Page 105 of Black Castle

“I swear—” Vivienne fails to finish her words as the echo of glass being shattered slices through the room.

Her tablet. Isadora is smashing the screen of her tablet on her desk.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” Vivienne’s voice tears across the room, shaking the foundation of the house, while Isadora continuously rams the tablet on the table until pieces of glass begin to fly all over the place.

Satisfied, she tosses what is left of the device across the room, prowling toward Vivienne, eyes haunting and crazed.

“You are a liar.” She grabs Vivienne’s hair, shoving her face into hers. The smell of alcohol makes Vivienne dizzy, or maybe it’s because she is pulling her hair from her scalp.

“You made a promise, remember?” she snarls, her fingers digging into Vivienne’s jaw. “You are supposed to stay here with me. Your life is mine. And now you think you can fly away and leave me behind?”

“I’m not leaving.” Vivienne’s chest burns, her head spinning. “Just leave me alone, you psycho!”

Panting, Isadora’s hold on Vivienne’s face and hair suddenly loosens and she staggers backward. Vivienne takes a step further away, watching her through the curve of her lashes.

Isadora’s gaze grows more unsteady and crazed. She also looks very, very confused. And all of a sudden, the woman pulls at the braids she has her hair in, letting out a loud cry. Her eyes search around and when they fall on a stool by Vivienne’s dresser, she dashes to grab it.

“Wait—what the—”

Everything happens too fast and before Vivienne can understand what is happening, the shattering sound of her desktop screen rings across the room. Over and over and over again, she smashes the screen with the stool.

Tossing the stool aside, she goes over to tug off all the connecting cords, hoisting the desktop from the table and dumping it on the floor.

For a few seconds, Vivienne feels completely numb, paralyzed, a distant ringing in her head as she stares at the mess. And then something shifts within her, a flicker of rage that grows with the ticks of the clock’s hand. Then, red bursts behind her eyes, a strangely familiar entity with the destructive energy of poison engulfing her from within. In her veins, her blood has been replaced with acid, anger like forest fire roaring in her chest.

The room reverberates with a bone-chilling cry, raw and agonizing as Vivienne charges like a wounded lion towards Isadora. But before she can make an attack, Isadora fists a hand, throwing a punch directly at Vivienne’s jaw, sending her barreling to the hard floor.

Vivienne has no time to reel back from the attack as Isadora lunges at her. She pins her to the floor with one hand, and then jabs her elbow right into her throat, earning a choking sound from Vivienne.

Vivienne thrashes against Isadora’s hold, but perhaps, she has lost the will to fight as all weak effort to set herself free comes out futile. So she lays there, defeated, unyielding as Isadora wraps her fingers around her neck to hold her in place while her fist sends punches after punches to Vivienne’s jaws, head, ribs…over and over and over again.

“Today, I’ll finally kill you!” Isadora roars, grabbing the reading lamp on the bedside drawer, raising it midair only to smash it into Vivienne’s head. The unexpected force earns a struggling gasp from Vivienne before blackness spreads across her eyes.

Then she feels nothing but numbness, hears nothing but the shallow beats of her heart.

Vivienne doesn’t know how long she stayed knocked out. But being woken up by the sound of her 6:30 am alarm tells her she was out throughout the night.

When her eyes crack open, she is a bit confused. And when she tries to move, her sore and aching joints protest in pain. She tries to open her mouth but there is a throbbing in her jaw, a metallic taste of blood on her tongue.

And that’s when memory floods her.

Drunk Isadora, her broken desktop and tablet—her years of hard work gone in a puff of smoke, and a beating that sent her reeling to the edge of death.

Her eyes twitch and her fingers clench. Heat builds and simmers low in her chest, each breath shallow, feeding the fire. Suddenly the world around her blurs out.

And disconnected from her surroundings, she barely even notices that she had passed out on the floor earlier but woke up tucked under the covers of the bed. Instead, the edges of her vision tint in red as she throws the cover off her body.

She feels nothing, not even the sharp pain when a broken glass embeds itself into her foot as she trudges out of the room, the air bitter, the tension in her chest corded like a wire ready to snap.

All she sees is red, and her mind bounces between grey, bleak, and black. She is in no control when she charges into the kitchen and grabs a knife. And all she hears behind the crack of the closed door in her head is kill her, kill her, kill her.

So when she barges right into Isadora’s room and reaches the bump hidden under her cover, all she hears is, ‘Kill her, she has ruined everything, kill her. And so she does. She drives the knife right through the cover, over and over again. She pours all her years of hate, anger, neglect, and regret into every motion of the knife. She wants her to bleed. She wants to hear her scream and beg.

But there is a problem, she can’t hear anything, nothing at all that sounds like the cry of agony. And she can’t see anything.

No blood.

Violently, Vivienne pulls the cover from the bed and all she sees are pillows whose cottons are spilling out and flying around.

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