✓ WICKED VOWS| JAKE (Book II )

54-Cards Painted By Blood

Ana's pov

I know that I am ruined and now- I'm ruining others.

I stood there all alone in the great hall of the mansion, its gaudiness starkly reflected against how the storm was raging inside me. I want to punish myself for today. Brimming with tears, his eyes stayed in my memory as he voiced his last wish, his voice juddering with the pain felt within me. The entrance doors slammed shut with a bang behind him, leaving me in a choking silence. He left, what did I expect?

Heavy in the leg, I plodded upstairs, my footsteps deliberate and slow. The creak of each step was loud within my ears, reminding me with every step just how heavy the weight of my decisions felt.

I entered the old bedroom. The toys that I had ravaged in an uncontrollable fit of anger lay scattered on the floor, remnants of a past from which I would never be freed. I stumbled forward and picked up the little surviving Matryoshka doll. 

My knees buckled, and I collapsed onto the floor, its cold hardness a direct contrast to my turmoil within. I leaned my back against the bed and allowed the reality of my existence to seep deep into my bones. I was the embodiment of darkness, a woman who could fake a smile, yet whose soul was tainted with the ability to betray, and cut through trust as a blade cuts through flesh. I had been the daughter who had to barter her own child's life against her survival, an assassin of blood and necessity. My trust issues had grown to a point where I couldn't even trust other people's food without suspicion.

Then I was back again, back to my old ruined self.

I found myself whisked back to a haunting memory, one that, though it had been so deep inside me, was now roaring at my very nostrils with a vengeance. It was the day I won my first challenge in this life macabre rite of passage orchestrated by the man I had called my father. He took me down to the basement of our outfit-a vast, ominous space where traitors were tortured. It was as if all had fallen into an abyss of darkness, and into that chasm, I was flung, chained to an old man, scrawny, a specter of a figure in the dim light. He was thin and tortured. I did not like that sight that time, it terrified me to the bone. 

It was funny how life turned me after and tortured traitors too in that same basement.

He kept me there until he made sure I was starved enough. The gnawing hunger inside me was replaced by my father's men, who descended with a cake and some water. The cake was my favorite and it seemed almost scornfully delicious. I glanced at the old man, those parched lips, that gaunt frame-eloquent in their plea for what had come to me. Embedded deep within me, this misdirected sense of compassion from a child made me carry the cake and water over to him. He took it in with quivering hands, his agony all but palpable.

Minutes dragged on, and the old man's weak attempts at eating degenerated into violent, choking paroxysms. The blood welling from his mouth painted a ghastly picture, his final throes a horrible display of pain and death. I was consumed by terror as I had watched his life ebb away. The steps of a man were unmistakable-it was my father, the ghost of my past. His voice slithered into the dark: "First, listen, Mayoshka. Don't trust anybody-not even your blood."

He pulled me from my place of horror, his touch cold and calculating. And in that instant, the truth crystallized with brutal clarity: I was expendable, a pawn in some sort of sinister game, another cruel lesson beaten into my psyche by my father. I had poisoned a man to death, my small hands becoming a deathly weapon even before I reached the age when I would fully understand the depth of that act. I killed a man when I was a child, I poisoned an old man with my own hands. That day, I realized trust was a luxury I couldn't afford, and a promise was made to myself, never to cry again.