The Queen of Lies

Prologue

The world grows cold around me as I lay here on the ground unmoving, frozen in time. Screaming plays in my ears over and over until they ring. My body and mind are slowly becoming numb to everything happening around me. People are scrambling around the room, trying to escape. Glass shatters as bullets soar towards anything that moves. Yet, I still do nothing but lay on the cool tile of the now ruined ballroom.

There is no reason for me to move. My world crashes around me in this moment, as I realize that I now have lost everything I cared about. Nothing matters anymore. My heart and soul are being forcefully torn from my body as the men behind the guns continue firing into the now sparsely populated room. Though the ground is now littered with once lively bodies, the screams never stop resounding in my head.

Before the chaos has even began to halt, I have already decided that I am going to stop whoever orchestrated this attack on everyone I loved. My mom, my dad, my younger brother, their screams heard above all the most. Maybe not now, maybe not ever, but the thought fuels me into pushing myself up and away from the commotion. Crawling my way through the throngs of cooling corpses and out of the room, I pull myself up and out one of the broken windows that line the main hallway of the house. I bite my lip to choke back the scream barreling up my throat from a combination of glass shredding the skin on the front of my body and the emotional pain of tonight's tragedy. I stumble through the yard into the wooded area surrounding our once lively home never looking back. My breathing comes out in ragged huffs, and the screams from those not lucky enough to be decimated in the first couple bullets become distant as I force myself to take step after step in the opposite direction from the God forsaken place.

I yelp out in pain as my foot catches a root that has made its way up from the damp soil and tumble to the ground. Looking around, I spot a large hole under the tree from which the root came from, and crawl into it as best as I can. Shudders rack my body as I silently cry. I wait for sirens to come blaring from the distance, racing to help erase this gut wrenching night, but they never do.

Years later I would look back on this and use it as fuel for my vengeance. I swore it to myself to take down the very people who destroyed my life on this night.

Of course, you can never expect to mess with the briar, and not receive the thorns.