My love!!

The air no longer had room for Lara’s breath; her lungs were suffocated by the thick, metallic scent of her daughter’s lifeblood. She looked at Robert with a gaze paralyzed by a dual horror: a terror of what he had just done, and an instinctive, primal fear of the monster he had become. Her mouth hung open, a silent void of disbelief.

She began to crawl toward Suzanne. As she dragged herself across the floor, the shards of glass bit into her palms, but she felt nothing. The physical pain was a mere whisper against the screaming silence of her soul.

“My love,” she whispered, her voice cracking like dry parchment. “Did you mean that your father was that witch? My darling… didn’t I tell you not to fear? Didn’t I say I was right here, and no one would hurt you?”

She reached the small, limp body. With hysterical, trembling hands, she began to wipe the blood from Suzanne’s severed throat, smearing it onto her own cheeks and forehead in a grisly ritual.

“Suzanne, wake up, my child. Your mother is here,” she sobbed, her mind fracturing. “Look, my love… I am putting on my makeup now. You are the beautiful, kind witch, and I am yours. Look at your mother’s face now… look!”

A jagged, guttural wail—half-scream, half-sob—tore from her throat.

Robert, broken by his own atrocity, had fled the room, his receding voice filled with curses and incoherent drunken rants. Lara was left alone in the crimson shadows, clutching her daughter’s cooling body to her chest. She wept with a searing, agonizing heat that felt like it would burn her skin.

“My love,” she wailed into the silence. “If only I had been the one slaughtered. If only my neck had been in place of yours… Oh, God… let it be me! Let it be me!”

Silence fell over her, a heavy shroud broken only by the jagged remnants of her sobs. Suddenly, she leaned down and pressed a long, lingering kiss onto Suzanne’s bloodied brow. Her voice was an eerie whisper, caught between this world and the next.

“Suzy, my love... you said the witch hid you with her wand. I refuse to believe your dream was a prophecy that your father was the ‘Kind Witch.’ No... oh, no.”

A ghost of a smile touched her lips, more terrifying than any scream.

“The witch was you. And you... you were my soul. With your permission, my darling, my soul left this body the very moment you departed from this world.”

Then, the smile vanished. Her features fractured, crumbling into a mask of pure, agonizing desperation. Her voice rose into a pleading shriek that echoed off the cold stone walls:

“Suzy? Suzanne? The Witch? By what name must I call you... just so you will wake up? WAKE UP!”

Then, she heard it—the heavy, rhythmic thud of Robert’s footsteps from below. In the haunting silence of the house, the sound of his approach felt closer to her ears than her own shallow breaths. It was as if the footfalls of Death itself were more intimate, more real, than the very life still coursing through her veins.

The man who had just stolen her world was returning, and the sound of his boots on the floorboards beat like a funeral march, echoing against the hollow walls of her shattered heart. Life was becoming a distant memory, a fading whisper, while the encroaching shadow of her tormentor was the only truth left in the dark.