Which piques Helene’s interest. Love is a concept she neither understands nor admires. It’s a notion the rest of the world—the one lesser than hers—has used to sell dreams and debt to their inhabitants.
Desire, power, control. Those are things she understands. She’s marketed them, profited off them, used them as the very foundations to build her enterprise upon. No, not an enterprise. That’s too insignificant to encapsulate what she’s created.
Helene has created a world within a world. Like a bauble wrapped in another that isn’t visible in certain lights to keep it protected.
Yet she still finds Delilah’s foolish ideals of love intriguing.How much will that love allow her to endure?she wonders.It’s more than love for Kane. There’s also love for the children she’s lost.Would she be willing to die for them? Sell herself? Just how far can I push this sweet girl before she gives me control of her very being?
Raising her stick, she turns it to show the lion’s head. The guard quickly goes to the hatch for the cellar, pulling on the thick chain to free the dogs who have been preparing for this moment. All seven of them bound up the stone steps, leapingto reach their meal as the guard sticks to the wall. He waits until the dogs have moved further through the courtyard, until they’re closer to Delilah, then lifts his mask to blow into the whistle, giving their attack command.
Helene laughs lightly, watching them jump up, latching onto Delilah’s bare leg as she screams out in pain. They tug harder, despite her attempts to fight the restraints keeping her attached to the beam, kicking and screaming to scare the dogs away.
Four hours, three cups of chamomile tea, and a late dinner served by one of her masked guards pass by before Helene grows bored of Delilah’s screams, and signals for the guard to remove the dogs. Blood stains the sandstone bricks, pooling beneath Delilah’s motionless body as Helene slowly raises from her plush armchair in the atrium. Her steps are accompanied by the emblem of those who disrespected her, scraping against the dirt, yet she still feels the hollowness of losing her most trusted friends in the Wards. They would have admired her work, regaled her with tales of their own exploits if they hadn’t turned their back on what they helped create.
She stops in front of Delilah, slowly lifting her stick to dig the sharp serpent end into the exposed flesh on her calf.
“Stop,” Delilah weakly begs around her sobs. “Please. Just stop.”
“Why were you punished, sweet girl?” she asks, exploring the wound further.
Delilah whimpers without any energy to scream after hours of being mauled and a chunk of muscle missing. “Please.”
“That isn’t the correct answer.”
“Yes,” she answers on a breath, her chest deflating as she battles the nausea brought on by pain. “Please. Let me down.”
“In order for me to, you must answer.”
All the pain, the screams still echoing in her mind, and the grief of losing her child cloud her mind. She tightly shuts her eyes as she tries to focus. “Because….” She can’t keep her head up, but she manages to remember what led to her being tied to the building. “Because I tried to kill you.”
“Good girl,” Helene croons as she lifts her stick from the wound, then signals to the guard to undo Delilah’s restraints. She steps back as the mechanical click disturbs the air, then another step to allow the guard to carelessly lift her off the wooden beams keeping her in place.
Delilah is dropped to the floor, sending more pain shooting up her leg as she screams out, “Please!” Only the scream isn’t as loud as it was before. The depth makes up for the volume as she slumps against her blood soaking into the stone with her eyes closed.
Cold metal presses into the front of her throat, the sharp horns pushing beneath her jaw, forcing her to look up as Helene takes something out of her pocket. The item is too small for her to determine what it is, but she hopes it’s water.
Instead, it’s torment as Helene passes her a sand timer. The grains are darker than the ones she’s seen before. She can’t keep her eyes open as the pressure of the lion’s head is forcefully dug into her neck, the horns scraping against her skin.
Helene waits until she’s opened her eyes to give her a warm smile. A smile can be used to conceal many things, but the softness carries into her voice as she leans over Delilah. “You burnt my child. Now, I have burnt yours.”
Delilah slowly tilts her hand, watching the grey grains of ash hug the glass edge of the sand timer. The ashes of her baby slip through the small hole between each glass compartment as she continues tilting her hand. Then she sobs, her body too depleted to form tears, yet the heartache requires an outlet.
61
KANE
It’s odd for me to be away from Sasha when having her in my life is what I imagine having a younger sibling is like. I’m worried about whether she has enough snacks, if she’ll go to sleep, or if she’ll be cold in the abandoned building we’ve made our home for the night since The Three haven’t sent us another job.
I can’t go back to her as I’m taken to the location of The Rainbow Rooms event tonight. I wasn’t able to join the last one due to my vetting being unsuccessful. After paying an extortionate sum to the handle B on the forum linked to TRR, I’ve passed all the requirements to be in attendance.
Thankfully, discretion is one of their requirements so the old firefighter’s mask over my balaclava provides a barrier between the hood they forced me to wear. The hose allows sounds to travel through the suffocating material as we rock with the waves. It doesn’t require sight to figure out we’re on a boat. The others sitting in their own sections won’t be able to hear the low voices of the crew as they confirm our arrival time. I’ll be able to use that as an indicator of where they’ve taken us since we weren’t allowed to bring any electronics.
Warmth engulfs me as we pull into the harbor, the shadows fully eaten up by our surroundings. The air is thicker, humid like we’re inside a cave.
“Welcome to The Rainbow Rooms,” an automated voice says. “You may look around, you may participate, you may be sick to your stomach. You may not, under any circumstance, divulge information from behind our doors. Enjoy your stay.” Other voices join in, eerily distorting the speech as they finish, “Remember, you may not see us, but we hear you.”
What the fuck have I gotten myself involved in?
All of Decker’s research mentioned TRR as some type of event. Half of the conversations were missing when I went into the forums, and I couldn’t stomach reading their one-sided desires for children, or how the pedophiles were swapping stories between themselves. The only information I could find was a banding system based on different colors. The last message the host left up announced a new silver band. None of the fuckers spoke outside of the coded colors, but I didn’t look too closely because I’d rather be ignorant.
