It was such a pretty dream. And I was all for making it come true.
W e flew right over a glitzy strip of lights, a street so vibrant it made my eyes nearly pop out of my skull and fall into my lap.
There was a pyramid with a beam of light cutting right up into the sky, a shiny Ferris wheel and towering hotels, all of them illuminated in white, pink, blue, green. It was a feast for my eyes and they wanted to eat up every piece. I spotted the Eiffel tower and whipped around in my seat, gasping as I looked to Niall.
“We’re in Paris?” I cried.
“Las Vegas, love.” He smirked and my heart did a dip and a spin then bounced off somewhere into my gut.
I felt lots of things about that all at once. Las Vegas was the most exciting place in the world. It was a city built on a foundation of sin and I had always, always, always wanted to visit. But on the other hand, this was the city my mom had run off to with her fancy new man Esteban. Yuck.
She’d promised we’d see each other regularly, but I hadn’t heard a peep from her since. She’d tossed me away like a mouldy potato which had recently been up a convict’s butt and I had never forgiven her for it. She was a flyaway hag, a runaway ho, and I didn’t care about her one bit. Because she had abandoned me for Esteban. Fucking Esteban of all people. The man who’d eaten the last special box of Coco Pops my dad had brought home with us from our trip to England. A snarling creature awoke in my chest, snapping off pieces of my ribs in a fit of rage over that memory.
The plane bumped as it landed suddenly and I gasped in surprise, looking to Niall.
“You’re not taking me to my mom and Esteban, are you?” I blurted. “They won’t take me back if that’s what you’re thinking. They don’t want me, Hellfire, and I don’t want them. Please don’t take me to them. They’ll put me in a box and ship me off to Peru. And I don’t know anyone in Peru. I can’t even speak Perusian – I mean, I’ll probably pick it up after a while because I’m really gifted with languages, but I hear there’s a lot of llamas in Peru and everyone knows llamas are snobs and hate everyone. Even if I can speak their language perfectly, they won’t let me into their llama clan, so I’ll be all alone again, and I just want to go home. Let me go home with you.” I was struggling with my seatbelt, trying to get it off so that I could run and find a space in the back of the plane where I could hide, but Niall got out of his seat, leaning over me and pressing his hands to my shoulders as he held me down in the chair.
“I’m not taking ya back to them, little psycho. Listen to me, I meant what I said to ya. You’re mine. Nothing’s gonna change that now, understand? Where you go, I go, and vice versa. So if ya ever end up in Peru somehow, I’ll be there too, alright? But it ain’t gonna be me who sends ya there.”
A lump rose in my throat and bobbed there like a ship on a rocky wave.
“You promise?” I whispered, stilling as I stared up at the powerful man above me making such beautiful declarations that they simply didn’t seem real. When we’d had sex, it had been such a wonderful dream to buy into it, but now reality was here and she was a blonde bimbo of a bitch, slapping me around the face repeatedly while her friends watched and laughed.
“I promise, Brooklyn,” he said roughly.
I swear every time he used my real name some broken piece inside me fixed back into place. But it wasn’t rebuilding the old me, it was a new version which I liked the feel of.
I took a slow breath, letting myself believe that dream again, even while reality’s laughter tittered in my ear. Niall unclipped my belt and drew me to my feet, tucking a lock of hair behind my ear and leaning into me.
His mouth came down on mine and a nuclear explosion went off in my belly, incinerating every butterfly in sight and leaving mass destruction in its wake. His touch had such an effect on me that when his mouth parted from mine, I felt like I’d just survived the fallout of that blast he’d set off in me, weathered years in an apocalypse where I’d fought zombies and become the queen of a savage land.
His hand dropped to take mine, his fingers threading between my own and he turned, tugging me after him while I raised my chin and walked beside him. We climbed down a little stairway out of the plane and a warm desert wind caressed my cheeks, the dry air so different to the wet stuff I was used to.
A fancy black car was waiting for us and a man in a suit stood there, nodding to Niall before opening the back door and ushering us inside. We dropped into the back of it while the man got in the car and drove off across the airfield, not saying a single word while Niall released my hand and placed it on my knee instead.
“This is the right thing to do,” he murmured to himself and I looked to him for an explanation, but he just turned his head and gazed out the window thoughtfully. “Jesus, would ya look at the size of that palm tree over there?” he gasped. “That’s got to be the size of two palm trees sitting one on top of the other.”
“At least,” I agreed.
We were soon driving along the strip I’d seen from the sky and every building blew my mind as I gazed out at them. There must have been a bazillion light bulbs to make this place so shiny and I stared at the people on the sidewalks either side of us, hunting their eyes for that same light. There was such a mixture of misery and joy rolling through their expressions, I couldn’t tell if this place was hell or heaven.
There were girls in bikinis with big feathers pluming from their butts while men gawped at them and their wives pulled on their arms to keep them away. Tourists weaved among the crowd in Las Vegas shirts and hats, people dressed up for their nights out on the town, and people who didn’t have any shoes or teeth. It was a clash of rich and poor and everything in between, all of them milling along together, so many people even though it was late at night, everyone looked wide awake and ready to find out what Vegas had to offer them. I could feel the energy in the air, the excitement over the world opening up again in the wake of the Hades Virus. I could feel the promise of money against my palm and the sense of it already slipping from my fingers too. Everyone here was rolling the dice, praying their number came up and I wanted to roll one as well and find out if fate was in my favour tonight.
“Can we go there?” I pointed into a casino. “No – there!” I spotted a man dressed as a shirtless Roman soldier. “Actually, there,” I changed my mind as another wonder caught my eye. “No, no, I wanna go in there!” I tapped on the window, pointing to every building we passed, each one begging me to come explore it. When the Eiffel Tower whizzed by, I pouted at Niall, folding my arms. “Where are we going? It better be better than – oh my God, look at those fountains!” I scrambled over Niall’s lap, squashing my face to the window to see the huge sprays of water shooting towards the sky, the water lit up in an incredible display as Viva Las Vegas by Elvis Presley played through speakers all around it. “Stop the car, driver man,” I begged.
“Don’t stop,” Niall barked and I looked to him with my biggest eyes, a whimper leaving my throat. Niall pushed me back into my seat, shaking his head at me.
“We’ve got somewhere to be, Spider,” he said firmly and my pout deepened as I huffed. “I’ll take ya to see the fountains after.”