His little body had immediately tensed up at my question but he remained as silent as ever, keeping his lips tightly shut. The only thing that told me that he had heard my question at all was the slight frown that appeared right after.But it had disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. He immediately pulled his hands away from Ms. Belcalis as if he had been burned and hopped off the bed with a slight humph. Avoiding my question all together, he instructed, "You can stay downstairs for the night since it's late, but don't try anything." I nodded silently and gathered all the dirty items off the nightstand. The shredded clothes, dirty clothes, and bloody basin. Taking one last glance back at the pair, watching how he meticulously tucked his mother in with an array of blankets, I stepped out of the bedroom with an armful of items and made my way downstairs. It was pitch dark outside with only a few rays of moonlight shining through the windows. There was the usual random hollering

"Reegan? What are you doing here?" A man with shaggy midnight black hair and a familiar set of grey eyes— the two key traits inherited by all the men in the Cordova family— stared back at me blankly, clearly not in the best mood. When I opened my door this morning, I hadn't expected to see my younger brother standing outside my apartment. With only a five-year age gap, we never had a bad relationship, especially since he had no desire to take over the family business, but he wasn't one to visit others.He worked as a freelance hacker who would've stayed inside his house 24/7 if it wasn't for my mother's mandatory weekly family dinners. As such, he stood just half a foot shorter than me at only 6 feet tall, with a much leaner build than my own from sitting around at his apartment all day. "I didn't want to come, but—" Reegan was abruptly cut off when an arm was suddenly thrown around him, and a familiar brunette popped up in the doorway."I thought we should hang out together this

By the time Ms. Belcalis finished her bath, I had finished disinfecting Liam's wounds and applying an ointment to the bruise on his cheek. I had also wrapped the open-wounded scrapes on his little hands with bandages since he seemed to have scabbed his tender palms pretty badly on the rough pavement when he was pushed around in the crowd. She walked out of the bathroom, drying her hair with a small towel. Even though I found a set of relatively small clothes from my teenage years, the shirt was barely hanging onto her shoulders and almost fell all the way down to her knees. To add on, the drawstring of the shorts seemed to had been pulled as far as it could possibly go to keep them on her hips. But she still managed to make my heart flutter, even though she had just come out of the shower and her face was slightly swollen from before. Taking barely any note of me, she went straight to Liam's side, kneeling down next to him as her eyes worriedly raked over his body. She chewed onto

Shit, this wasn't how I wanted her to find out. If it were up to me, I would've never wanted this situation to happen in the first place, for her sake. She didn't seem like someone who liked to the center of attention and I didn't her to be unnecessarily bombarded by paparazzi just because she was seen with me. But what's done is done. I let out a heavy sigh as I quickly turned my phone off, blackening the screen. When I turned around to glance down at her, she was still staring at the blank screen of my phone with her eyebrows completely scrunched up and her thumbnail locked between her teeth. I gently pulled her finger out of her mouth, not wanting her to hurt herself from chewing on her nail. I softly apologized, "I'm sorry, Ms. Belcalis. I should've been more careful." Her hand tightened, squeezing only two of my finger in her little hand. She looked up with bright violet eyes, quivering as tearing threatened to spill. "I-I... Um... Y-you..." I lightly brushed the tears out o

I don't think I have been as nervous as today since I first met one of my father's business friends back from when I was still only 14 years old. I had changed my outfit 3 times already and fidgeted with my cuffs more times than I could count. Would she like the outfit? It was just a simple button-up shirt along with an oversized coat and some slacks. It wasn't all that different from my usual outfits or full-on suits for work. Would she think that I didn't put too much effort into my outfit and looked too boring?No, no, no. I shouldn't be thinking like that. Ms. Belcalis wouldn't be a person like that. I nervously glanced down at the bouquet of flowers in my arms. I ended up grabbing a set from a flower shop along the way out of instinct: a bouquet of lilacs intermixed with a few strands of lavender because of how they reminded me of her eyes. But did she even like flowers? It was such a cliché gift for the first date. A book probably would've been better for her... I had never