Page 76 of Ash and Poison

I had always been very interested in plants—my birth mother loved growing flowers in our garden and used to tell me which ones to avoid.

‘They’re beautiful, aren’t they?’ She’d smile. ‘But they are poison, darling. Don’t play with them.’

Oh, I wanted to play with them so bad.

By thirteen, I could name every single poisonous plant and flower.

That night, we went to his room. We didn’t give him the chance to come to ours.

I still remember how his face looked. Pale. Stricken. Sweating like a pig.

“What are you—” he slurred. The poison I had added to his food was already working.

This man was supposed to protect us. Instead, he broke us, little by little, until we were nothing but empty shells of the girls we once were.

That night, we became something else.

We became weapons. We became power. We became his hell.

“We’re taking our power back. It comes… with your death.”

“Never. I’ll hurt you for…”

He was massive, but the dose of poison in his blood made him weak, vulnerable, and for once, powerless.

I could have added the entire dose into his food and killed him quietly—but I wanted to, I needed to, look him in the eyes as he died. I needed to feel his last breath.

My hands gripped his shoulders while Layne pried his jaw open. He fought us—tried to throw us off, cursing at us, telling us we would never be free of him.

But he underestimated us, as men like him often did.

Trina tilted the bottle of poison between his lips… the poison I’d collected from the Aconitum. He gagged, his eyes wide with terror as realization dawned.

He started to cry then. Great, heaving sobs that shook his entire body. He begged, pleaded—promising things he’d never deliver, spouting apologies he didn’t mean.

I didn’t feel sorry for him. He deserved to cry, to beg, just as Layne and I had cried and begged for mercy.

“Pathetic.” I laughed as Layne punched him in the stomach.

“You’ll not get away with…” He gasped, his fingers clawing against his throat.

“Oh, but we will. When the cops come, they’ll find poison in your food, and Martha will be dead beside you. She’ll write a letter telling the world what a monster you are, what you did to us. She killed you because she wanted to save her girls. Us. Martha has got to at least do that for us.”

“Please, save me, Diya.”

“Well, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.” I shrugged.

That night, I learned something unforgettable.

Men like him only survived because they convinced us that we were powerless from when we were young. They would manipulate, gaslight, and abuse because that was the only way they could maintain the illusion of control. But the moment a woman understood her true strength, it’d be over.

The power dynamic would shift, and they would crumble.

Oh, how gloriously he crumbled.

“Adieu then, bastard. You’ll go straight to hell.”

For once, the fear wasn’t ours. It was his.