Author Games: Ace of Spades

Semifinals: Florence French

"She's still alive!" a voice shouted. "Keep her vitals stable. We aren't losing another one."

"You got this, girlie," another whispered, almost directly into her ear. The voice was high and patronizing, but a comfort nonetheless. She felt her breath rise and fall to the beat of the words in her head, growing more stable with each intake of air. "You look like a strong one. Push through."

The beeping echoed in the back of her mind again. She knew what it was, and yet it felt odd to her. She had never thought that she might be able to hear her own heart beat, yet now it was ringing in her ears. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. It was the sound of her dying, she knew, and yet it was hope too; as long as the noise went on, so did she. She took another breath – a solitary deep one this time – before everything went to black and all she could feel was a burning in the right side of her chest. The last thing she remembered was clutching the case closer to her chest. It was worth so much more than a million dollars now; its price was blood, and that was a thing which she could never pay back.

Yet again, Florence French was facing death itself – and she was far from sure that she'd be able to pull another victory. She was even less certain that she wanted to.

//

In your face, Paul, she wanted to say. In fact, she wanted to pick up her phone and dial the number right away, if only to gloat that she had been so much more than he'd ever thought. I did it.

Except those were words she could never even dream to speak. Not when their meaning hid the most hideous and fowl of acts. Her entire life, she had wanted to prove to the world that she was capable; now that she had succeeded, however, she realized she would never be allowed to truly revel in her glory. For all her winning, Florence French had lost.

Still, there was no denying that the case felt good in her hand. Already, she was considering the series of things she might do with a million dollars: she could live the life of an heiress, if she wanted, and do everything and anything; she could travel to Europe, like she'd always dreamed, and see the sights that had been the treasures of the known world for centuries; she could live a simple life, but always have the backup she might need, if she decided she wanted it. And yet, one thought kept returning to her time and time again. There was no glamour to it, or even convenience, but she knew she wanted it all the same. I'm going back to school, she thought. Everything she'd done had been for that one goal – to choose anything else, now that she had achieved it, seemed to her nothing but folly.

She hadn't bothered to put much thought into how the others would die. From the moment she had burnt the picture, they had vanished from her mind, turning into specks of a past which no longer existed. Florence had played God in a way, thinking it was up to her to decide what was real and what was not. It had been wrong – she knew it had – but that didn't matter. She was getting away with it. She was getting everything she had ever wanted.

She was watching the Aces hold a gun to their heads.

From the moment Florence had walked out the door of the room she had found, a feeling that something awful was about to happen begun to build in her gut. They were standing in a line down the hallway, each one of them staring at something she at first hadn't been able to see. It had grown clearer with each moment, however, until she could finally see Kol, a gun, and the three corpses at her feet. Her thoughts swam in circles, the same three phrases rolling in her head over and over again, singing of her own evils.

...She will be young and beautiful tragic...

...she would be a headline and then disappear forever...