• Janine •

My father is a strong man, trust me, I know. But all people break and all empires fall, and the longer you're standing the more it hurts after all.

The first time I watched him cry, they were the silent kind of tears—as if you didn't quite know they were there yet and hadn't yet processed the overflow of feelings that were falling from your eyes. I tend imagine he had felt like the floor had disappeared below him, as if the world had just collapsed beneath him; fallen and shattered and just simply gone like the lives we both used to possess—because I know that is what I had felt.

Everything had fallen into perfectly into place, for them at least. Working in the shadows for an unknown amount of time, they laid their tracks and traps as they pleased. Their result? An intricate plot to throw chaos into the city with all the pieces lined up clearly in a trail of black and white dominos and ready to fall.

And it had only taken a mere whisper to set it all tumbling down at their will.