I jumped on my feet and I snapped my eyes open when I rolled out of the bed with a loud bang. I rubbed the sensitive spot with a groan. It was going to leave a big ass bruise. Or to mention the bad headache that was severely killing my buzz. I was surprised when I found out it was almost eleven. I always considered myself to be a morning person - waking at eight for the most time. Sleeping in was Noah's thing.
The outside of my room was loud, which made my head hurt more. There were stomping footsteps around the hallway. My brows furrowed.
Did something happen?
I walked to the door and pulled it inches open so I could put only my head out. Guards and doctors were running around, shouting.
Huh?
I went out into the hallway and halted when I saw the stained window glass at the end of the hallway was shattered. There were broken glasses scattered over the floor. The hole looked human-sized. Blood dripped from the cracked still intact, of what was left of the glass wall.
Did someone jump? Or throw themself through the glass?
My eyes widened.
Ariana!
She was suicidal and we sent the guards away last night. We must have fallen asleep. Leaving our sister who wanted to die all alone.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
What if she was dead? What if my little sister died last night?
No. I shook my head. Calm the fuck down, I told myself before I could get ahead of myself.
I exhaled when I saw Noah speaking to one of the guards in the middle of the hallway. I didn't hesitate to push myself forward into a sprint to get to him.
"Noah!" I called out, reaching out to take the hem of the shirt in my balled-up fists. "What the fuck happened?"
Noah turned to the guard to dismiss him before shifting his attention to me completely.
"Did Ariana jump?" My words came out as panicked gasps. "Is she okay?"
He grabbed my shoulder and dug his fingers into it until I winced. The sudden slight pain shut me up and made me focus on Noah as he dragged me into one of the guest rooms.
"Calm down," Noah said sternly as he let me go when the door was shut. "Breathe and I'll explain."
I nodded frantically as I inhaled and exhaled. I tried to halt the panicked thoughts that kept slamming into my brain. When I've calm down, I noticed Noah's expression and it gave me shivers. He was seething and his hands curled into fists and uncurled in a cycle as if he was struggling to not punch the wall.
He was wrathful.
"I'm calm. Explain." I said curtly.
"Someone pushed Uncle this early morning." He said tightly. "One of the guards saw him fall through the glass from outside while patrolling."
"What?" I gasped, even though I visibly relaxed that it wasn't Ariana. "Is he alive?"
"Yes but I don't know if it's for long. He's in a coma at the hospital, now. Dante and the other are there right now."
"Jesus," I said. "Who did it?"
He shook his head. "We don't know yet."
"Any clues?" I asked. "And why didn't you wake me up?"
"Because I wanted you to sleep the drug away." I didn't miss how he skipped over the 'any clues' question.
"What?!" I stumbled back a step. "I don't fucking take any drugs!"
"Jesus, you're slow." Noah shook his head. "What was the last thing you remembered last night?"
"I-" I started to explain before I realized I didn't remember anything after drinking the tea. I looked at Noah from the carpet with wide eyes. "The kitchen. I fell asleep...I think."
Noah nodded solemnly. "Exactly. How did you end up in your bed?"
"I don't know...?"
"We were drugged and someone carried us up to our beds."
I shuddered at the thought of someone watching me sleep and carrying me while I was entirely defenseless. What confused me greatly was that they could have easily kidnapped us or harmed us. Why drug us and just left us alone?
"How nice of them." He added sarcastically, shaking his head.
"Why did you wake up before me?" I questioned curtly.
"You drank the entire cup of tea. I drank only half of it. Ariana only took a few sips, but her weight took her out."
"Ariana was drugged, too?!"
Noah gave me a pointed look. "She was with us in the kitchen or can't you recall that?"
I exhaled, shaking my head. "This is getting too much," I said, pinching my nose.
I heard Noah taking a sharp intake of breath. I lifted my head slowly to find his pained expression.
"What is it?" I snapped. "Tell me."
"If it's too much-"
"No! I want to know." I was getting increasingly frustrated. "Did she wake up?"
"She did." He said. "Before us."
"Elaborate!" I snapped in annoyance at his prolonging.
