A Designer Dress From Heaven and Your Dirty Wedding Ring

xviii. i'm free darlin' (i revenge, i revenge)

this chapter contains warnings for the following: car accident, vomiting, blood, graphic death, murder, guns, canon-typical violence (heavy on the violence), ptsd, strangulation, toxic relationships, threats of sexual violence (two sentences from makarov), dysfunctional family dynamics, and mentions of child abuse/manipulation

Your world is engulfed in fire and blood.

Surrounded by the debris of shattered glass and crushed metal, pain wracks your tender body. Lungs flooded with the sharp sting of smoke, you choke and gasp into the bed of broken glass you lay on.

Where are the others?

Are they okay?

Are you okay?

You can still feel everything, the pain is evidence of that, and nothing seems to be broken aside from the car. You brace yourself for the pain and command your limbs to move. The scrape of your arms against the shards of glass beneath you is grating, but you clench your teeth and bare it to army crawl out of the car's mechanical corpse.

A few of the larger shards catch on the fabric of your dress, threatening to tear at the already thin flesh of your freshly healed bullet wound.

Still, you make it out, collapsing onto the manicured lawn of the Adler Estate with a violent dry heave.

Breathe in, breathe out.

You have to make it through this.

You push yourself back to sit on your heels, taking deep breaths to soothe the oncoming nausea and gather your surroundings.

It's hard to see, the air so thick with smoke that anything beyond the car is nothing more than a thick outline. The car itself is totaled, lying upside down behind you in a crushed heap with the windows blown out. Blood stains the upholstery, but you don't know if it's yours or someone else's.

You don't see anyone else, but you can hear the distant echo of shouts layered over the rapid pops of gunshots.

A loud boom vibrates over you, a force of heat slamming into your body and nearly knocking you over. When you right yourself, you see the vibrant orange of a roaring fire billowing from a truck that's smashed its way into the front of the estate.

The doors open, one man collapsing out of the passenger side already dead, while the other launches himself from the driver's seat consumed in a blaze that he trails across your mother's flower garden.

Get to the house, you tell yourself. This ends today.

You force yourself to your feet, pushing the pain to the back of your mind as you kick off your one remaining shoe.

You keep low, using the smoke as cover as you cross the yard to the front of the estate.

The screams are louder now as you slide through the collapsing door and slink into the foyer, but it's not the shouting that has your heart plummeting into your stomach.

The foyer is destroyed. Even through the thin haze of smoke, you can see the broken furniture, the ravaged plants, torn paintings, bullet-filled walls, and blood-stained tile. Bodies are spread across the floor and toppled over furniture, lying face down in pools of their own blood.

A white, hot rage burns through you, more powerful than the inferno that threatens to consume the estate.

They've turned your home into a warzone.