Strong For Too Long Trilogy ✔️

37. Real from Fake

CHAPTER 37: Real from Fake

I guess I wanted more. The sound of the violin playing stung a purified melody in my ears. I felt the woman sing rather than heard it and she sung her heart out. She sits next to me. One week ago, after I was forced to follow her, she placed me in a simulation, teasing me with Aaron once again. She's done it before, the odd memory in my mind while Alice Henderson still hangs tortured whilst undergoing the transition between normal, and that of a candidate.

I stared at Alice when the chains were removed and her fight gone. Her life taken from her eyes and built into something else, a machine who will only ever obey. Every order is followed, all her life, it's now up to direct orders. Farah made them they way I was experimented on, a trial with no room for error-that defined me. I watch in hopes of believing that that dirty, four letter word wasn't made up when someone was at their brink of death. Hope.

What a lie.

A pretty, sad little lie.

"You kill everything you touch," My words had some influence.

She sips her rose-gold wine, "Love the cryptic manner, love. More entertaining than the music, I must say." She was truly the scum of the Earth. I lean forward, the ridiculous gem red dress she forces me to wear tightens like a chain around me, a noose tightening around my neck, threatening to pop my head off at any given moment I show resistance to her every bloody whim.

I stare at her, "Were you so abused back then that you must inflict it upon others? Is this to compensate that pain and ensure others know exactly what it's like? You've had your fun, Cassandra. You'll either get locked up or shot dead, which one do you want by the end of this? Either way, you won't be remembered." I point out, looking at the ruby red lobster and thinking I saw a leg twitch.

She laughs like some secret melody. Like we had a perfect doll house with green lawns, all in order with dripping red and white roses in the fountain-tinted garden, a pocket-white fence. A house smelling of berry muffins and fruit trees ripened outside where she has a home, children who adore her and a husband to kiss her Goodnight and hug her tight in the morning. Like some traditional mother where it's essence traipsed into the modern world and women are just so happy to continue playing the home girl, forever poised and graceful.

This both needed a pure wake-up call.

And hand-cuffs.

And an orange jumpsuit with a red bullet between her eyes, shot dead, breath long-gone, an end to her plague. No more infesting across a world that wasn't her pick of lab rats, that wasn't trial and errors. People aren't toys and she never learned that dolls were never alive, they didn't breathe, feel or react like she wanted.

"You're funny, love." She giggles at me, shining like an Angel ripped from hell.

"You're delusional, insane and a maniac. Can you answer my question now?" I was fed up.

"You want to dance?" She wonders. Hand out to me, "Mother and daughter bonding, come on?" She giggles, hand outstretched when so many males look at her and see what they want. A rose has thorns, something so many seen to forget. Hers is poisonous and alluring, I'm not so blind to see the dripping spikes that have already taken souls and claimed them as her own...a rose doesn't contain a soul. She can be pretty, she can even be beautiful...but she's still nothing but a poisonous little bitch trying to overcome a garden of flowers because that is just how selfish she really is.

I stand, give her the finger and walk away. Two candidates flank me, but they weren't guards. Farah ignores her monotonic husband from the corner of my eyes.

I recall every memory she implanted in my head, played on a broken loop like she wanted to show me her torture, her pain. I saw it all with my own two eyes, I just could never understand the red string aligning and connected dots of people I didn't know, people I couldn't understand. She connected memories of my own with visions designed as hers, a simulation of advanced concoctions that pondered another life. One of lessened ruins and beautiful, untainted and untangled purity in a family of hidden killers.