"She woke up around 3 or 4 in the morning. The cameras caught her wandering into the kitchen-"
"Let me see it," I asked, putting my palm out.
"Apollo, I don't think-"
"She's my sister, too! I want to see what happened for myself!"
Noah stared at me in silence before finally nodding slowly and pulling out his phone.
"This is... hard to watch." He warned.
"I can handle it." I snapped as I snatched the phone in my hands. On the screen, there was a recording of the empty kitchen. I pressed play.
It fast forward until a figure, which I instantly realized was Ariana, came into the kitchen. Her cheeks were tear-stained and red-rimmed. Her hair was dripping wet. She looked horrible and that's not the worst of it. She was bleeding through her light baby blue hoodie and her leggings. She created bloodily footprints behind her as she walked forward - sometimes smearing them as she slid her feet across the floor.
I looked up at Noah with horror and silent question. "She cut herself in various areas of her body with broken glasses from the shattered mirror. She tore the toilet lid off and smashed the mirror with it beforehand."
I inhaled and held the oxygen in. I returned my head down to the screen. Ariana was turning all of the ten stoves to the highest gas level. She stumbled slightly, with a visible limp, to the cabinet. She opened them and took the pots out. One by one, she grabbed them and tossed them on the floor with a clang. When she reached the tenth pot, she brought one to the sink. She filled the pot with water and settled it on one of the stoves. She repeated it with each pot until all ten stoves had a big pot placed on them.
She then backed away and she stood there, frozen. The camera could only show the side of her face and most of her back. She stared and stared at the stoves in silence. Unmoving. Not even a muscle twitched. The recording fast-forwards thirty minutes later. The pots were overflowing with bubbles from the boiling water. My stomach dropped, praying it wasn't going the way I was suspected of.
Suddenly, without a warning, she stepped forward. Her hand balled the hems of her hoodie and squirmed out of it to reveal a black sports bra. My breath hitched at the various scars on each inch of her skin. The front of her body is titled towards the camera. I saw the carved words across her stomach.
KODIAK PROPERTY
"Stop!" She suddenly screamed, whipping her head around to look at something or someone.
"Who is she talking to?" I muttered, seeing nobody there but air from where Ariana was staring at.
"Wait for it." That was all Noah said.
"I have to do it. This way, I have the control!" She began to sob. "I am the one in control of my pain, not them!"
She went silent as if she was listening to something before speaking up again.
"Just go, Eleanor." She snapped before turning back to curl her hands around the handles of a pot and bringing it up above her stomach.
She tipped the pot and poured the boiling water on it - scalding most of her stomach. It must be painful but she didn't react to it. As if she was detached from reality. Again and again, she repeated this with the remaining nine pots. Until all left of her stomach and spots of her legs where some of the water dropped on was nothing but charred skin and blisters on my sorellina's skin.
The carved words weren't visible anymore - the tissues were removed from the burn.
I exhaled as I ripped my eyes away from the phone. "Oh, god," I whispered as tears rolled across my now red-rimmed eyes. "She snapped. She completely snapped."
Eleanor...
"Eleanor isn't even real, is she?" I asked, casting my focus on the carpet underneath me. Sometime during the video, I fell to my knees. So I was on the floor and wiping away the endless tears coming out.
"No, she isn't. I think she's hallucinating." Noah replied and my heart stopped. Jesus.
"Apollo," Noah said. I looked at him and I didn't like what I saw in his expression. "It's not over, yet. But you don't have to continue to watch if you don't feel like you can handle it."
Not over...?
"No." I snarled. "I can handle it."
I looked back at the video. I didn't want to see it yet I needed to know what exactly happened. If she had to suffer, then I would at least be there.
I met the sight of Ariana on the screen destroying the kitchen. Throwing things around and quickly swept the stuff off to crash on the floor inside the cabinet and the glass plates broke. I winced as she walked on the scattered broken glasses but it didn't phase her in any way at all. No flinch. No pained look. No sound.
The kitchen was a mess by the time she suddenly halted as she was about to push off more stuff with a sweep of hand from another shelf. She retracted her hand and then reached out again. She pulled out something in her hand. I couldn't see her from the screen, only her behind.
