Juliet's Trail of Petals

Chapter 2: Part 2:

Alexandra

I was staring at the parchment on my floor with such disdain I was sure my expression would cut it in half, and I began to squeeze my overgrown nails into the flesh of my palms. The flow was tenfold as thick this time, though. I look back up at the stranger that was staring at me as if I were a deformed, half eaten animal as tears fell down the porcelain of my skin and onto the parchment that had been an instrument to my madness hours ago. I was weeping as though I were a young child after finding that their cat hadn't "run away." 

"I'm sorry if this is insensitive, but should I go? This seems personal and—"she began.

"The woman— you seek—was my fiancé," I sob, only pausing to gasp for the fresh air my lungs have needed since Harrieta passed.

"Was your fiancé?" she inquires.

"Her corpse lies in—the grave I followed you to," I say through gritted teeth.

The face of the wanderer twisted into that of prey who tripped and fell during a chase with its assailant. The face that any creature makes when they have realized that without a miracle, its life is lost. In the midst of my sobs, I noticed she went pail. She became a tree, and the lumberjack that were my words where what had cut her down. She fainted.

knock. knock. knock.

It was the servant that has come to inform me that the investigators had arrived, meaning the sun had cast its rays of fire onto the earth to begin another day once again. I realized I am still sobbing, and I now have an unconscious stranger on my bedroom door, with no idea as to what to do. 

"A-Are you in there your highness? I am so sorry to disturb you at this time b-but the investigators you summoned last night," Esmerelda says in almost a whisper.

"I am here, but do not open the door," I command "I was born with working legs."

"Yes, your highness," she responds.

I write a note the corner of a piece of paper, and I placed it near the woman in my room so as to allow her to understand why I may not be present when she awakens. I open the door to the width necessary for only my body to slip through it, and I shut it once again. I catch the eye of the servant, and she looks at me as if she were a gazelle being preyed upon by a deadly feline. Grazing past the servant who has summoned me, I meet with the investigators who were there for the aftermath of my beloved's death.  Upon touching my face, I realize that because the feline of my fiancé's death consumes the gazelle that is my mind, I am crying. And so, they too stare at me like as if I had been freshly released from a mad house. I ignore my tears and continue on as if the walls of my peace of mind had not begun to collapse past the water damage that was the death of my life. And when I came to meet the men responsible for picking at the flesh of detail in my fiancé's death, there was four of them. Two tall, and two short, though one of the taller figures had a rounder finish to him, and all of them but the shortest of the two smaller ones was a ginger.

"I have summoned you all here due to your presence at the scene of Harrietta's Death. I must know if any of the four of you happened to have spotted a weapon of any sort at the time of investigation?" I asked as they eyed me up and down, and then stopping again at the sight of my wildly unkempt hair.

They glanced at each other as if begging one another to deliver whatever it was that was going to punch my left cheek with the force of one hundred bulls.

"We, em," the round one began "We found a small dagger your highness."

I heard those words in echoes, almost as if I had dreamed them. I then flinched at the sight of a hand, and as my eyes focused on whom that hand belonged to, it was Esmerelda. And as I realize that she had snapped me from the cage made of trance I began to see that she was the only one in my vicinity at that moment.

"Esmerelda!" I panicked "How long have my eyes been glued to the same stone in the wall?"

"For about a half hour your grace," she's nervous, and avoids my eye as if she thought I was mad.

I rush back to my quarters and am relived to find the estranged women has begun to awaken. She has grabbed the pieces of parchment that lay on my floor, and I saw as her eyes danced across each letter, I wrote to myself, my father, my cousins, my uncle, anybody that had witnessed anything of the events that caused the permanent destruction of peace. She looked as if she wanted to rip them to shreds while also maintaining the look of agony of the heart. She just stared and after a while shuffled to the next piece like a mad man that has found he knows too much of something. And then, she finally looks up at me and her face twists so that she resembles a soleless body that has been freshly dragged to Pluto by Pluto himself. 

"They found—"and I found myself on the floor not just weeping but screaming caused by the agony in my soul.

She sat there as if mimicking the statues given to me by the rulers of Athens as an early wedding gift. She was lifeless and as pale as the marble that cupped the curves of the faces of the gods three dimensional replicas. I watched her hands loosen to release the pieces of parchment I had placed the last ounce of hope that no one would take my beloved from me on as I continued to feel as though someone ripped my heart in two.