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.
