YAGA | ✓

NINETEEN

•••

SHE HADN'T left him, not really.

She'd only wanted him to believe it, but Milena couldn't stay away from the blood and gore. Their energy was magnetic, pulling her toward them as if with some sort of unseen force. Sat on the stairs, she ran her hands along the bannister, slick with blood, before reaching into her mouth with a handkerchief and wiping the guts from her teeth. They'd returned back to normal by now, but the sickening feeling of flesh between them was fading agonisingly slowly. Every breath made her want to throw up, sickened by what she'd done.

She'd wanted to give him a chance, she really had. But that chance hadn't arrived until it was too late. She still couldn't find the room to regret killing Dimitri, though. He was a thorn in her side, with all his childish prejudices and foolish witchhunts. The real monsters were right under his nose, and he was off chasing pretend ones that his murderer of a father had told him, mere fairytales. Dimitri Sorenov had forgotten that life was not a fairytale and that there were no monsters that hid under beds, and fashioned himself a hero. A hollow one, with nothing in his brain apart from hatred.

Almost like me, Milena thought resentfully, standing up and spitting on the gnarled wood floor. A cloud of dust went up in the dank air, and she stifled a cough. Pouring her long, bedraggled hair over her shoulders, she began to brush through it with her fingers, the blood on them now dried and brown. Looking at it, she almost felt ashamed. As much as Dimitri had it coming, as much as she didn't regret killing him, she thought of what her father would say, before realising the painful truth.

Her father did not care, and he never had. It had always been like that, even though she'd tried, tried so desperately. She did everything he wanted, but it was never enough. Every time that she put her own emotions aside to please him, broken the boundaries that she'd set up for herself and sinned more than any child ever should've. At only eight years old, she'd done worse things that many people would've been scared to do at the ends of their lives. For her father, she'd walked to the ends of the earth, and he'd rewarded her by burning his own daughter alive.

The skin where the burns snaked up her thighs tingled, and she shivered, a chill seeping through her body. She could still, if she blocked out her other thoughts, smell the sickening stench of burning flesh. It filled her lungs until she felt the need to splutter them up, coughs racking her body.

Creak.

A footstep, tiny and indistinct, but nevertheless still there. Milena gritted her teeth, standing up abruptly. It had come from upstairs, she realised, where there were only two rooms. Yaga had not been as subtle as she'd evidently intended to have been, though from that Lena had gathered that she'd managed to heal herself, in some kind of way, at least. It meant that she was able-bodied enough to move, and therefore, fight.

To Lena, every move that was not fighting was a wasted one.

Creak.

Lena drew her knife, starting up the stairs. Despite being armed, she knew very well that weapons were pointless, After all, the battle that would soon arise would be one of wits and powers that did not rely on skill. She needn't know how to throw a knife any more than anything else, for it would be as everything else - useless.

A sob tore at her throat suddenly, for no particular reason at all, and she let out a small choked sound, eyes streaming. She wanted to sit down alone and cry, cry until there were no more tears remaining.

She would not cry for her father, dead in a so-called accident years ago, nor for her mother, dead in childbirth. She would not cry for her brother, out to find fortune in the big city and left to starve in the gutter, a country fool, forever and always. She would not cry for Nikolai and Johana, killed by the girl that had been their family for nearly a decade. She would not even cry for Yaga, who had rattled the entire world and set it aflame.