Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Sasha screamed.
She just couldn’t take it anymore.
Vile stood, leaving her on the bench. In a single, graceful movement, he was once more the Queen of Hearts. His long coat swirling around him in a flourish of red and black. “Must you always be interrupting us? I was in the middle of something! Or rather. About to be.”
“Sash, are you—are you okay?” Sidney.
Sasha couldn’t look at her sister. Just couldn’t.
That was the second time she’d been caught indisposed with Vile.
And who knows if it was on purpose. Probably?
Who was to say it wasn’t. Standing from the bench, she walked to the far end of the balcony and pressed her hands to the stone surface of the railing and tried to focus on her breathing.
In, out. In, out. Anything but focusing on the nonsense of the where, and the who, and the what.
But that was when she heard that voice.
“Oooh, is that her? The sister?” A cackle. “How wonderful! The King of Hearts! How I would love to invite her to tea! Do you think I could make her a new crown?”
A cold shiver ran through her like the arctic wind. It left her feeling pins and needles in her arms and legs. She stared straight ahead into the distance, seeing the mountains in the far horizon for the first time.
That voice.
She knew that voice.
“Hello, oh King of Hearts, oh Mighty Sovereign. I am your most Humble Servant, the Mad Hatter! And I come to beg your mercy—”
“Shhh!” Sidney shushed him loudly.
Slowly, Sasha turned around. And the terror must have been clear on her face.
Sidney’s eyes immediately went wide. “Sash? What’s wrong? What’d Vile do? Did he—did he hurt you? I swear to fuck if he touched you I will cut his dick off and serve it to him on a fucking platter—”
Vile snorted. “Please. I would never resort to anything so rudimentary to inspire fear, my dear. No, this is entirely your doing, I’m delighted to say.”
It wasn’t until someone had taken her wrist, pulling her hand away from her forearm, that she realized her nails were tinged with blood and her skin was stinging. Vile was standing in front of her, still donning the Queen of Hearts motif, but his back was to the others.
Sasha had begun scratching at herself, frantically tearing at her arm without even realizing it.
He said nothing. His expression was unreadable. He might as well have been a wall. But the fact that he held her wrist in his hand, stopping her…?
Disgust.
Her stomach lurched in sudden nausea. Tears filled her eyes. Turning around, she faced the garden and the scenery once more. “Go away. All of you. Just go away.” Doing her best to sound firm, she knew she failed miserably.
“I’m afraid we have come to a bit of an impasse where such things are not possible, my dear King of Hearts,” Vile put a hand on her shoulder. “Not even an order from you would drive the White Knight and his Alice away now that they’re on the verge of winning.”
Verge of winning. A shudder ran through her, forcing her to bite back a sob. She didn’t want to die again, not like that—not here. Please.
Looking down at the angry red scratches on her forearm, she had to grip the railing again with both hands to keep from shaking.
Please.
“You are the one writing this story, my King.” The hand on her shoulder tightened just slightly. “You are the one who decides how it ends.” He gently, carefully, urged her to turn around to face the gathering crowd.
Numbly, she could only go along with him. She felt like she had ice water running through her veins. Vile moved her to stand in front of him, his back to the railing. He dwarfed her in height—he always did, no matter what role he played.
It should have scared her.
But what was in front of her terrified her far more than the monster at her back.
Behind Sidney, the White Knight, and her collection of characters from Wonderland, was a small army of guards.
He placed the scepter-turned-cane into her hand.
It really was beautiful, with the enormous ruby carved into a heart.
“Call for the guards. Demand they all have their heads be permanently removed from their shoulders. You are the King, after all. They will answer to you. Sadly, there is no love lost where I am concerned. They will not intervene to save my life. But you? You, they’ll save. ”
But that would mean…“You’re telling me to kill Sidney.”
“Or, she will have us both killed.” He rested his hands on her shoulders, one on each side. It felt almost comforting. It shouldn’t have. “One of you dies here by beheading. It is your choice which.”
“What if I only have your ass killed, and just have her exiled?” Sidney grinned, proudly. “To live out the rest of her life in Wonderland! How bad could that be?”
It felt like a stab to the heart.
She recoiled, stepping back into Vile hard enough that if it weren’t for him, she might have fallen backwards over the railing and over the edge into the garden below. The terrified whine that escaped her was barely recognizable even to herself.
Vile laughed. Cruel, and insidious. Oh, he knew exactly what he was doing. And he had likely predicted exactly how all this was going to go down. But she could barely process that realization through the pounding in her ears.
She gripped the scepter-cane in both her hands. A cold sweat was forming on her back.
No. No, no, no, no…
A lifetime in Wonderland?
“What is a single lifetime in a place like this?” Vile purred into her ear. “Certainly the clocks will run normally for you.”
Please, no…
“Sentence first—verdict afterward, my King.” Vile’s hands on her shoulders tightened ever so slightly.
How could she ever forget? Sasha knew those words very well. It was how the story ended, after all. “Stuff and nonsense,” she murmured. “The idea of having the sentence first.” Those were Alice’s lines in the book. But Sidney wouldn’t know that.
This was the part when Alice was meant to wake up. When her sister was supposed to brush the leaves from Alice’s head that she had mistaken for all the cards of the deck. But that wasn’t going to happen, was it? This wasn’t the story as it was written. And she wasn’t Alice.
She was the King of Hearts.
Vile whispered to her what she already knew. “You or them, my dear. You, or them.”
The words left her mouth before she could stop them. Before she could even think them through.
“Off with their heads.”
The End.