Born of Blood

Chapter 4

Solitude isn't easy.

Being alone, it's suffocating.

It leaves your chest hollow, burning with repressed hopes. Your throat is constantly tight while you hold back tears, swallowing the words you want to shout at every person who walks past you and acts like you don't exist. Like you're a disease, a shadow drifting behind every stranger you cross. Your eyes burn, red and angry, tears welling hot and warm within your lids. That's when your nose starts to run, and your breaths become choppy.

You don't exist.

You never existed, not to those around you anyway.

Not in this life.

Scarlet's lips trembled. Her hot tears spilled over her lids and onto the white fabric she folded so gently.  Her purple fingers were a striking contrast against the cool linen. There were others in the laundry attachment of the pack house. It smelt of detergent and fabric softener. Winter was slowly picking up, it was time to change the summer comforters to the winter duvets. Scarlet was cleaning the Alphas linens. Her fingers hurt. It was a stupid reason to feel so sad about the day, but Scarlet could only take so much folding.

The others in the laundry unit stared at the back of her head, her long and matted brown hair falling to her elbows. Watching her hands, purple and swollen, folding and folding and folding, the repetitive motion cramping in her fingers and wrists; the pain echoed to her elbows. They whispered, sharp tongues slewing gossip and hate, they giggled as they mocked her clothing and anorexic body. They wanted her gone. They were folding their young's bedding, they didn't want her scent permeating it, ruining it with the smell of her depression and uncleanliness.

Burn it. They spit. We'll have to burn it.

Oh her knuckles ached, hot tears spilled over, throat tight as she wanted nothing more than to scream at these women to be quiet! She yearned to clamp her broken fingers over their mouths and hiss at them for the terrible words that bled from their tongues. To rip their throats from their body and watch them gurgle on their gossip- she could watch their blood ruin their children's bedding.

A whimper left her throat, a hiss of a repressed sob. She sucked in air through clenched teeth, her ribs inflating excruciatingly as each vertebrae stretched. A gasp left her mouth, another tear turned a spot on the white linen grey. She could list her pain, list her beatings. Go into terrible detail of the burning and breaking her carcass has been through- and that's all it was really- a carcass. It wasn't worth it anymore. All the looking and counting broken bones, all the bruises and cuts and open gaping wounds from devices that shouldn't have left the kitchen or worse, the cells. The burns from silver, the taste of blood on her tongue always being constant. She was tired, her body mimicking the age of the elders she cared for in the evening who spit on her and hissed with their lost voices. She was embarrassed.

She was embarrassed from all the eyes landing on her form and whispering terrible words to each other. She was embarrassed that every person hated her so easily, mocking names leaving their lips, quick passing injuries from young and old. Was she so easy to hate? Was she so terrible a person that all in her pack had to ruin her? Her chest burned red, her cheeks a similar state as her tears kept from her eyes and crashed into the white water of the Alphas linens. This ocean would soon be completely grey if she could not control herself, she knew her Alpha would not be fond of tear-soaked bedding.

Scarlet would never dare say it out loud, but she didn't ever remember doing anything to deserve this treatment. All her brain supplies was cold winter snow hitting her face. Feet trudging heavily through ice that reached her ankles. Her parents telling her to endure, if she were to be strong she would endure.