Kasien （Age 19） #2
Her eyes drag up, slow, like it physically hurts to look at me. Her hands fall from her mouth into her lap. Her breathing only gets faster, louder, like her lungs can’t keep up.
“Let me explain everything.” My throat burns. The bile rises again, my eyes sting. “Please, just—”
She doesn’t look away, doesn’t blink. And then, without taking her eyes off me, she pushes herself to her feet and starts backing up.
“No, please don’t leave me,” I blurt out, my voice too loud, cracking under the weight of it. “Please, please don’t leave me. I swear I can explain. I’ll tell you everything.”
The words tumble over each other, broken by gasps. My knees buckle and I drop to my knees in front of her, bloody hands falling uselessly into my lap.
“I’m begging you, please, don’t leave me.”
Tears blur my vision, hot and relentless.
My whole body shakes with sobs I can’t stop. I’ve taken stabs with less reaction than this, but watching her recoil from me hurts worse than any wound.
She keeps backing away. One step. Two. Three.
“Please—d—don’t be—scared of me. P—please, Kiara. Don’t—leave me.” The sentence falls apart between breaths.
Her heel hits the edge of the staircase. She glances back just long enough to see the steps, then turns and bolts, running down the big curved stairs, through the lobby, shoving the heavy door open so hard it crashes against the walls.
And then she’s gone.
I look out the staircase window.
She’s running down the driveway, hair flying behind her in a dark, frantic wave. Her short white summer dress flutters around her thighs as she runs.
She doesn’t look back. Not once. Not for me. Not even to check if I’m following. She just runs until the trees at the edge of the property swallow her whole, hiding the manor from the outside world like it doesn’t exist.
My chest convulses with sobs I try to strangle down, but they tear out of me anyway.
The pain is everywhere, burning through muscle and bone, clawing at my ribs from the inside.
I can’t get rid of the image of her eyes on me just minutes ago. The last look before she ran. So much disbelief. So much fear. She looked at me like I was a monster.
But that’s not the truth. It can’t be.
They made me this. They trained me for this. Pushed and twisted and used me until this was the only way I knew how to fight back. I never wanted to be like them. I never wanted to end up as the monster they are.
A pool of blood starts to leak from Sylvia’s body, already touching my feet. I don’t know how long I sit there.
My breathing slowly calms, and the pool of blood spreads around my legs, my knees sticky under my body, my mind numb and empty.
“Is she dead?”
I lift my head and see Adrien standing in front of me. I gulp and finally let the words come out of my mouth as I stare into blank space.
“She saw Kiara.”
Adrien doesn’t need any more explanation. He knows what Sylvia is capable of. Well, she was.
“And Varner?” he asks.
I lift my head to look at him again, his expression is calm, steady, almost proud.
“He’s probably in his office,” I whisper and finally inhale to wake up from whatever I was in.
“Let’s finish this up then,” he tells me, takes out his gun from the back of his jeans, and gestures with the gun for me to get up.
I push myself up and nod, something in me suddenly calms, like it’s been switched off. I take a few steps to my room, take my gun from under the pillow and get back to the hallway.
We calmly walk through the long hall going to the second wing of the manor, where the library is. My bare feet leave a trail of bloody steps on the floor.
We finally get to the second wing and open the library door, finding my adoptive father sitting behind his huge oak desk, smoking a cigarette. As soon as his head tilts up to see who’s paying him a visit, we point our guns at him in sync.
He lazily drags his hands above his head and rests his elbows on the wooden desk, watching us with that rotten little smirk, cigarette dangling between his fingers.
“So,” he says calmly, “what’s the grand plan? Run away? Disappear? Take your girls with you into a new life?”
“Shut up,” Adrien spits.
Varner ignores him completely. His eyes land on me instead.
“You do realize you won’t get far,” he says. “Not with Natalya.”
Adrien’s head snaps toward him. “What the fuck does that mean?”
Varner leans back in his chair, like he’s settling in for a show.
“She’s already claimed,” he says, savoring it.
My stomach drops. “What?” I breathe.
Varner sighs dramatically. “My golden girl was promised to Lucien months ago. Signed by me and old Devereaux. Arranged and expected. His son has been counting down the days until she turns eighteen.”
Adrien goes perfectly still. “You’re lying,” he says, but his voice sounds wrong. Rough.
Varner chuckles. “Believe whatever helps you sleep,” he says lightly. “But Lucien, and mostly his father, doesn’t give up what’s his. Not ever. If she disappears, he’ll hunt her to the fucking end of his days.”
My grip on the gun slips for a second. My heartbeat jumps into my throat. Adrien’s jaw flexes so hard a vein pops in his neck. Varner tilts his head, amused by what he sees on Adrien’s face. His breath shudders—not from fear, but from something sharper, deeper.
