Chapter Ten

Lucianne closed her room door behind her and locked it before she climbed onto her bed with the book Gabriel had given her. His own personal, annotated copy of Sublime. She brushed her fingers against the cloth, feeling the frays on her skin. It was well-loved, and she couldn't imagine why he had decided to part with it for her sake.

That wasn't the only thing on her mind though. As she was walking back to her tower, she couldn't help but remember one of her favourite poems from the book. Now that she was personally familiar with the author himself, a few connections were made in her mind that she could no longer ignore.

Flipping the book open, she thumbed through the pages before she finally found the poem she was looking for. She used her finger to read the poem another time, fully immersing herself in it along with the new knowledge she had received.

The poem was about a little girl who had a blood disorder. She cried blood daily and her parents were at their wits' end. They had tried everything, from the best doctors, to religion and even to voodoo. But nothing could heal her. They eventually came to the conclusion that it was a curse from Genevieve's bloodline. Slowly, all the servants left the royal family, citing how they did not want to be accursed as well.

Gabriel was also from that bloodline, so he was related to this little girl. The poet spoke of her as if he knew her intimately, and Lucianne wondered if the little girl was his sister.

The little girl's condition, however, wasn't the only tragedy that had befallen the family. Her father was busy at work trying to save a cat from a chandelier, and he had perched himself on the edge of the stairwell bannisters. Alas, he slipped and fell several storeys down, hitting his back at the wrong angle. He was paralysed in the end, though he could somewhat move. But because of the accident, he would have to be taken care of around the clock.

The poet's mother, unfortunately, was not too fond of the idea. She already had her hands full with a little girl who cried blood, and now she was going to have to feed a cripple, bathe him, and even wipe the shit from his ass? It was surely not the way she wanted to spend the rest of her life.

So when a few months passed, there was one night where a loud gunshot was heard. The family rushed into the room and saw the mother with her hand covering her mouth in shock, tears streaming down her face. Her husband had killed himself! He didn't want to live as a vegetable.

But the evidence did not line up. The poet made investigations of his own, and discovered the angle at which his father would have to shoot himself was one which was not accomplishable by his own hand. And as a cripple, there was no way he could lift a rifle by himself. He was obviously murdered by the mother.

Now, the poet loved his sister, and he knew her mother saw her as another burden. She had only gone along caring for all these years because of how much her father loved the little girl. He feared that she would soon try to free herself of this burden as well, so he got to work immediately.

The mother wasn't someone who slept well. How could she? She tried to sleep every night, but she was haunted by nightmares. What she dreamed of, the poet did not need to guess. So he fetched some sleeping pills from the local market and brought them to his mother, asking her to sleep well with them.

But the first few pills he gave her were sugar pills. And hence, she did not sleep well either. He decided on a date where he would end his mother's life and invited the townspeople to a ball. The people were afraid, but they were more curious.

Then one fateful night, he replaced her sugar pills with the correct pills and advised her to try sleeping by the shore, so that the sound of the waves would calm her. The mother listened and went out to the shore under the prying eyes of all ball attendees.

She slept well at last. But as the night wore on and he invited the people back into the ball to dance, he had all the doors closed. The townspeople danced to their hearts' content and nobody noticed that the mother had disappeared.

Until days later, when a piercing cry was heard. They found the body of the mother washed ashore, dead. The police pieced the facts together and came to the conclusion that she had drowned when she slept by the shore and the tide came in, and the eyewitnesses were of no shortage. Sure, she was royalty and was well-educated, but she never did pay much attention to the seas.

Lucianne reread the poem again and again. She always assumed the poet was talking about something fictional, but now she wasn't so sure. It sounded incredibly real with all the information she had now. Would he mind if she asked him about this?

She began to close the book, ready to turn in for sleep, when something fell out from between some pages. It drifted to her sheets, a piece of white paper. She picked it up, and gasped when she turned the paper around.

It was a drawn portrait of her.