Page 105 of Worse Than Wicked
Mabel Darling
This can’t be real.
I’m weightless, floating, a balloon untethered, dropped by a careless child’s hand. For once, I want to go back, but I can’t find my way, can’t seem to return to my body. I can’t find the hand that let me go, the one that promised to hold on.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
Baron stumbles to his feet, backs away from his brother’s lifeless form. His eyes are wild, crazed with pain. For one brief flash, there’s hope, and I think, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s not Baron at all. Maybe everything will be okay.
Baron never shows that much emotion. Never feels it.
But then his eyes fix on me, and the rage is like nothing I’ve ever seen, nothing I can withstand. I shrink down, take a single step back. Being invisible, quiet, and harmless as a baby bunny used to save me, and when it didn’t, drifting away did. I got greedy. I got tired of being quiet. I wanted to make noise, to strike back. And now I pay.
Baron seizes me by the throat, his fingers digging in.
I am defenseless as a little bunny. I have no poison, no knives, no guns. No window or wine bottle presents itself. There’s poison in my pocket, but I don’t reach for it.
“What did you do?” he asks, his breath heavy, labored.
“Nothing,” I manage.
Baron’s fingers tighten, cutting off my air. His eyes blaze hotter than the fire consuming Summer House behind him. Hotter than Baron has ever been.
“Duke?” I mouth, but I have no voice. His fingers are crushing my windpipe. Already, my vision swims, dots of black appearing. Already, my mind is fading.
This is the punishment for my crimes. I always knew the risk. I thought eventually, the police would come for me, no matter how well I hid my tracks, no matter who buried the bodies in my wake. But it’s not the courts that will make me pay.
This is a different kind of justice, one as ancient as human sacrifice.
My knees buckle, and Baron does to the ground with me. I’m vaguely aware of the damp, solid earth below, the fire climbing to the sky above.
This is how I pay. With my life.
It’s more than fair. I’ve taken so many.
This is what happens, not when you take a life, but when you get greedy.
No one likes a greedy girl.
The court system wouldn’t have been kinder. Probably, they would have been crueler. They would have paraded my traumas out one by one, hanging on every salacious detail, using them for their own titillation later, when they were at home with their wives and husbands and daughters of their own, in bedrooms down the hall.
“Where did he put his fingers?”
“Did it hurt?”
“How old were you the first time it happened?”
“What did he say to you while he was inside you?”
“Why didn’t you tell someone?”
“Did you enjoy your grandpa’s special kisses?”
“Did you cum?”
They don’t like it when ordinary people dole out the justice that they would never have the courage to deliver.
So I don’t mind that this is how it ends. I prefer it, even. I stare blindly, sightlessly, up at him, and I feel myself slipping away.
