The room smelled of my usual jasmine incense mix with something metallic I couldn't place. My chest felt full of knives that never stopped moving. The pain slowly building up enough to wake me out of my sleep.
"Esther?" His voice was soft, not like his usual sleepy tone he usually had when I wake him up in the middle of the night.
"I can't—" My words came out in broken pieces. The bed dipped beneath me. Every breath was like thousands of needles piercing my chest.
He sat down beside me with a careful politeness. His fingers took my trembling hands, a touch that was usually enough to comfort me. He held me like I was made of glass unlike how people who perceive me–a cold blooded killer.
"Breath Esther," he said. His eyes were unusually calm. "You're scaring me." his tone lack of emotion, something inside me told me there is something amiss yet I cannot place my finger into it. And the pain grew by the second.
"Quick! Call the p-physician," I said, my lips trembling. His panic should have followed like it usually is. Instead there was a cold, hollow clarity.
He laughed, low and practiced. "You're being dramatic. We'll call the physician. Lay still."
He slipped his hands away, jumping out of our bed. The curtains behind him moved and someone slipped in, it was Margarette. My best friend. My confidante. What is she doing inside our chamber?
The smile she gave him was private, the smile she gave me was sinister.
"You look terrible," she said, her face telling a different story, in her face lay a quiet smile.
She snaked her hand onto my husband's arm. Her fingers were light. My throat closed around the word "why" before it could escape. What I saw almost numbed the pain in my chest.
"What are you t-two doing? I-I know! You're g-gonna help me, right?." I forced a smile that tasted like paper. Forcing myself to reason out what my eyes could see.
Margarette crouched to my level as if to whisper a secret. "Esther, please. Just die already. It was such a strong poison? Why did it took too long to effect. Are you even human? I was cramping up hiding behind that curtain. Aren't you my best friend?"
"Poison? What do you mean?" I echoed. The laugh ripped out of me, I wanted it to be a joke. Even breathing was a chore. She gestured something in my back and when I forced myself to turn around, I saw the empty glass of milk at the table. It was the milk my husband prepared for me before we went to bed.
He leaned in, blue eyes clinical. "You've always been… difficult and too smart for your own good. You wasted a lot of our time. We even have to make a story to isolate you so you keep depending on us."
"No. People hate me because I'm cruel," I hissed. "It was natural for them to hate me." blood started filling my mouth, the metallic taste weirdly familiar.
"Nope. You did what we told you to pave the way for us," he corrected. "We made you the villain so we could be the heroes."
My world narrowed to two faces. I watched them discuss me like a painting they could reframe. Margarette's hand never left his arm. Her smile never left her mouth. My hand started to lose it strength. If I could just grab my sword I wanted to slash them both if it's the last thing I do. The victorious smile in their faces are worst than the pain of the poison that slowly kills me.
"S-Stop," I said. The word was small. I had given bigger orders—executions, decrees, verdicts. None of those felt as important in this moment as the thread of breath that clung to my lungs. I don't want to die, I can't lose. Esther doesn't lose.
He shook his head. "It's all your fault, Esther. You made it happen."
Margarette smiled like sunlight that had turned poisonous. "We will make sure to take care of the throne you fought so hard for. Because that's what they believe…"
"Believe what?" My voice scraped raw. I tried to sit up. The room tipped. My vision's blur.
"That you were the monster," he said. "That you enjoyed the blood. That you wanted power at any cost and that you're better off dead"
"You—" I choked on my own blood, my mattress stained red.
"Don't force yourself, it will hurt more,you're gonna die anyways" Margarette said with a smile of fake kindness.
"You traitors!" I spat as blood drip out of my mouth, spilling like vomit.
"See? I told you. Don't worry I'll take care of your beloved husband for you." she stated in mocking tone landing a kiss on his cheek.
"Go fuck yourself," I cursed. I spat the blood in front of them, the liquid flew in her nightgown. Then a loud slap landed in my face.
It was from my husband, the man I had always trusted. He leaned back, his expressions dimmed. "Can you just die peacefully? I don't even love you anyway. I never did. If not for our plan I wouldn't sleep in the same room as you."
