Misleading The Marquis

37 - Gina

"Finally!" came a woman's voice, this from the opposite side of the room, "I thought you'd never get them here!"

Gwen looked up from the floor into a face nearly as familiar to her as her own.

"Louisa?" she whispered hoarsely, disbelief filling her just as it felt as if her blood was draining from her altogether. The maid who'd grown up with her in St. John Manor, been there the day her parents each died, the day that Ben had begun to act strange... and the day they'd taken him away, "What is going on?" Gina choked out, fearing she already knew.

"Malcolm don't!" Bane shouted and Gina watched her husband lunge at his brother. But in an instant, there was a bolt of tesla power from what GIna assumed was Malcolm's hand held Tesla stunner, and the Bear of the North landed on the floor beside her with a grown.

"Bane!" she heard herself scream as she scrambled to him, touched his face, searching for a pulse.

"He'll be fine," Louisa scoffed impatiently with a roll of her eyes as she left her place next to the Tesla coil control door to stand beside Malcolm. Bane's younger brother was staring down at them both with such a twist of anger and pain, but he didn't contradict his counterpart.

"How could you?" Gina asked him in a deathly whisper, her voice breaking halfway through her words. Louisa smirked unhappily, crossing her arms against herself.

"You wouldn't understand," Louisa answered tightly, her anger nearly palpable, "I've been on this plan with Ben for over a year,"

"Ben?" Gina breathed, "He isn't dead?" she asked, unable to help the hopeful tone in her voice.

"Of course he's dead you stupid bitch!" Louisa screeched, balling her fists at her sides in outrage. Malcolm stayed quiet but nodded his chin towards something on the opposite side of the room where Louisa had been standing only moments ago.

Gina did take a good look then, for she hadn't bothered before now. The room was full of foggy morning light, weak and cold... it was not comforting at all. But it granted her a view of what could only be the work of whoever had stolen the family relic. The floor was covered in an elaborate series of symbols, some mirror, others repeated as they scrawled across the stone floor of the workshop, all swirling and twisting towards one center - there was a black stone basin, and it looked to be roughly a hundred years old. These were the same symbols that had been painted onto Gina's floor just before the fire - she'd thought then that she must've done the work in her sleep. But now she doubted that theory - it was done in such detail that no madman could have duplicated it. And strewn over the dark charcoal paint were black roses, roughly chopped like garden lettuce rather than expensive and rare flowers that they were. The bodies were strewn in every direction, again creating a kind of carpet over top of the symbols.

But this wasn't what Malcolm had urged her to look towards - no. Instead, just beyond the stone basin lay two coffins on the stone floor, each adorned in black roses and surrounded by an intricate set of symbols of its own. Neither looked familiar to her... though one had clearly been unearthed, and the other looked as if it had never been put to the ground, to begin with.

"Ben," Gina breathed, feeling as if the air had been stolen from her lungs as she spoke his name. In her chest, she knew it was her twin's body that lay inside the box that had never kissed the earth... then who -

"It's her," Malcolm spoke the words brokenly, and Gina whirled around to see that same face of pain once again, "It's the first Lady Brisbane... before you, dear sister."

"Cora..." Gina murmured in a kind of whisper, then swallowed past the dryness in her throat as Malcolm's face crumpled into a dark scowl of anger.

"She was perfect..." he said quietly, and Louis turned away in a huff, as if she'd heard this before, "She was everything a man could want... at least - everything I ever wanted..." Malcolm explained, "And then he took her from me... like it was nothing like it was just another competition from our childhood."