Her Maiden

Chapter Twenty-eight: Drop

You hear the clunk of the lock mechanism from the other side of the door and a feeling of absolute despair hits you with the full force of a Mack truck.

"Please, come back!" you plead, hammering your fists against the door, though you know it's futile.

The sounds of coarse whispers steal away down the hallway as the sisters begin their descent to the foyer, leaving you alone and completely powerless, shut away and incapable of doing anything to change this dire, nightmarish turning of events.

You groan in frustration, pacing the room, your mind racing. Alcina was about to make a terrible mistake and you had to do something - anything, to stop it from happening.

You begin desperately yanking on the door, trying to wiggle the handle as violently as possible, your knuckles white in determination, though unsurprisingly, the old iron thing remains solid, unmoving.

Fuck, FUCK.

You grunt in effort as you try slamming the door with your shoulder, throwing all of your bodyweight behind your movements, wincing in pain when you connect with the thick, aged wood.

This can't be happening, this can't be happening.

You step back from the door and run your fingers through your hair, pulling it taught against your scalp, the pain keeping you oddly grounded. 

"I am getting out of this room," you tell yourself, your voice shaky but drenched with resolve.

You glance to the only other possibility. It's not one you at all like the idea of.

The window.

The only other possibly exit.

The room was already on the third floor of the castle. If you were to jump, the best case scenario would be two shattered legs, you imagine. That was if you were to actually survive that kind of drop in the first place, which would be more than unlikely. You would have to scale the walls as best as you could, even if only to reach a distance you could safely land yourself from.

You race to the window and are met with the reflection of a woman who looks thrown into the heights of pure panic, her eyes wide and chest heaving, yet, still somehow dauntless in her intrepidity. For the first time in a long time, this fleeting glimpse of yourself, so unmistakably channelled by urgency and purpose, fills you with a sense of assuredness and courage.

The window is tall, and, unsurprisingly, locked, when you try and open the catch. 

You race to the bed and grab a pillow, unsheathing it from it's case, which you wrap tightly around your clenched fist, trying to create as many layers of cushioning as possible.

You pray this works and that you don't sever an artery.

With all of your might, you punch your hand through the glass, feeling it shatter around the impact, shards hitting the floor around your bare feet. Luckily, you seem to remain unscathed.

Still using the pillowcase as a buffer, you carefully try and clear away the remaining fragments until the now broken window looks more or less safe enough for you to climb through. You peer out into the night air and look down. In the dimness of the late night, you struggle to even see the ground below. A loose shard of glass you missed falls then and you feel your stomach knot as it disappears into the darkness, followed by a long silence until finally you hear the small thump of it making contact with the ground below. 

Luckily, it seemed that there was not an inch of the castle Dimitrescu exterior which wasn't adorned in carvings and ledges from which fearsome stone grotesques could preside; gazing over the grounds, warning unwanted visitors of the horrors they might find should they dare to enter.