tiny & vicious || h.s ✔️

~28~

Song: Something's Gotta Give by Camila Cabello

Aria's POV

Maya Angelou once said, "We may encounter many defeats, but we must never be defeated"

In this moment...I felt defeated. I felt as defeated as a brown mouse in a room full of cats. I was beaten down and I didn't know when I would ever get back up.

It was just one of those moments.

You know those moments when you literally felt your heartbreak. You hear the crack. You hear the crickets silence and the birds stop singing because your pain is enough to crush every breathing thing for miles. You feel the shards of glass piercing your lungs until it takes every bit of your strength to inhale again. You take in a breath and suddenly it feels like you might as well be taking your last. That was how I felt in this moment. The moment I never thought I would ever be in.

Tension intoxicated the setting. Hurt rolled off me in waves. My feet stumbled back as I listened to my daughter's words. No. She was lying. She had to be.

My heartbeat slowed, and my legs threatened to fall. My head drooped to the floor. She was lying. Memories upon memories of Jordyn and I flowed through my brain. Our laughter, our pain, our tears. The beauty of our sisterhood. It was the best thing I had ever experience and there was nothing that could take it away from me. But the light I had seen was instantly trampled with darkness.

The moment I peered into my best friend's eyes. I felt the heartbreak. I felt the pain. I felt a wave of emotions crash into me at once. A face I had loved to see every day. A face always full of happiness and bliss. Today, I saw the blankness of it. I saw the bleak emotion in her eyes and the darkness in her soul. Without a hint of remorse or a drop of pain, she stared at me.

Nothing.

"She took me from you, Mama. She put me in a car with these big men and taunted me with her mean laughs. She dragged her nails down my cheek and pointed a gun at me."

The last words took a blow at me. Suddenly, a punch was landed to my stomach and I doubled over in pain. I looked around for the attacker but realised that there wasn't one. The inside turmoil of my soul was the attacker and I had fallen prey to its advances.

She pointed a gun at her. At my daughter. How was that even possible?

"She tried to kill me, Mama, I swear. I had to fight her and crash the car so I could escape but she followed me down here and tried to kill me. She was going to kill me, Mama." I heard the soft sobs in my baby's voice. Her voice broke, tears spilling out of her eyes. It was all true. It was only then that I noticed the gash of blood on my baby's face and the dried blood beneath my sister's fingernails. In a different scenario, the sight of my daughter's blood would have sent me into a bloodthirsty frenzy but in this moment, the sight of my best friend's betrayal almost brought me to my knees.

My heart heaved with every word. As my daughter cried, I watched Jordyn. I watched her emotionless state change into fear. Fear of what I would do to her once the truth was out. But to be honest, I didn't know what to do. Nothing in me worked anymore. I felt broken and used. Like a caged bird, stripped of its feathers.

I couldn't bring myself to say her name. Instead, I lifted my gun, the emotion shining brightly in my eyes. I saw her body tremble with fear and her eyes brew a dangerous storm. She was scared. Scared of me. I scoffed. Never in my life had I ever seen her afraid. She stared murderers in the eye without an inch of fear. She scaled mountainous buildings and stood defenceless in a storm of bullets without fear. But now in her last moments, she peered at me with the most fear in the world. The most fear I had ever seen. Her best friend. Her sister. I was her only fear. Me. The woman who gave her the world. I couldn't believe it.