Page 47

“That’s not you?” She raises a brow. “Right, I thought so too. That can’t possibly be you. I mean you were right here, tending to the house. Come on, how would you have ended up there? It’s stupid, right? Anyone that thinks it’s you must be a damn bloody fool, isn’t it?”

“I-”

Whatever Vivienne is planning to say gets shoved back down her throat as a resounding echo of a slap knocks her off her balance, leaving her staggering a few steps back.

Her ear is ringing, her cheek throbbing, and there is a metallic taste settling at the corner of her mouth.

“Who is he?” She prowls toward her, shoving the screen of her phone into her face. “Who did you go and see in Russia?”

“M-my friend.” Vivienne struggles out, cradling her face.

“Oh.” Her thick brow raises mockingly, tongue tucked inside her cheek. “Your friend, right?”

Vivienne nods.

“How wonderful.” She claps her hands. “A friend.”

Vivienne nods again.

“Wow.” A sinister smile touches Isadora’s lips. “This friend must be so special, isn’t he?”

Isadora sinks to the edge of the bed, her legs crossed. And then she goes ahead and burps. The stench of alcohol is just a hint but it still lingers around Vivienne’s nostril for some seconds.

“So…” Her eyes drag back to her. “Where did you get the money to go see this special friend ?” She makes an air quote with her fingers.

“It’s my money,” Vivienne quickly says.

“I never said you stole it.” Isadora’s eyes darken, and her lips lost the smile which was never even real in the first place. “Where did you get the money? I am your legal guardian and I reserve every right to know.”

Vivienne stalls a little, then realizes keeping information from Isadora Rivera never ends well.

“I made a few commissions.”

Isadora’s eyes travel to Vivienne’s desktop and then to her tablet whose screen is still left on. She rises to her feet and crosses over to the study desk.

She picks up the tablet.

“So people are finally interested in your silly little doodles, huh?” It sounds more like a confirmation. And she sounds more cynical than proud of Vivienne.

“Yes.”

“So, now you are making so much money you even fly across the world now, isn’t it?” Isadora hasn’t turned her back, but her tone grows more spiteful and her grip on the tablet seems a bit too hard.

“I really needed—”

“I bet you think you are a big girl now, am I right?” She slowly turns to Vivienne. “Now you have wings, don’t you?”

“What—”

“I bet you wanna fly now, huh?” Vivienne doesn’t like Isadora’s smiles, and this one on her lips right now makes her really nervous.

“Isadora, what—”

“Tell me, how far do you wanna fly, my little swan?” She raises a devious brow. “Where do you wanna fly off to?”

“Can you stop?—”

“-Russia? Asia? Maybe the UK? Or have you thought of maybe South Korea? Yes.” She snaps her fingers. “I bet you have thought of somewhere far away from Isadora Rivera.”

“I’m not—” Vivienne licks her suddenly dry lips, wringing her now sweaty hands, and swallowing the big lump stuck in her throat. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“These lies.” Her fingers dig into the screen of the tablet. “These little lies of yours are what I hate the most. You are just like your father. You two are so good at lying to me.”

“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.

A loud roar slices through the air like a primal cry of rage as she continues to stab the bed and the pillows over and over again until she is worn out.

Her breaths are shallow, sweat coating every part of her body as she collapses beside the bed. Then something snaps. It feels like a dark cloud finally moving to give way to the blue. It feels like a mask being pulled away from her eyes.

She can hear and she can see clearly now.

“Oh, my god!” The knife slips from her trembling hands, hitting the floor beside her with a loud thud. She raises her trembling hands to her eyes, her heart pounding.

These hands. These hands of hers. They almost took a life.

“I told you, didn’t I?” Vivienne’s head snaps to the other side of the bed where there is a brown chair Isadora usually sits on to go through criminal files whenever she is working from home.

And right now, Isadora is sitting there, legs crossed, a sinister smile on.

“You are just like him,” she says. “Like father, like daughter.”

“No.” Vivienne shakes her head, panic breaking through the haze of shock in her eyes. “No, no, no. I’m not. I’m not like him. I will never be like him.”

“Why not?” She raises a comical brow. “His blood burns fervidly in your veins, doesn’t it? His darkness lives inside you.”

“Stop!” Her hand flies to cover both of her ears. “Stop.” She roars, her chest burning.

Then, all of a sudden, a quiet settles around her, Isadora’s voice is gone. She cracks her eyes open. And though the brown chair is still there, Isadora is not.

She isn’t there. She was never there. It was all in her head. This is her conscience judging her, not Isadora.

And then she realizes it: that thing in her father’s head might be in her head, too.