Severed Ties

Epilogue

Cameron

She was gone.

It had been twelve days since I had seen her. Damon Mortello was dead and there wasn't a single person at his grave. Apart from her.

Dressed in the inky black cloak stolen from the Grim Reaper himself, she stood over his grave, she didn't speak a word, her mouth pressed into a tight line a single tears pooling in her darkened eyes, so dark you couldn't even see where the pupil met the iris. Eyes that used to look at me with something close to love.

I could not convince myself it was love though, the more I thought the more it escaped me, she had loved me but had I loved her enough, had I deserved her love I wouldn't have done what I had.

I still remembered, her standing them, formidable and unwavering, my mother's gun clasped firmly in her hands, she had shot my father, but in the leg, she had made sure both my parents had survived.

And now I had taken her father away. Sure Vincent Torres was still alive but for her 25 years of life, Damon Mortello had been the only father she had ever known. Cruel for moments of her childhood but good at hiding his temper. And in some twisted way, he had loved her.

She had loved me, but I did not think she loved me anymore.

I had killed him when he had no weapon, no intent to kill, he was not going to kill Alara, but my hand had moved too quickly a marionette to the image of her, alone crying with the blood of her brother in her hands. The sick need for Damon to control her to wield her as a weapon she refused to be.

It had all been cultivated a plan to pressure her into the crystal they wanted, the diamond they wanted. 

Alonso had though he was saving Mara Mortello, it hadn't taken long for me to realise that it was her mother's name Mortello. Damon had been nothing without that name behind him, the first born Mortello daughter was the key to the blood diamond.

It was her Maternal grandfather who had intricately placed the map on the skin of his grandaughter, someone I was sure he was intent on protecting.

That was the thing with the mind it was so fragile,  Artemis Mortello, did not remember even his own daughter the legacy he left her with the curse that meant she stood over her Stepfather's grave.

A single rose in her hand, deliberately as white as the freshly fallen snow. No more red.

Alara Torres needed nothing more red in her life.

I did not think that Vincent Torres was innocent, I was sure Alonso's direction to hide Alara and her mother with Damon Mortello had been no accident.

I was sure of this much, Vincent Torres was anything but innocent.

He wanted the Blood Diamond too.

She clutched the rose, I watched hidden behind the stones of the dead, some of which I was sure I was instrumental in the death of. The Mortello graveyard, some of these people, when the Vipers and Mortellos were rivals had been killed at my hands. And now, there was another to add to that list.

There had always been blood on my hands.

And as she dropped the rose, I saw that she had pricked her finger on one of the thorns, before she could stop it as the rose fell and pressed against the snow blanketed ground, so did a drop of her blood.

Perfectly, tragically beautifully, the drop of blood fell on the rose so white, so intentionally pure from any sort of colour, especially red, and painted it that rouge she had so wanted to avoid.

The blood followed her everywhere, painting itself on the grave, that had severed all ties.

Between Alara and I.