Page 114 of Oblivion
I guess that that was as much as we would talk properly today.
28
BELLADONNA
I loved plans.
I loved them when I was a kid and I love them especially now. The pieces of the puzzle were slowly falling in place, pawing a path for me to do what I wanted to do all these years.
To make Ophelia Aster suffer as much as I did.
She was weak now, much weaker than years ago, allowing herself to fall for a man that couldn’t protect her from me. No one could protect her from me. Ophelia Aster destroyed my life, took everything I loved from me and I was going to return a favor now.
My eyes flickered over the board on the opposite side of my desk, going over the photos of the people I had to go through. It would have been easy just getting to her, killing her, taking away her life, but she didn’t deserve to go out that easily.
I wanted her to suffer, to feel what I felt. To drown in her sorrow and in her pain, choking on all these emotions until death was the only thing she could think about. I used to be docile, weak, allowing other people to rule my life, but not anymore.
Now I was in charge, and it was hilarious watching all of them running around, trying to figure out who I was. But I did my homework, and I covered my tracks well enough so that they wouldn’t be able to find me.
It was funny how easy it was to hide in plain sight, but none of them could find me. Cillian and Tristan came close a couple of times, Italians did as well, but I knew more than they did. I knew all their dirty secrets, all their hidden skeletons and all the things they wanted the world to forget.
But I would never forget them,
I could never forget how each and every one of them fucked me over. They forgot about me as if I had never meant anything, leaving me alone in the dark world that she destroyed.
And they were all going to pay.
I stood up from the desk and walked toward the board, taking the red marker from the desk with me. Logan Nightingale’s picture stood on the left-hand side, right next to his fucking sons, but they weren’t the ones I would need to destroy.
At least not yet.
I popped the lid off the marker and placed it on the high table in front of the board, my eyes going over their pictures.
Ophelia Aster.
Storm Knoxx.
Cillian, Tristan, and Kieran Nightingale.
Logan Nightingale.
They were all going to pay for what they did to me. For how they abandoned me.
I should have probably thanked Ophelia for getting rid of Nikolai and his little minion, but we would need to keep that for when I finally meet her in person. I couldn’t wait to see the look on her face, the shock, the disbelief…
“Miss,” suddenly came from behind me, and as I turned around, I saw Ivan, standing at the threshold, holding a beige envelope in his hand.
“Yes, Ivan,” I answered, turning toward him. I might have been tiny, but all these men knew that they shouldn’t fuck with me if they wanted to live. They stayed behind after Nikolai died, running away from Lazar Asterov and Sons of Hades, but they should have known that I was not a better option than them—I was worse.
“T-This came in mail,” he stammered, looking at the floor.
Some of them tried to take over, to kill me when they had just joined, but they failed to remember that I had been in this game much longer than they were, and nothing and nobody was going to stop me.
I waved my hand, beckoning him toward me.
“What is it?” I asked, taking the envelope from him as he slowly approached me, his hands trembling as they released it.
“I don’t know,” he murmured, looking at my collarbone instead of my eyes. “It was addressed to you, so none of us opened it.”