She turned and I froze at the thing in her hand. A matchbox Ares put away for his cigarettes to hide from Ace because he never enters the kitchen.
What was she doing?
"Was she trying to burn the house down?" I questioned without looking away from the screen and received no reply from Noah. He just sat looking at me carefully in silence.
She titled her head to something right beneath the camera and walked towards it. Up close, I saw her eye was bloodshot and they looked like they were ready to budge out. Her nose was red and her normal neat blonde hair was a messy nest. Her eyes were foggy as if she was seeing yet wasn't there, there. The side of her face had blood, smeared slightly - shaped as a fingerprint.
She looked crazed. Out of her mind.
She took something from under the camera and when she backed away with a bottle of whiskey in a hand. Another hand held the box of matches.
Oh god, she was trying to burn the mansion or kitchen down.
She halted by the island table and stared at it. She put aside the matches on it. When she turned the bottle cap off and lifted it, I expected her to dump it over the kitchen. But she did the thing I didn't predict.
She poured it over on herself.
I winced again. Her burn and cuts must hurt but yet again she gave no signs of pain. Still silent as a ghost. When the bottle was empty, she tossed it on the floor. She took the box of matches and open it. With a quick swipe of the hand, a spark of fire appeared in the match.
She didn't hesitate to pull it closer to her chest. Suddenly, a few guards ran into the kitchen and grabbed Ariana, making her drop the match. Lucky, the match didn't fall on the pool of whiskey but next to it. The fire sparked out.
She went limp in the guard's arms as he lifted her into his arms and brought her out of the kitchen, out of the screen. The guards must have heard the noise from the kitchen and came in to find Ariana like that.
The video finished and I looked up at Noah with complete horror. I was feeling several emotions at the same time.
"What the fuck was she trying to do?" I asked, referring to the fire part.
"She tried to set herself on fire."
My stomach recoiled and I gripped it painfully as my dinner from last night made a reappearance. Noah came up behind my bent-over back to rub it smoothly.
"I shouldn't have let you watch that," Noah murmured.
"Stop that," I said as I dry heaved at the taste of vomit in my mouth. "Why now? She was getting better and she just-" I cut myself off, shaking my head in denial. She was so happy yesterday. She talked a lot. She laughed and smiled. I saw her eyes sparkle with life for the first time in ten years.
"Something triggered her," Noah said. "We're trying to figure out what was it. The doctor is checking on her right now."
"The one who drugged us did something to her..." I concluded, clenching my hands into fists.
Noah nodded solemnly. "Exactly."
"I'm going to assume that the person pushed Uncle, too?"
Noah nodded again. "That's what I think, too."
What truly happened on this night of chaos?
"How's Ariana? What did she say? Where is she right now?"
Noah took a deep breath before speaking, causing me to tense. "She's in her room. After the doctors' check-up on her, we're going to airlift her to the hospital. The doctors say she needs to be monitored closely for a while."
I nodded to confirm I got it. "How is she," I repeated.
Noah swallowed visibly. "She withdrew into the similar state we found her in."
"What? What do you mean by that?" I shook my head, out of denial.
"She's unresponsive just like in the beginning. But she's going to be fine. The psychiatrist who observed her said she should snap out of it in days. If it lasts weeks, that's when we should worry."
"But her mental state is what I'm worried about," Noah added so quietly that I almost didn't hear him.
I didn't reply. Ariana didn't deserve this. She wasn't supposed to be this way. There should be nothing that triggers her. She's supposed to be a spoiled princess and the most loved and happiest girl in the entire world.
That was what we all had intended before Cata took her and ended up in our worst enemies' clutches.
We heard two polite knocks on the door and Noah sighed, standing up. "Stay here." He ordered me before going to open the door. I strained my ears to eavesdrop. I heard a feminine voice speak.
"The Don and your father have arrived earlier, sir. Your brothers, including Alex, are also with them."
I know this chapter is quite shocking and maybe a bit confusing but the pieces will be put together in due time.
Who do you think pushed the uncle off through the glass wall?
So the father and the others finally returned!
At an unfortunate time, though.