Love opened a mortal wound. In agony, I worked the blade to make it deeper. Please, I begged, let death come quick.
━━ Love Opened a Mortal Wound, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
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For Pippa, fear is the appendix of the mind.
It is to be cut out at the first sign of irritation, to be removed the moment it begins to hold you back from truly experiencing life to its' fullest extent. As a young girl, she took a scalpel to the part of her that quivered and flinched at the possibility of monsters hiding in her closet when she realized her parents with their busy, busy lives were never going to be there to scare them off for her. Split her skin open and ripped out the part of her that cried on towering slides and monkey bars at the park, didn't make a sound when she scrapped her knee down to the bone and bled all over that very same playground.
Philippa Franklin, at such a tender age, forced herself to be the opposite of a whimpering child stereotype and with a billionaire for a daddy and a doctor for a mommy, what did she really have to be scared of anyway? Her palace for a home in an Arizona suburb and the imaginary ghosts that haunt its halls? The parents who provide her with anything and everything she could ever need, want, desire but raise their voices at her sometimes and stare at her with eyes of disapproval no matter what she does? With the fear clipped out of her, Pippa is a fledgling bird learning to fly for the first time but she is free.
She is thirteen years old when the castle comes crumbling down and she plummets to the earth on shriveled wings.
The worst day of her life begins with the sound of shattering glass. Philippa remembers the sound in crystal clarity, remembers that she was in the study with her younger brother Quentin reluctantly playing hide and seek, remembers that her parents and older brother weren't in the country when the men covered head-to-toe in black stormed into their home, tied up and threatened the house help with guns pointed at their temporals, and absconded from the castle with jewelry, riches, and two children in their grasp. She remembers the bone-chilling, blood-curdling fear that enveloped her mind, body, and soul for the next ten days she and Quinn spent in a cobblestone, metal-encased cell. Fear her parents wouldn't pay the ransom money their kidnappers wanted, fear her fingers would fall off due to the rapidly-encroaching hypothermia, fear that despite her best efforts, Quentin would die from the torture inflicted upon his small frame.
