"Who did this to my daughter?!"
Oh no...
This isn't the first thing I want to come back to life for...
How ironic...
"Caster, speak! Who did this to my daughter?!"
The smell of disinfectant preceded my full awareness. The cold mixture of cleanliness and anxiety that only exists in hospitals. The same smell that lingered in my memory the day my father was dying. The air here is different; filtered, purified, entering my lungs as if it were not of this world.
So I am alive.
Or at least... I haven't died yet.
"Look, Laura... she's opened her eyes."
I felt a warm hand grip mine tightly, fingers trembling against my skin, kisses poured in a desperate silence. I tried to open my eyes fully, but the light was heavy, my vision blurry. Yet I could make out the shadows: Caster, Stacker, Teague. They stood almost equidistant, as if under suspicion.
The scene is painfully familiar.
The same faces, the same tension, the same catastrophe… me.
The same scene repeats itself…
"Diana? My dear, can you hear me? Are you okay?"
If only I could answer.
Us
If only I could tell you to run. Not from them… but from something you can't see.
I tried to make sense of my body. The pain wasn't localized, it was all-encompassing; as if my bones were being rearranged without my consent. Bandages encircled my chest and shoulders, a heavy weight encircled my neck—a medical brace to immobilize my vertebrae. Even breathing required calculated effort.
That's how it ended.
I went into the library to escape, and came out carried to a white bed surrounded by machines monitoring my pulse. I was searching for survival, and I nearly lost my life on the way.
I couldn't open my eyes properly, but my hearing was sharp. And my mother wasn't silent.
Her voice rose, filled with panic and anger:
"Where are you going?!"
"Tig, let go of my hand! I'll call the police! You almost killed my daughter!"
"Laura, come to your senses… It looks like a burglar broke in."
A short, broken laugh escaped my mother, hardly a laugh at all.
"A burglar? In a house guarded day and night? All this security, all this protection, and the thief has to find my daughter to attack?!"
She was approaching them; I could hear the scraping of her footsteps on the floor.
"You take her to a bar, make her drink until she's unconscious, then she comes back to me with broken bones, and you call it a burglar? I won't allow it!"
I knew she didn't know the truth. And that was a merciful ignorance.
If she had known that what had happened to me wasn't a robbery or a minor altercation, but a confrontation with something beyond her comprehension, her anger would have turned into unbearable terror.
"I apologize to you all, but you must leave the patient alone; your intrusive presence is affecting her comfort."
Finally, the nurse intervened, putting an end to the tragedy surrounding me. My mother's sobs were the sharpest blade in my chest, and with the creak of the door closing behind them, I realized everyone had indeed left. I returned to my solitude, to the pure oxygen flowing into my lungs like an anesthetic, stealing me from reality.
But the events wouldn't leave my mind; memories struck me like lightning bolts. I remembered his features, his severed hand, and the horrific way he had broken me. Had his cruelty reached such a point that he had lost his humanity? It seemed that power and authority had given him the illusion that he was the sole predator, and perhaps he had done worse to others than he had done to me.
I could hardly believe that I had moved from my peaceful life to this miserable Edinburgh, only to find myself the protagonist of a dark fantasy, a story whose goal was survival and whose title was death.
Days of Ash
I remained bedridden for more than four days, my body motionless and my soul speechless. The only things that connected me to life were my mother's kisses imprinted on my hand and her tears that regularly soaked my skin.
As the days passed, I began to regain my ability to move and speak. I spoke with my mother, and sometimes with Tej, but the two brothers hadn't appeared since the first day for a reason I didn't know, and I lacked the energy to satisfy my curiosity by asking about them.
Despite the pain, this incident granted me precious time with my mother, time I hadn't had in a long time. During this time, I discovered the widening chasm of silence between her and her husband, Tej. He tried to appease her on every visit, but she met his attempts with fierce resistance and dismissed him with harsh words. My attempts to reconcile them evaporated before her stubbornness.
And every day, she would repeat her inevitable question: "Who did this to you?" And every time, I resorted to lying, pretending I hadn't seen my attacker's face, that he had attacked me without any motive or reason.
I spent more than two weeks in medical care. Only today did I begin to enjoy eating normally again; Joseph's grip, which had squeezed and crushed my throat, had prevented me from swallowing anything solid for so long, leaving my body to subsist solely on liquids.
I'm now on my feet, gathering my clothes with my mother around the room, as it's time to leave the hospital. Medically speaking, I'm "cured," but the truth is, the cure is only on paper; in reality, there's still a long road ahead with medication and treating those bruises that still stain my chest and neck with pain.
Through my long conversations with my mother, I understood what had happened that night. They found me lying in a pool of blood inside the library, but the story everyone heard was incomplete. They said I was in the "first library," not the third. It seemed that Joseph, after he had finished attacking me, disposed of me in a more remote location to obscure the evidence.
"Glad to have you back..."
The voice came from behind me, sharp and cold. I turned to find Sauntra standing there with her usual smug smile. She looked like an ancient witch who refused to acknowledge the passage of time; heavy makeup, tight black dresses that suffocated her, as if she were still chasing a bygone youth.