I wanted to laugh. Why do this fucker think I still cared? I'm dying and there's no bigger feelings in my heart than wanting to kill them. My hatred overflowing over my limp body made me feel like I wanna die.
"Love? Do you think I care?" My throat closed like a fist.
"He never loved anyone aside from me," Margarette finished for him.
Heat flared in my chest, bright and blind. My hands, which had once fought in an endless war, trembled. The room spun with the their betrayal, the milk I drank before I slept thinking it was out of pure concern, the thought I had when he held it to me like I was the luckiest girl in the world, the act of pure trust I gave them all my life. All of those disgusted me. It filled me with emotion even hatred cannot begin to describe.
I thought of all the men and women I had ordered executed. I thought about the look on the lieutenants' faces when the rope was tightened. I wanted to imagine it was them. I never wanted to forget, I never wanted to forgive.
The ceiling above me blurred. Their victorious laughter echoed as I lay limp unable to respond faded into distance.
I mustered all the last remaining strength I had to flip them off.
All I had left was a single thought—sharp and terrible. If I was to die, I would die remembering their faces. I would die knowing I never got to get back on their betrayal. That they actually succeeded in their plan. I would take the memory of their betrayal like a blade and hold it up until my last breath.
I wanted to remember how pathetic I was.
When I opened my eyes again, I was drowning, water filled my lungs. I struggled until I felt a cold marble in my hand that that I can hold unto. I was inside a very strange room, it was cold. The thing I was in was made of material like porcelain in the shape of a tub. The room was small and covered in tile.
A bathroom. A sensed of familiarity flowed in my mind.
My hand lifted. It was small. It looked foreign. A thin, pale scar marked my inner wrist. The line caught the light that illuminates from the small window.
But why? I'm pretty sure I died inside my bedroom. Even the hatred is still burning inside me.
I sat up too fast and the world reeled. My head was thick with a shame that was not mine and all the memories were too loud.
Allesha Seres, the name flash inside my head. A discarded wife. Bruised. Used. The shard of memory that followed was enough to make my blood boil: a lover's laugh in a doorway, a man who is my husband with a woman that is not me clinging on him, a friend whose betrayal shoved me to death and a husband who got pushed around by her every word.
I touched the thin scar. A tremor ran through my body, it was not fear. It was anger.
Pathetic. Why would you kill yourself because of that? You were alive when you found out? You might as well kill them.
I hated how similar our situation is, I hated how different we responded.
I hated that it was me who had to die. Someone who would give anything just to be alive and get my revenge to soothe the anger inside of me.
Allesha, you've been really pathetic. It's making me angry.
But it's not your fault. It's those people who drove you to make that pathetic decision.
I swung my legs over the tub and stood on feet in the cold marbled floor, my clothes soaked and dripped. The bathroom unlike in my previous world smelled of detergent that smelled familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I stepped outside. A room smaller than my palace but still carried the same elegance welcomed me, the water dripping from me leaving traces in the tiled floor.
A cracked photograph on the wall showed a woman's arm around a man, one wearing a white gown and the man wearing a suit and tie. Both flashing a genuine smile. She was familiar of that, they had the same set of painting when they got married.
I remembered everything in flashes: the poisoned milk, the way my husband's hand had been colder than it should be, Margarette's sinister smile catching the moonlight like a blade. I remembered the final moment—how I had wanted to make them pay, how the last thing I'd seen was their hands joined and my life slipping away.
Now, in this borrowed body, the rage that had been hammered into me in that bedroom returned like a living thing.
The anger never subsided.
"Allesha," I said aloud to the empty room, my eyes fixed at her smile on the photograph. The name tasted different on my tongue than Esther. But I should get use to it. After all, I am Allesha now.
"I will make you suffer," I said to the face of the man in the photograph, almost warping into my husbands face and to the memory of her best friend playing her. "I will make them kneel and beg for forgiveness."
I pressed my thumb into the thin white line on my wrist, it didn't hurt, the wound had healed but the water in the tub still stained of blood.
You will never beg again. I will make sure it will be their turn to cry.
Fate had made a mistake by letting me live twice. I intended to make sure someone will pay for their betrayal. I don't care if it's not them. My hatred need it's direction.
After all—what else did I have to lose?