The festival night ended with her letter to an unknown villian she created . The morning visited ith the letter. The reply came swiftly. By morning, Anna found another envelope pressed beneath her door no reply in words, no tender acknowledgement of her trembling midnight script. Only a name, an address scrawled in a hand she was beginning to dread recognizing:
Marrow Lane, No. 7 – The Flower Shop.
She stared at it as though it had been inked in blood. The letters bit into the paper with a pressure that betrayed anger or longing or both. She folded it, set it beneath her teacup, and carried herself through the day like a woman on trial.
Her teaching hours were mechanical, her voice breaking into the classroom like a faint echo, her pupils' questions blurring into noise. She corrected verses, spoke of Shakespeare, but her heart was not in her throat it was buried in that letter, waiting to throb again once she reached the address.
When the hour at last freed her, she stepped into her carriage and let it roll towards Marrow Lane. The street was narrow, hushed, draped in ivy that tangled around the bricks as if nature itself wanted to choke it into silence.
The flower shop had no signboard, only the faint scent of soil and wilted roses spilling into the cobblestone air. A bell above the door chimed faintly when she stepped inside.
Behind the counter stood a lady of late years, her posture prim, her eyes watchful, her hands folded like a parish nun's.
"Are you Anne?" the woman asked, her voice soft yet fixed with strange certainty.
Anna's throat tightened. She answered, "Yes, madame."
The woman turned, lifted a single bloom from the counter, and placed it into Anna's hands.
It was a yellow chrysanthemum.
Anna's chest stiffened as memory crept in chrysanthemums carried the language of grief, despair, and death. In some corners of Europe, they were laid upon graves. In others, their yellow shade spoke of betrayal, jealousy, and the rot of greed.
The woman offered no further words, only a nod, and gestured towards the exit.
Anna walked out, the bloom quivering in her grip. She felt the weight of the entire street pressing against her as she crossed towards a stone fountain at the corner, the sound of water trickling with a cruel mockery of calm. She sat upon the bench, her knees brushing the petals, her eyes caught in the fractured mirror of the fountain's rippling surface.
Within the bouquet of paper wrapping, she found it.
Another letter.
No signature. No greeting. Only a block of words lifted not from his hand, but from hers.
From The Tale of Dorian Veyne.
"She begged, her swollen belly heavy with a life not yet given. The creature inside her writhed as though it too feared the silence of my hand. I thought of mercy, once like a man recalling water in the desert but mercy is a fool's jewel. What is a woman heavy with child but a shell of two hungers, two weaknesses waiting to rot? One death, and I strike two veins. One cut, and the future bleeds as easily as the present. To carve her open, to silence not just the mother but the whimper in her womb that is purity of power. That is truth, before God, before man. That is the knife as it was meant to be, And I smiled like a fool infront of the corpse of an unborn child and a women , the blood was neat , red and the smell made me mad... Hahaha
The words leapt out of the page, venom born from her own pen. She remembered writing it in fevered imagination, her mind trying to crawl into the villain's marrow and understand him. It had been fiction fiction meant for her book, her character.
And yet here it was. Delivered back to her like a mirror she could not turn away from.
Her chest heaved. The page continued:
"You never gave me a name. You made me shadow, you made me silence, you made me suffer without skin. You denied me even the filth of feeling, Lady Anne. And now I live only in the rot of your words. Do you imagine this cruelty? Or do you taste it? If I command you do you dare to do it? Will you take your little white hands and wrap them around a throat, swollen with new breath? Will you cut it, as you let me cut it, with the mind you so carefully carved for me?"
"Answer, Lady Anne. Do you have any fate beyond your own ink? Or will you let me breathe through you, as I always have? If I ask you to kill, will you do it with this same devotion? You will, won't you? What else can you do, right, Lady Anne?"
The words bled off the page like poison into her eyes.
Her heart seized. The fountain's rippling seemed to grow louder, louder, until it drowned her breath. She gripped the bench with both hands, her knuckles turning bloodless. The flower slid to the ground, its petals breaking in the dirt like gold coins abandoned.
Her knees went numb, her breath hitched, her chest clamped tight as though bound in iron. She couldn't breathe her lungs clawed for air, her vision blurred with tears that cut across her cheeks unbidden.
The letter shook in her hand. Her mind screamed: He is real. He reads me. He knows me. He will not stop.
And in that cruel instant, her tears tasted of salt and terror.
Her body folded forward, her forehead brushing against the brittle paper. A sob slipped free not of grief, but of fear so raw it clutched her bones.
Somewhere in the distance, the bell of a church tolled. The flower shop's door closed with a soft thud. And Anna sat alone, trapped in the echo of her own words, the echo of her villain, wondering if she had not conjured him into flesh herself.
The question pulsed again from the page:
If I ask you to do this to someone, will you?
Her throat clenched. Her knees trembled.
A single drop of water perhaps a tear, perhaps the fountain's spray spotted the ink, and it smeared into a shadow of his voice.
She could not answer. She could only tremble.
And still, in the air, she swore she could smell oak.
Would you like me to make the next chapter escalate his command perhaps the first time he actually asks her to do something in reality, to test her loyalty or do you want her panic and fear to carry longer before the demand comes?
At the bench in the foundain she can hear her own heart beat and the flows coming from the water and she spoke to herself, iam afraid....