"Thank you..."
I replied curtly, continuing to fold the clothes and put them in the suitcase without giving her the honor of turning my head.
"This is what happens when you break the rules," she said in a harsh, preachy tone. "I'm glad you broke one now. Perhaps you'll learn from your mistakes and not break any of my rules in the future."
My hand froze. I turned to her, a mock smile plastered on my face. "I just went to get a book," I said. "I wanted to read something."
"A book? In the dead of night? The rules forbid entering the library at night. You've violated my rules. If you had waited until morning, you would have saved us a lot of trouble."
"I'm the one who needs to save trouble here," I retorted, my voice rising. "Since I set foot in your palace, I've only encountered new kinds of trouble."
She sighed with feigned boredom and said, "Listen... I bet you were attacked by someone in the darkness of the library and you can't remember their face. My advice to you is not to look for who it was, and not to reopen this family wound again. I'll consider this a new rule, so try not to break it."
"Someone?" I thought to myself sarcastically. She apparently doesn't realize I've known the culprit perfectly well since my first day. She thinks I'm some foolish victim, a helpless scapegoat.
"Try to comply," she added, turning with haughty steps toward the door, "or you'll find that monster waiting to crush you again."
I mustered my scattered courage and stopped her with a single sentence: "Do you think all this is normal?"
She stopped in her tracks and turned with a questioning look: "Excuse me...?"
I continued bitterly, "Aren't you ashamed? These strict rules, and this monster lurking in the shadows... Do you think his presence in a prestigious palace like yours is normal? You're a curse!"
Her arrogance suddenly turned into an open threat, and her gaze blazed with anger as she approached. "And what do you know about our palace to call it a curse? A hundred-year-old palace, where I was raised and where I reached this position thanks to it... A spoiled brat like you isn't going to teach me how to manage my affairs."
"Aren't you afraid I'll call the police?" I interrupted defiantly. "Tell them everything, and open an investigation into your rules?"
She laughed sarcastically. "Just as much trouble as your mother... Your mother filed a complaint against Stacker for getting you drunk and sick, and now you want to stir up trouble? Go ahead... Call the police, and bring the federal agents along if you can!"
She stormed out and slammed the door behind her, leaving me stunned. I do work for a federal agent, but her absolute confidence suggested she was hiding behind Joseph's terrifying shadow.
But wait... a complaint?
Did they arrest Stacker because of my mother's tip?
I felt a pang of sympathy for him, but I didn't blame my poor mother; if she had the evidence I had, she'd have the whole family locked up to save her daughter.
Sauntra left the room, leaving behind a question that gnawed at my mind. She hadn't mentioned anything about what she'd seen while I was with Master in the room. Could it be that she truly hadn't seen anything? If she had, she would at least have used it to blackmail me into silence or even used it against me. But she simply left as if nothing had happened.
My mother's entrance broke my train of thought, her face beaming. "The driver is waiting outside. Are you finished, sweetheart?"
I looked directly at her and blurted out my urgent question: "Mom... why did you file a complaint against Stacker?"
Her smile vanished, replaced by a miserable rage as she replied, "Isn't what they're already doing to you enough?"
"But what did Stacker do wrong?" I exclaimed bitterly. "You're taking revenge on the kindest person in that family and letting the real monsters go free!"
She sighed heavily, her voice heavy with frustration. "Please stop... If I had the power to erase them all from existence, I would do it without hesitation."
"But he's not the culprit, Mama!" I pleaded desperately. "I told you it was some unknown person who attacked me, maybe a thief who broke into the library."
"And who says it wasn't him?" she snapped, her tone uncompromising. "Whatever the truth may be, there's no denying he was the reason you lost consciousness and fell ill that night."
"Mama, I'm an adult!" I cried helplessly. "You can't throw someone in jail just for sharing a few drinks with an adult!"
She slammed the bags down and looked at me coldly. "The police didn't arrest him for getting you drunk... it was for getting his underage brother drunk."
The ground seemed to shake beneath my feet. "Mama, stop... Go and drop the charges immediately."
She stopped moving completely and gave me a strange, suspicious look. "Do you love him?"
I clutched my head in my hands, my head pounding with a headache and despair. "Please, stop! Love who? Can't you see my condition? I'm just trying to stop you from making a terrible mistake... You can't torture someone just because you're angry."
"What anger are you talking about?" she said, ignoring my words as she went back to gathering the bags. "I'm giving them back a small part of what they did to my daughter."
"How long has he been detained?" I asked, my heart heavy.
"I won't back down," she replied without turning around. "It's already too late."
"I asked you... How long has he been detained?" I raised my voice urgently.
"Two weeks!" she shouted at me, her voice so sharp it made me back away. "Two whole weeks!"
"Two weeks?" I whispered to myself in astonishment, "And here I was, wondering all this time why he never visited me, not even once..."
My mother continued coldly as she headed towards the door, "I arrested one of them, not both. As for Caster, he disappeared after a heated argument with Sauntra and traveled far away, but it's said he'll be returning to the palace today."
Before closing the door behind her, she added in a commanding tone, "Put on your coat... and follow me quickly."