I knew where exactly she would be.
And the thought of knowing that Alison had spent time to think about me was enough to send shivers down the back of my neck to my toes.
I looked at the abandoned house and breathed.
“What do I have to do to you until you realise that you’re not wanted. That there is no reason for you to be here Alice? Go kill yourself Alice. You want an invitation to make it official, there it is.”
The words my mother had just spoken carved me.
I braced for the hit of the saucepan that came hurdling at me and whimpered as the boiling hot contents spilled over my arms and legs.
Father watched from the corner, nodding in agreement.
I shivered at the memories.
No one should be treated like that.
No one.
But even that disappears when you spent years in a house by yourself. You miss even the memories that killed you inside. You craved for that type of emotion again. Even if it was the worst type of emotion.
I had wanted all that abuse back so much.
It was better than having nothing at all.
That was the worst.
Just knowing that.
Just feeling those things.
I stepped over the threshold of the house and moved inside. I climbed the stairs one at a time. The smell of the house had staled over the years until it smelt like rotting wood and loneliness and a dash of dead parents.
Splendid.
But truly, none of that mattered anymore.
I was finally going to meet Alison.
Alison Dilarentis.
And as I stepped over the last step on the stairs I knew where she would be.
Not my room.
My room wasn’t enough.
But my parents.
I breathed.
God, I was so proud of her.
She knew just how to torment someone.
I couldn’t help the grin that crept onto my face as I moved to my parents room and opened the door.
My eyes locked on her form immediately as a hurricane of desperate emotions plagued me. I latched onto anything I could find.
She was still as beautiful as always.
She faced away from me. Her golden blonde hair fell down her back in perfectly curled waves and framed her heart shaped face. Her figure was slender and graceful and the confident stance she always had never wavered.
“I hope you know you are more of annoyance than anything, Alice,” Alison said, her silky voice drawled. She twirled a blade skilfully in her hands and I spotted several others in her back pocket.
She turned around.
Her eyes.
Her eyes had the ability to be cold and calculating and beautiful and vibrant at the same time and I just couldn’t stop looking.
Her eyes were the sea.
The type of sea that drowns people and holds magnificent beings and consumes ships and is everything that I love.
My eyes flew wildly over her. I couldn’t get enough of her. I absorbed every freckle and twitch desperately and I didn’t realise that my heart was galloping inside my chest until my eyes casually flew beside her to the boy who was tied to a wooden beam beside her.
Gabriel Holbrook.
My heart stopped.
Holbrook was staring at me wildly like he was frightened for my life. His mouth was taped down and his hands tied behind him and around the wooden beam that jutted out from the ceiling.
I stared at him.
Alison must’ve captured him from the school.
His eyes catch my bruises and the blood crusted in my hair and his eyes turn into a raging storm.
“I hope you understand,” Alison said, watching the interaction between Holbrook and I. “I didn’t think this encounter would be as interesting without everyone’s favourite hero. Gabriel Holbrook.”
My eyes left Holbrook and began to automatically and involuntarily be consumed by Alison’s. I watched the way she moved and breathed and the whole notion of Holbrook being present left my consciousness.
Her expression was a relaxed sort of rigid. She looked at me like getting rid of people was a day-to-day activity. Like she honestly had better things to do. Like I was a nuisance.
Alison spots the gun in my pockets but ignores it. She knows that I won’t use it. I won’t kill her.
But I was too consumed by her enough that sweat dripped of my hand and my heart raced in front of my mind and I desperately wanted to reach out and touch her to see if she was real.
My mind was blooming with non-existent flowers and passion and complete and utter adoration.
“God, you are perfect.” Those words left my mouth.
Alison glared at me as I began to grin happily like a happy little girl who was entirely mesmerised with a floating balloon.
“Don’t you see,” I whisper, my voice beaming. I scanned her over, once, twice and forever. “You’re perfect Alison. Flawless. Impeccable. A prodigy. You are everything I have ever wanted to be and I was the one to create you. It makes me so proud. It makes me so proud that I, Alice Fiend, could create something perfect like you.”
