John and Marlena (Finally) Get a Q!

Chapter 112 - Shattered Hopes...

"Damn him!" Kristen stomped on the picture of John and Marlena with Belle, grinding her heel mercilessly into the child's angelic face. "*Damn* him!" Swiping the picture off the hardwood floor, she screwed it up between scrawny fingers, vicious rage lending to the pleasure that she felt in seeing Marlena's face crumpled and torn.

"How *dare* you try and take him from me," she spat at the picture. "I won't *let* you. I won't let you get your hands on him you *bitch*!" She screwed the photograph into a ball and hurled it across the room with all the venom she could muster. "I won't let it happen. I won't let him leave me!"

Her shrieking seemed to increase an octave as she worked herself up and a beautiful glass vase sailed across the room after the picture, shattering into jagged shards on contact with the exposed brickwork of the wall.

"Damn you John," her sobbing punctured the silence, and it was joined by discordant tinkling as a fragment of broken glass teetered off the screwed-up wad of photographic garbage. She hated him. Hated them all. All the smug, smiling do-gooders that made your business, their business. All their sympathetic, *pathetic* glances when they thought she wasn't looking. All their pitiable lies.

Now, even Peter was lying to her. She knew it. She could feel deep in her gut, in the blood that ran frigid through her veins, that John was with Marlena. That he was lying through his teeth every time he denied it. Every time he fed her some bullsh*t about going to another business meeting.

She could smell the deception in the air, from John, Maya, Nicole, and Peter. From everyone. And she hated them all. But most of all, she hated Marlena.

*Bitch*. Thieving, whoring *slut*.

"Think you're going to take John, do you?" her lips curled into an ugly scowl. "You think you can just take what doesn't belong to you? Well, I've got news for you Dr. Saint Marlena Evans."

She looked up at the bureau where there was another picture of Belle and Marlena set among mementoes of a life before Kristen.

"Well, you *can't*!" Wrathfully, she reached around and tore the cord to a lamp from the socket in the wall. Turning and yanking the lamp from the bed stand, she stomped over to the bureau and with a violent sweep of the lamp; she demolished both the lampshade and bulb and the knick-knacks of the top of the bureau.

Hardly aware of the havoc around her, Kristen continued.

"I won't let you have him, you bitch." The picture lay face up on the floor, Marlena and her daughter smiling virtuously from behind cracked glass. With both hands around the base of the lampstand, Kristen brought the jagged bulb down against the glass, splintering it further. "I won't, I *won't*! You bitch, you *bitch*!!" She brought the lamp down against the picture over and over again, fracturing the frame and scoring the picture underneath shattered glass until it was barely recognizable.

"Kristen!" Maya's voice came from outside the locked door of the bedroom that Kristen had shut herself in and it was beginning to take on an edge of anxiety. But Kristen didn't hear her. She was enjoying herself too much. "Kristen, let me in. For G*d's sake, let me *in*!" She pounded on the door frantically. With all the screaming and smashing glass and goodness know what else that was going on in there, Maya knew that there was a real danger Kristen could hurt herself. And that was precisely what she had been employed to stop happening.

She hadn't even seen it coming. Kristen had ended her call with John and calmly said she was going upstairs to take a shower. It wasn't until Maya had heard the ranting and the shattering of glass that she had realized what was happening. And now the door was locked, and she had no way of getting in there to find out what was going on.