We're all rotten, buried and forgotten,

Living it up underground

Amor stood tall from his once casual stance, finally assuming his full height after leaning up against that wall with that familiar devil may care attitude. It does not deter her, even as he towers her petite form like a looming shark shadowing above her on the ocean floor. She should have felt small and timid but she was anything but. Her wild eyes peer up at him with her ever growing rage, becoming much larger than the vampire before her. She wanted to pound on his chest with closed fists until her knuckles bled, to make him hurt half as badly as her. She wanted to scream at him until the sound grew broken and her throat grew raw and ragged.

"Bullshit." She exclaims, not bothering to truly listen to what he was saying, as she was entirely stifled by her own madness.

A terribly lucid thought crossed her very scattered mind. Oh fuck, if he were here, it meant his sister was somewhere not too far away. Or perhaps he had lost that psycho cat lady for good, somehow she doubted it. That black haired savage was so close to accomplishing what so many seemed unable to. To kill her once and for all. She remembered that dilapidated house, it was like a distant fog in her mind. It was a house forged of nightmare and torture, filled with Risques creatures to execute her whims. They encircled her like vultures, picking her apart piece by piece. They never stopped.

How serene and peaceful it was to be in the welcoming lull of death. It was like wading through a comforting dream world while what was left of her life simply drifted out to sea.

His words pull her from her own private hell, claiming ignorance to Ryker's true intentions. That one word stuck out like a crimson sore thumb. His heart. Of course, he was referring to her and not that devilish sister. But she couldn't truly hear him as she was consumed in those roaring flames while it eats her alive. "Oh? Well.. surprise."That darkness laced with sarcasm spat from her tongue. Ignorance was apparently his bliss. He could claim it all night long because yes, as he so wonderfully put it, he had no idea. He simply wasn't there. Did he truly think men like Ryker would just stop at an empire? Amor was a monster, a diabolical fiend at the deepest core of it. So why hadn't he known that they were constructed from the very same vile fabric the other man was made up of.

A storm brewed as if it grew from the friction of the two forms down below. It was as though her very rage fueled the very volatile mass overhead. Let it storm! Let the tempest devour her whole, both proverbial and tangible. Let the rain pelt her flesh in sweet reckless abandon and watch as the lightning cracks and splinters the sky in two. In that very moment within all her undying rage she wants nothing more for the sky to tear her apart. To rain down its own fury upon her which only rivalled her own, allowing it to mingle and grow with her. For a moment, it was as though she could very well become that storm. It thrums with electric anticipation, slicing right through her stone core.

It did so seem like he got everything he ever wanted. Freedom to do as he pleased, no longer under the shackles of a fragile human. He got everything that he wanted to achieve, he got to start anew wherever he pleased. So yes. Yes, he did get exactly what he desired, as he so often did. He left without an explanation, without a care in the world. It was as though he believed in his own web of lies, that he was doing the right thing by keeping his controlling sister at bay. Amor should have killed Harley along with the rest of her family. Instead of caging her, becoming her captor, her entire existence. Despite everything he had done, he etched himself upon every fibre, so deeply no matter how hard she tried she couldn't erase that mark upon her very soul. In that time, she knew nothing else. She became that pet he so dared to call her. It was a potent case of Stockholm syndrome if there ever was a tale, yet it turned into an elaborate and unbridled beast of its own. She doesn't answer his question, her eyes bore into his own seeing something that looks like pain and a consuming void flooding his stormy eyes. "I envy you, you know, to be able to turn it all off when you feel like it."

That was when she felt the first warmth of his own rage bubbling to the surface. Let it come. Finally, the man got angry. "All that 'sacrifice' just for you to run like a dog with a tail between his legs." That should do it. That sarcasm like an acidic poison drops from her naturally, that would no doubt enrage him further. Those words fall from her blood tinged lips before she could stop them.

"What do you think?" She hissed through gritted teeth, she placed both hands on his shoulders like she was about to shake him fiercely. As though she could make him see right into her mind and into the chaos that resided there. She refused to be a damaged broken human thing. She was sick of being some weak little ragdoll when it came stacked up against the supernatural. She hated it even more than she hated him. Oh how she hated that the only way she could survive that madness was from Ryker's bite. That intoxicating numbness which would wash over her when it all grew too much, it would stop that saturated pain, at least for a little while. She hated that she relied on that inebriating aftershock, that it was the only thing that had once kept her going in a world of bleak despair. If only she had known, all it took was a little carnage to set her free.

At least now, she enlightened him. Her finger grew into fists, scrunching up the fabric of his stained shirt as though it could have been his neck. "He's the reason I am here, in Sacrosanct, he found me the last place I moved. I can't seem to kill him." And Isolt, her cherished friend, but she wasn't going to tell him that, nor that his freakshow of a sister was the one that turned her. Risque somehow seemed to be everywhere Harley was, destroying her life, piece by piece.

Perhaps, Harley's wicked hatred was more with herself and her own frail weakness. That very inability to protect herself from the shadows that always marred her door.

If he had cared, he would have found her, she thought with a startling resoluteness. Not entirely positive if she believed them. She's convinced that any interest he possessed of her currently was purely out of nostalgia's familiar touch. That he only wanted her when she conveniently toppled into his metaphorical lap. Hell, even Ryker and all his sick obsessions found her. Time and time again, no matter where she moved. She pried herself away, surprised that she touched him.

"Your sister was right about one thing." She paused in careful consideration. "You should have turned me all those years ago and you didn't. For some reason, you preferred me weak. That weakness is and was my greatest downfall." Like a flower on a grave, she was destined to die like everything around her. It was a good thing that some people are harder to kill and this little vixen was one of them.

Harlequin Ray Westward