I breathed a heavy wondrous and dreamy sigh as my eyes travelled her face.
There was no difference.
The girl I had taught years ago was the exact same as today. Only better. Only developed into a certain type of perfection.
I had done this.
I had made her.
“You did everything right,” I whisper. “When I saw you on the first day of school. I saw something in you. I saw something different to when I look at everyone else. I just didn’t know it would be this. That you would be everything that I wanted to be. I am glad to have been pushed into a fire by you. And guess what? Cece is dead. Your arch enemy is dead. You know what we could be once again? Everything. God Alison, I couldn’t love you anymore. You are everything.”
I am completely mesmerised by the being that is Alison Dilaurentis.
Alison glares at me and says, “Oh honey, you didn’t even know me when you knew me. But honestly, this is annoying.” Alison turns towards Holbrook and says, “Oh, Officer Holbrook, I knew Alice was bad but not this bad.”
Alison laughs and looks back at me fiercely, “Oh Alice, I don’t think you get it. Do you? The past we had together does not exist anymore. You do not exist to me anymore. You are an inconvenience. Your obsession is inconvenient. ”
I laugh hysterically and keep shaking my head side to side while I smile and giggle at the floor. I’ve lost control. “No,” I say, “I don’t think you get it. What we have is irreplaceable. That’s why I searched forever to find you. That’s why I am here now.”
“You are here now, because you don’t exist without me. You are nothing Alice,” Alison says.
A sharp pang digs into my chest and I lose control over and over again.
Then Alison speaks.
“I want you to get this straight. You are nuisance to me, nothing more. Your obsession I could ignore, but your pressing things now and that is the only reason I ever acknowledged you again here today. I was content on never seeing you again and god, did that make me so happy. But your obviously relentless and I know you and I know the path you would take to find me. What I didn’t predict was the fact that Holbrook and your mental patient would be in on it to. Not even the death of your family stopped you. I didn’t know I was doing you a service at that time. If I had known they abused you I would’ve kept them very much alive and out of the floorboards,” She says. “I’m going to bury you, Alice.”
She says it like nothing.
Alison continues, “The problem with you Alice is that you remain the same. Same words and same actions. Me? Well I change to my environment. I am evolution walking.”
I falter, my head clearing for just a moment. Alison’s words carve my being and my mood turns slightly irritated.
Alison does the one thing that I least expect.
She swivels her self behind Holbrook, facing me, and puts a knife against his throat.
I falter.
Fierceness coats my veins as the knife closes around Holbrook’s throat as a bead of blood forms and slithers down his throat.
Alison is watching me slowly.
My whole being has fallen into the state of being rigid and my mind is telling me to stay put while my heart shoves me into a wall enough to remind me that the boy who is standing as a future victim to that knife is Gabriel Holbrook.
I feel as if I am choking.
A surge of panic and realisation rises in my mind and I am shocked. I am completely and utterly shocked because I managed to block out Gabe when he wasn’t in danger and now he was everything but.
And it scared me.
Because now it was on a whole different level.
I guess that is why my voice slips.
“Touch him further, and I will cut your throat out,” I say. The words are concrete, unmoving and death defying. They are a brewing storm, poison and the sound of unwanted goodbyes and I know that I can’t take them back now because for some odd reason I don’t want to take them back.
I must love him a lot then.
I must love him a lot to say that to Alison.
Alison looks surprised for the first time.
My heart speeds up.
I want to pocket that emotion.
“I’m sorry to say Alice, but I find that hard to believe. You wouldn’t dare mark your prodigious project,” Alison drawled, her face illuminated with a wicked smile. “But I do have a question though. Can you please shed some light on why Gabriel, of all people, avoided the wrath was once you and I? Then again he left you, betrayed you and you still protect him. What does he have? I avoided your games because I played you the same. I made you feel the way you made everyone else feel before you killed them. But Holbrook did none of that, but he avoided you the same. That ‘s the only thing that I haven’t been able to figure out about you, Alice. What does Gabriel Holbrook have that makes him immune and invincible to the likes of us as we were back then?”
