Isabella recoiled.
Her boots scraped harshly against the stone floor as she retreated from the monster wearing a human mask.
Her breath was a series of jagged, shallow heaves that rattled in her chest—a frantic rhythm of a heart already breaking.
Her frame shook with a violent, primal tremor. The kind that precedes a total collapse of the soul.
"You… you slaughtered him?" she gasped, the words tasting like copper and bile.
"It was you? You are the one who tore my father from this world?"
The question hung in the air, a pathetic plea for a lie that would never come.
Isabella's fingers clawed at her own temples, nails biting into the skin until the sting of physical pain rivaled the psychic agony screaming behind her eyes.
She looked like a woman trying to physically hold her skull together before the sheer madness of the revelation shattered it.
Across the room, Olivia sat enshrined in a sickeningly graceful repose.
She did not flinch; she did not blink.
A heavy, suffocating boredom hung over her, as if the confession of cold-blooded murder was a tedious chore she was forced to endure.
She let out a long, theatrical sigh that curdled the very air.
"Oh, Isabella, my sweet, dim-witted thing," Olivia drawled, the velvet of her voice dripping with a lethal condescension.
"Your ears must be as rotted as your father's corpse. Do I truly have to carve the words into your skin for you to understand?"
Olivia leaned forward slightly, a predatory glint dancing in her hollow eyes.
"It wasn't my father who ended him. It was me."
"How else would I possess the very silver that hung around his dying throat? How else would I know the exact patch of worm-ridden earth where he rots?"
"It is a simple equation of blood, darling. Isn't it delightfully obvious?"
Then, the air in the room died.
The frantic trembling in Isabella's limbs ceased with a suddenness that was more terrifying than the shaking.
The shattered girl vanished.
In her place rose something hollowed-out and frigid.
She stood up—not with the weakness of a victim, but with the slow, rhythmic grace of a closing coffin lid.
Her silence was no longer shock; it was the quiet before a slaughter.
In the shadows, the maid felt the temperature plunge. A primal instinct, ancient and urgent, screamed at her to flee.
She took a half-step forward, her mouth opening to intervene, but Olivia's voice cut through the gloom like a guillotine blade.
"Stay your hand," Olivia commanded, her gaze fixed on her prey with a sadistic hunger.
"Do not interfere. I want to see what this grief turns into."
With a jagged, kinetic burst of violence, Isabella lunged.
Her slender fingers, fueled by a lifetime of repressed grief, clamped like iron manacles around Olivia's throat.
She drove the woman back into the velvet maw of the couch, the frame groaning under the sudden impact.
Isabella's breath was no longer human; it was the ragged, white-hot hiss of a furnace.
But Olivia… Olivia merely bloomed under the violence.
A wicked, poisonous smile carved its way across her face, even as the oxygen began to flee her lungs.
"What is this?" Olivia's voice emerged as a strained, melodic rasp.
"A murder attempt? Your hands are shivering, my sweet. Do you require a lesson in the architecture of a proper strangulation?"
"I possess… extensive field experience, as you well know."
A sharp, jagged gasp tore from Isabella's throat. Her grip tightened until her knuckles turned the color of bone.
"Damn you to hell," Isabella spat. "I will end you. I will purge the earth of a blight like you."
Olivia attempted a low, guttural chuckle that devolved into a wet, wheezing rattle.
"Well, then?" she taunted. "What stays your hand? Shall I recount the melody of it? How I felt your father's windpipe collapse beneath my touch?"
She craned her neck forward, her breath—stale and metallic—ghosting against Isabella's flushed cheek.
"I buried my weight into his throat... slowly... watching the light in his eyes flicker and fail like a dying candle."
"I watched him claw at the air until there was nothing left but silence."
Her lips curled into a sneer of absolute mockery.
"And you? You lack the spine to even crush a common fly."
A suffocating, tomb-like silence descended.
Isabella's grip became a vice.
She felt it—the delicious, terrifying surrender of anatomy. The tremor in Olivia's limbs, the hitch in her dying breath, the slow, graying pallor of her porcelain skin.
Isabella was winning.
And then—Olivia smiled.
It was not the desperate grimace of the dying. It was a smirk. Triumphant. Unbroken.
"Is that... all?" Olivia's voice cracked through the air, saturated with a terrifying mirth.
The breath died in Isabella's throat. A sliver of ice-cold doubt pierced through her.
How was she still conscious?
A sudden, unnatural lethargy flooded Isabella's veins. A leaden heaviness settled into her joints.
The resolve in her fingers began to unravel.
And then, she saw it.
A single globule of vivid, pulsating crimson rolled down Olivia's pale cheek.
Blood?
No—not Olivia's.
The blood was her own.
A lightning-strike of pure terror pierced Isabella's heart.
Her fingers drifted upward to her own face. When she pulled them away, the tips were stained scarlet.
A warm, metallic tide began to leak from her nostrils, splattering across Olivia's ivory gown in a spray of cruel irony.
The world began to liquefy.
Olivia exhaled—a slow, luxuriant breath—and began to peel Isabella's failing hands from her throat with the grace of someone plucking dead petals from a rose.
With a single, disdainful shove, she sent Isabella sprawling onto the floor.
Isabella struck the floorboards hard. She turned her head toward the mirror.
She wasn't weeping. She was hemorrhaging.
"What... what have you done to me?" she wheezed.
Olivia descended into a crouch beside her, catching Isabella's chin in a grip that was deceptively tender.
"Oh, Isabella," she whispered. "Did you truly believe your righteous fury could bridge the gap between us? That you could simply... overpower me?"
A dark, subterranean chuckle bubbled from Olivia's throat.
"You are a magnificent fool. Tethering your soul to the wrong people, time and again. First my father... and now me."
"Is your heart truly so desperate for a master?"
Isabella's mind fought through the thickening fog. And then, there it was—a mocking epiphany.
The vessel brought to her by the silent, shivering maid. The water she had swallowed like a blessing.
Her gut convulsed. A retch tore through her, and the floor was painted with a burst of her own life-force.
Olivia sighed. "A pity. Your father's heart was far more stubborn. He lasted much longer than this."
"So... you butchered my father..." Isabella rasped. "And now... it is my turn to follow him into the dark."
Olivia tilted her head, a predator considering a piece of carrion.
"Kill you?" She let the phrase hang in the air. "Oh no, my darling. Death is a gift. And I am not feeling particularly generous."
Olivia turned toward the trembling girl in the corner.
"Kira."
The maid flinched. "Y-Yes, my lady?"
"The rope. Now."
Kira moved like a shadow. She handed the hemp to Olivia, who took it with the practiced ease of a hangman.
Isabella lacked even the strength to flinch as Olivia knelt once more.
A pristine white cloth was produced, wound tight around Isabella's mouth, swallowing her curses into a muffled silence.
"Shh," Olivia cooed, a sound more chilling than any scream.
"We wouldn't want to wake the neighbors, would we?"
"Do not worry, little bird... I intend to take very, very good care of you."