Page 27 of The Opening Act is Death (The Carnival of The Damned)

Twenty Nine

Visha - The Blood Letter

I write a note I swore I never would. To him.

The ink bleeds before I even touch the page, maybe it knows.

Maybe the paper has waited longer than I have for this to happen.

But still, my hand hesitates. The Carnival is quiet tonight, not dead; no, she doesn’t die.

But quiet, like something is listening. Like it’s holding its breath with me.

I sit on the ruined velvet chaise in the back of my dressing tent, the one Corvan fixed once with thread and silence.

My skirts pool around me like spilled wine.

My fingers shake, traitorous things. They only tremble when I think of him.

The letter begins the way all doomed things do; with his name.

Corvan.

And then I stare at the blank beneath it, at the endless ache beneath me.

Because I don’t know how to say it. How do you tell someone that the person you are now would have killed the person you were, just to be near them?

That I, Madame Noire, would slit the throat of the ballerina who once cried in a blood- soaked garden for the boy who disappeared?

How do you tell a ghost you loved him when he was flesh?

You don’t.

You write it in blood instead.

So I bite my fingertip until the skin splits open. Not the wrist, not for him. That would be too dramatic, and I’ve bled enough for this Carnival already. Just enough to smear the truth across the page.

I hated you.

I needed you.

I buried you.

And yet, I never stopped dancing in the direction of your shadow.

I write of the way his voice haunted the tent poles before I ever knew he’d returned.

How every illusion he casts tastes like regret, and every time he looks at me like he still wants to believe I’m real, it nearly unravels me.

I write that I should have killed him the night he arrived.

I wrote that I couldn’t, that I didn’t, that I won’t.

Not because I forgive him. But because the part of me that still feels anything , the part I thought I buried under the stage when I became Madame Noire, that part doesn’t want to let him go.

There is a kind of cruelty in being the woman who commands death, and yet trembling before a man who brings ghosts.

I write until my blood runs dry.

Until the wax candle beside me burns down and the shadows grow teeth.

Until The Carnival starts whispering again. Jealous. Hungry.

Because she knows I’m not writing this for her.

I seal the note with black wax and the imprint of my ring.

The one I wear to remember what I survived.

The one I almost took off when he touched my waist like it still belonged to him.

He won’t find this letter until The Carnival wants him to, and by then, I’ll be gone, changed, or something worse.

But it’s written now, and that means it’s real.

Even if he never reads it.

Even if he burns it.

Even if it bleeds through the cracks in this cursed tent and into the dirt below us.

He’ll know.

And maybe that’s all that matters.

Because he never had to confess.

Not once.

I never made him say it aloud; the lies, the vanishing, the blood between us because I already saw it.

I felt it. In the way he doesn’t meet my eyes when he’s scared I’ll see who he used to be.

In the ache he carries like a second spine.

In the illusions that flicker when I’m too close.

Some people demand apologies, I learned to read silence.

I learned to understand the way hands shake when they want to touch but believe they shouldn’t.

I saw his guilt before he ever wore it like a cloak, and still I stayed.

That was my sin.

And maybe, just maybe, my salvation.