I am trembling in my behind.
“Words mean nothing to him,” I say weakly. I can’t look Holbrook in the eye. I can’t look at him after I told Alison that all I wanted was she and I back together even though I had lost control of everything around me and I know that I still wanted to him.
But I will defend him.
I’ll defend him the way I defended Wesley to Ezra.
“What?” She spits out, disgusted.
“My only weapon, words, are the one thing that means nothing to him,” I say slowly, drawing out every word as I start shaking.
And my eyes meet Gabe’s for a flash of a second. But that flash of a second is enough to see there is no fear anymore. Only blooming love, respect and faith. His iris is a pool of loving concern directed only towards me and all they hold is pure fathomless hope.
He thinks I can do anything.
He thinks I see past the façade that is Alison.
And I know, in that moment, that whatever I choose, he will love me anyway. We have come too far for it to be anything else.
Alison watches us slowly and I think I know what she is thinking.
What is the use of taping Holbrook’s mouth shut when Alice and Holbrook can still communicate?
I don’t know Alison.
“We’ll always be able to sense each other,” I answer with my eyes as they meet Alison’s. No word is uttered.
She tilts her head, exaggerates a sigh and then smashes her lips against Holbrook’s.
I am too stunned to do anything.
Gabe struggles around like a snake, but it’s no use when he’s tied like that. He’s only hurting himself.
I wince.
Alison takes that as encouragement. She drags her lips along his jaw and into the dip of his neck. Then she moves against him and scoops her head into his neck like a perfect puzzle piece.
Holbrook jerks away by an inch, but is restricted for the rest by the ropes that bind him.
His eyes flash wildly onto my stoic expression and his eyes plead something that I can’t seem to pin point.
“Don’t struggle,” Alison whispers into his neck. “Just pretend like your kissing Alice. It shouldn’t be hard considering we are the same person. Heartless, manipulative and fake. You still haven’t realised that yet have you?”
Holbrook’s eyes break into a storm. One that contains tornadoes that overturn houses and kidnap children and leave the present of “hopeless” to all those that have managed to stay alive.
Alison laughs at Holbrook’s expression, clearly entertained, but she is clearly unimpressed by mine. Alison is a plate of arrogance with a dash of amusement now. Unlike before when all she did was listen to my lessons and play them out.
She had changed.
Something drops in my heart. Like a seed of doubt.
Alison grins a manipulative smile and kisses Holbrook again, this time dragging it out as long as possible and melting into it. She pulls back from the livid Hobrook and says, “ I can see why Alice keeps you. You are not too bad to play with.”
A splash of jealousy gurgles in my heart and I stumble back, heaving. I am shoved out of my stoic state and Alison grins. She has finally got a reaction out of me.
Holbrook says something sharp but it is muffled against the tape on his mouth.
She turns back to Holbrook and drags the palm of her hands down the length of him. Then with a quick swish of her blade, Holbrook’s shirt falls away revealing his sculptured torso and lean but mean muscles.
I go rigid as Alison trails her mouth along his shoulder and further and Holbrook looks so unbelievable terrified at what is happening.
She reaches toward his belt but she falters when she hears something.
When she hears my voice whisper, “Stop.”
A broken “Stop.”
And I am entirely torn into two pieces.
And I don’t realise it is fury that I have until I blindly walk up to Alison and slap her across the face. The slap rings out through the building and Alison stares at me in complete shock.
She didn’t think I could do that.
I didn’t even think I could do that.
Her face contorts into stormy rage and she slashes the blade across Holbrook’s torso and I scream. Before I know what I am doing I lunge at her and she grabs me mid air, and flings me across the room until the back of my head slaps against the wooden walls and I slide down them to the floor.
Stars dance across my eyes and I fling myself away just as a knife flings itself into the place my head would’ve been.
I dive behind the bed.
Alison laughs hysterically, “I never thought you as a runner Alice. Going to leave your big boy toy behind? That’s alright, he has a new play to anyway.”
And all of a sudden my mind erupts in a war.