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While other students went home to their families at Christmas, I stayed on campus during my days, working tirelessly at my project in a bid to escape reality. Perhaps that was why I was drawn to optical art.
Perhaps that was why I teased the man sent to kill me.
I even knew who sent him, who expected him to fail.
Being a mafia princess meant my cage defied the rules of men, and my existence was tested daily.
Only if I survived my father’s twisted trials would I one day earn the right to his throne.
A throne I’d rather burn, but he set up his life–and belatedly mine also–in a fashion that entwined me to his fate.
If I tried to walk away, I would die.
Playing with death was no easy game but one I pretended to enjoy when all I wanted was to be ignored, and left to play my own games, disappearing between this reality and the one I created, hiding from the world forever.
I wondered if my new foe was up to the task my father set. Something told me he might be.
Even now, I felt his eyes on me, though it should be impossible in the windowless room.
Perhaps I should paint the walls as well. The door.
Make it an inescapable hell of boxes and spirals, one that sent the viewer mad in an attempt to remove themselves from the type of cage I created.
Perhaps I should put my father in such a room and observe his madness.
There was a slice of stalker in each of us; some was simply harder to unearth than in others.
Like my killer.
A strange relationship blossomed between us where he watched me, and I watched him back, waiting for the brief pain that told me he finally took the shot he’d been paid to do.
Night after night he refused, observing me still and taking no action.
My father wouldn’t stand for the lack of satisfaction from either of us in our odd little impasse.
Last week he changed those rules, taking the shot that told him I was no easy target, even if, just once, I wanted to be one.
Let him take the shot, and experience death.
But that would let my father win.
Living allowed my father to win.
And so I made my twists and twirls on the cement flooring, working my way along the bared, striped plaster walls.
Here, no one could touch me in my pretty cage of illusions. My silence remained until my guard knocked harshly on the door I covered in an endless swarm of illusions that defied reality depending on which angle you stared at it from.
Stare too long and...
I smiled, my madness not quite slipping free, and opened the door.
My father’s guard took one look at the door and baulked. “Unnatural bitch,” he hissed, shoving his gun between my shoulder blades and forcing me out of the room.
“You don’t like my gifts,” I said sweetly. “What if I was your boss? Would you follow my commands?”
He sneered at me. “You’re more damaged than your fucking father. Stupid slut.”
I smiled and began to count in my head.