Varner smiles wider. “Lucien will smell that devotion on you the second he sees you. It’ll sign your death papers before you open your mouth.”
Adrien raises the gun to Varner’s forehead in one clean, vicious movement. Varner only has time to blink.
The shot cracks through the library like a whip, his head snaps back, and blood sprays the bookshelves behind him.
The cigarette drops onto the carpet, burning out silently. Adrien doesn’t lower the gun. His chest rises and falls in a violent, trembling rhythm. For a moment, the only sound in the room is the quiet hiss of smoke from the barrel.
Then Adrien finally turns his head toward me—eyes bright, jaw clenched, shaking with a fury that isn’t about Varner at all.
“Lucien is next,” he says quietly.
“Adrien,” I say, looking at him, my head clear now that both of the vampires are dead.
“We can’t go after Lucien. We’d be dead instantly and Natalya would be his.”
We would never survive this. There’s just the two of us, barely adults, against Lucien, his father and his entire Vermilion army.
“But we need to do something.” His voice cracks and his eyes glisten with a hint of tears. “I need to do something.”
He drops to the ground, squatting and gripping his hair, the gun trembling in his hand.
Then he straightens up, catching his breath as the panic attack loosens its grip and looks at me with certainty in his eyes.
“What if we’re all dead?”
?
I clean the blood from my hands and body, then throw on a hoodie, black cargo pants, and combat boots.
Adrien is ripping an old rug into two strips and stuffing the ends into a bottle of whiskey. He grabs a second bottle of something and gulps down about three shots of it before setting it back down and stuffing it with another strip of rug, same as the first one.
I sent the bodyguards home for today. They didn’t ask any questions. They know I don’t like it when they do.
Adrien hands me one of the bottles and falls into line beside me.
We stand in the center of the lobby, staring at the double staircase bowing up and around like cathedral arms, the marble pattern at our feet swallowing the light.
“Things are in the SUV,” Adrien says, his voice low. “Natalya’s already on the jet. Everything she needs with her.”
“She went willingly?” I ask, though I already know.
“No,” he hesitates. “Don’t ask me how I did it please.”
My eyes are fixed on the stairs. Sylvia’s body is lying at the top, a dark stain blooming from her head.
I feel nothing. No guilt. Only a flat, clear silence where everything used to be.
“You know, maybe we don’t have to—” I start, but immediately stop myself.
Adrien knows the plea before it leaves my mouth.
We don’t have to do this.
We could bury the bodies, disappear, and fold this chapter flat.
But we have wanted to set this place on fire for years.
We’re not stepping back now. And we both know we can’t disappear.
Lucien and his father would find us sooner or later, and neither of us is risking putting Natalya in that position.
We are too deep in this.
“Yes. We do,” he answers quietly.
I pull the lighter from my pocket and touch the flame to the rag stuffed in the bottle. Adrien sparks his right after me. He looks at me then, and for a beat his face is softer than I’ve ever seen. Sad.
He’s the only one who would never judge me. He looks so boyish, too young to have done what we do, and that softness in him makes something in my chest ache. I let it be there and shove it down.
We throw the molotovs so they land at the base of the broad, half-round staircase, right where the expensive runner begins. The rug drinks the flame like it’s been waiting its whole life for this. It climbs, hungry, licking the gilded frames and the silk curtains.
Perfect.
The fire is spreading much faster than I imagined.
As soon as it reaches the expensive paintings on the wall, it starts eating anything in its way, the linseed oil in the paintings feeding the fire.
The silk window curtains right on top of the stairs caught fire instantly and fell down, spreading the fire on the top floor.
It’s so ironic how the most expensive materials catch fire the easiest. As if they were made just to burn. A faint smile tugs at the corner of my mouth.
We stand there, amazed by the power of the fire, and light a cigarette each.
The fire is getting louder, cracking of the wood, sizzling of the rug, all pleasure to my ears.
“They’ll think we died in here,” Adrien says quietly, not taking his eyes away from our work and smoking his cigarette.
“I know,” I answer with amusement in my voice, and he suddenly looks at me.
“What about Kiara?”
“She’ll live. That’s enough.” I take a drag of the cigarette and fill my lungs with the smoke.
“What if she talks?”
“She won’t.”
She’s probably scared of me anyway.
In a couple of days, maybe even tomorrow, she’ll read an article about the tragically sad fire that burned down the Varner family, philanthropic heroes of this city, together with their two beloved adopted children, Kasien and Natalya Varner.
I laugh under my breath.
The smell starts to sting in my nose so we toss the cigarettes away in the lobby and go for the SUV, leaving this hellhole behind us.