Later tonight, there will be consequences. But in this moment, Moira lets her rage reign.
She slams her bedroom door shut and lies on her floor, kicking her shoes off and ignoring the heat of blood still rushing to her face where her mother had slapped her.
Eleanor does not deserve hands.
Not with the awful and borderline perverse things she’s been able to accomplish with them.
Moira hears a thump down below, but closes her eyes, unable to find the desire to care from deep within herself.
When she hears a shout, she jolts up and stands by the door.
A loud and rhythmic sound fills the air, and even muffled through layers of wood and stone and wall matter, it causes her to jump.
There’s screaming and shouting, and Moira cracks the door open, just in time to see one of her brothers run past. The weakest of the three.
“Alec,” she hisses as she watches him disappear into one of the rooms.
This is the problem with coddling boys and whipping girls, she thinks to herself as she waits to hear more from the chaos below.
More of those loud bangs fill the air and she’s reminded of the old truck her father used to take them on to ride about the borders of their land when they were all children. Mechanic bangs that sour one of the only pleasant memories she has of her life.
She slips away from the door when she hears heavy footfalls coming from the stairs.
Rather than await what she assumes to be her demise, she reaches for the bow tucked into her closet, pushing her dress’s straps down her shoulders, allowing her the room to comfortably sit the nock of the free arrow against the bow string.
Just as she reacquaints her hand with her anchor point, her chin, the door opens.
The slight buzz of the arrow slicing through the air is only interrupted by the sound of Moira notching another arrow. She draws back and sends another into the stranger who stumbles, clutching where the two arrows ends are now part of him.
She snatches her bag of arrows up and tiptoes through the halls, her heart pounding but her body alert.
Wood of the arrow between fingers, wood of the bow inside of fist.
Moira moves through the house as if her bow and arrow are her newest limbs. She’d never seen a dead man before, never thought a man would die at the end of her bow.
But she has to reason that because she isn’t ready to meet death, someone else has to take her place in line.
She attempts to ignore the rush it gives her, the way the adrenaline makes her giddy. The way the people below, every pompous and pampered one of them, are the ones being hunted now.
She is no longer their bargaining chip; their slave.
The whispering house, now full of screams. Moira smiles at the sound of the fear and the death and the chaos.
In her mind, this is what happens when going against nature; when denying life its cycle.
It shows up like a mad butcher, cutting the control away and granting your deepest fears.
5
There’s blood on the floor. It clings to Moira’s feet, reminiscing over a time, not too long ago, when it once ran warm.
Now it’s sticky and thick, and she tries not to let the squelch of each step derail her from her desire to survive what looks like an outright massacre.
In the span of perhaps an hour, she’s gone from being in the company of men who desire her, to seeing them all dead.
Every single one of them.
She peers at the back of a blond head, a hole neatly centered amongst the strands. When she pushes him over with her foot, she scoots back into the wall at the sight of what once was Brantley’s face.
Moira feasts her eyes on the remnants of death. She peers down at the burnt and deformed pink flesh, at the blood spread across the floor, the blood that now tries to belong to her, slipping in the cracks of her skin and forming a thick crust there.
“Who did this?” she whispers, as if the bodies on the floor could rise up and answer.
But would she want them to? Any of them?
She hasn’t seen anyone alive since her little brother Alec ran past her and she wonders if she’s all alone. If he and everyone else had been found and killed and the murderers had gone.
Until she hears someone call out upstairs.
“No sign of her.”
Her.
His words don’t sound the way hers do; they’re not shaped around the vowels the way hers are. And though she doesn’t know him, she still feels a jolt of familiarity.
She slips into the shadows and behind the door of the bathroom she’d just been inside of with her mother not too long ago. Before bullets rained down on this home.
“He’ll be pissed,” another voice says. “But we have the parents and one of the boys.”
Alec?
There’s been no sign of her other two brothers.
“Mierda.” There’s a sigh and then, “Let him know. I’ll check downstairs again.”
She’s trying to figure out her next move, her hand squeezing her bow into her fist. Moira wishes for a tactical approach, one that could guarantee her survival. But all she has are the few minutes before this man finds her.
And probably kills her.
Not today, she reminds herself as she notches an arrow and breathes evenly.
There’s an art to this and she learned it very early on. Only when her body stops breathing, content between the inhales and exhales, can she release the bow and watch it whiz through the air.
It takes an act initiated in death to deliver it to another.
She muses over this as a booted foot comes into view just before the rest of a body follows.
Don’t miss, don’t miss, she chants silently to herself.
And yet, she never does.
An arrow meets his left eye and she shrugs off her smirk as she steps over him. But something tells her to stop. To peer down at him and try to find a reason why’d he’d come here and what he’d wanted from her.
His dark hair sticks to his bloody cheek and she is reminded of the man in the woods.
Had they made love to the same devil? Sold their souls in return for their killer instincts?
This man was sloppier. He hadn’t taken as much care as the one in the woods had, sneaking up on her.
And maybe this is her first lesson in combat: too much confidence will get you killed.
The lesson comes full circle as she feels herself being yanked back by her hair.
It’s hard to breathe with the hand covering her mouth and nose.
“Mira, she can’t breathe.” She hears shuffling and a grunt. “El tonto.”
The hand on her mouth slides down to her throat but the one on her eyes remains. There are bright spots behind her lids as her captor presses hard enough to keep her from seeing anything.
He doesn’t know that animals will always know their cages better than an intruder ever could.
They’re about to enter her mother’s bedroom when Moira drives her elbow into the man holding her too closely. His groan punctuates her release and she rushes forward, pushing the door in front of her until it opens.
The lights are on and they cause her to blink, the spots in her vision fading. The scene in front of her takes its place and her breath hitches as someone comes from behind her and grips her hair again before pushing her to the side. She hits the floor, her elbows already aching with the force of her fall.
None of it matters.
Not when the man in front of her stares at her, his irises black endless pools that would terrify her if bruising brutality hadn’t always been her bedmate.