhood home one last time before saying goodbye to this part of my life.
I was truly on my own.
Breathe, just breathe, it's only temporary. I told myself, staring into the back of my cramped Honda Civic. At least I still had my job and my health, even though that was dwindling away. I could remain normal as long as I could keep my job, and that hope kept me going. Could things really get worse at this point? Yet as I drove myself to work, I knew afterward I had nowhere to go and was now officially homeless. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was how my life would always be.
***
I snorted at the memory, remembering how pathetic my life now was. Everything went downhill the day I left that driveway.
Funny how things worked out, I thought that was the worst day I would endure. Little did I know I had an entire future planned out by what supernaturals called the fates. That the two men I worked for would claim me and turn out to be monsters I wanted desperately to escape from until I no longer didn’t. What was the point? This life of mine was apparently destined for this horror story, why fight it? So what if my life was going to crumble and burn before I found happiness?
Happiness? I couldn’t remember what the heck that felt like, to me it seemed like some conjured-up dream, a fantasy, and I don’t mean the good kind that makes your panties damp. Don’t get me wrong. I wish it was that sort of dream, but I dreamt of stability. That's what would make me happy. The only dreams that seemed a possibility was a messed up sort of dream, the fucked up joke kind, where you didn’t know if you wanted to laugh or cry at the circumstances you found yourself in because it was truly that pathetic, that bad. Happiness was something of the past. I downed my bottle of vodka building up the liquid courage to face my Sinful mates, or maybe I was the sinful one and maybe I liked it. Or maybe this vodka had gone to my head. I stumbled back to the office, trying to pretend to be normal and like I hadn’t just downed half the bottle. Yep fake it till you make it, or don’t. Either way, I was all kinds of messed up, but that's ok because so were my mates.
