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“You’re not going anywhere,” she told me in her saccharine voice. “You don’t want anyone else to get hurt, do you?”
“Who?” I asked, my heart pounding.
“I could set fire to the whole Mansion,” she said with a sweet smile. “All of this, fucking gone. Because of you. Thorn would never forgive himself for bringing you here. You’d be a very fucking unhappy soul in the afterlife.”
Hearing her say it out loud made my blood chill in my veins.
“Don’t do this,” I begged her. “You don’t have to hurt me. If you want to go back home, I can arrange it with Thorn. Please, Carina.”
“Go back home?” She laughed in my face. “That’s the last thing I want, you stupid slut. In fact, since you’re still so convinced it’s true, let me clear some stuff up for you.”
She stepped forward and I recoiled when I felt her minty breath on my ear.
“I want what you have,” she whispered. “Thorn should have been mine all along, and now I’m going to fucking take him away from you.”
“But he doesn’t want you!” I tried to argue desperately. “He wants someone else, Carina… He never chose you!”
She roared with anger, smacking me so hard I fell on my ass, right in the pool of gasoline. While I tried to pick myself up, she circled me like a predator, snarling insults.
“He would have always chosen me,” she went on. “If you hadn’t showed up! If you hadn’t tried to oustage me! If you hadn’t stolen everything that fucking mattered!”
I realized she wasn’t making sense, and it would be impossible to barter with her. My last hope was getting away before she lit the fucking match.
I tried to run, but she stopped me. She stood right in front of me and pushed me back with unnatural force, adrenaline making her stronger than me.
Next, I ripped at my clothes. My dress came off, everything off until I was standing in front of her stark naked, shivering and afraid.
I needed to get my clothes off. They were covered in gasoline – they would catch fire in seconds.
But Carina didn’t give a shit. She laughed at me as she grabbed a lighter tucked into her sandal. How had I not noticed? How could I have been so fucking stupid?
She taunted me, holding the flame an inch above the grass.
“Please, don’t,” I begged her. “Please, we can talk this through.”
“Never,” she snarled. “He belongs to me, and you belong in hell!”
With those words, she set the world ablaze.
The grass caught fire immediately and I screamed as the rose garden was engulfed in flames in what felt like fucking seconds.
Carina ran away, nothing more than a figure between the flames that now surrounded me. She’d spilled the gasoline in a circle around me, I realized, effectively trapping me in the middle of the burning chaos.
I needed to run. I needed to get out.
I tried so fucking hard, but I got dizzier and dizzier and it got so fucking hard to breathe I ended up on my knees in the small circle of grass.
“Please,” I begged the burning sky. “Please Thorn, come and save me…”
Fifteen
Thorn
I was in the REC room for what felt like the first time in months.
I’d slowly given up on my habit of watching my Rose in her most intimate moments, and I felt like it was a significant move towards our future together. I no longer felt the need to check up on her every second of the day, instead preferring to spend my life by her side – it was much better to see and feel her than spend my days admiring her from afar. And it seemed as if she’d willingly accepted her fate, slowly succumbing to me until I was certain she belonged to me. Certain that I loved her, and she loved me.
A smile lit up my face as I turned off the cameras in her bedroom and placed a white sheet over the controls in the room. I was ready to lay my fantasies to rest and turn them into reality instead, finally choosing to live my life without being hidden in the shadows. And it felt incredible.
As I was getting ready to leave the room, I heard someone enter behind me. I turned around and came face to face with Pia, her dark eyes glinting with something I would’ve rather not seen.
“If you’ll excuse me,” I muttered, trying to get past her, but she stopped me with a hand on my chest.
“Wait,” she begged. “Before you go back to her… just wait a second.”
“Wait for what?” I asked tersely. “What do you want from me, Pia?”
“Can’t we just talk?” she asked desperately, and I sighed.
It always started with ‘just talking’. But somehow, every conversation of ours ended with me exhausted and her in tears. There was really nothing else to say. Often during the past months, I’d wondered whether I should send her away. Tell her there was no place for her at the Mansion any longer, and convince her to leave somehow, clearing the way for the relationship I’d built with my Rose.
