Reborn To Change My Fate-Chapter 82 - Eighty Two
In her manor, Senna stood by the window of her room,staring down at the street, thinking.
Her maid, Esme, stood silently by the door, her face a careful neutral expression.
"His Grace’s attitude towards Marissa is noticeably different from before," Senna said, her voice a low, cold monotone. She was not speaking to Esme; she was thinking aloud. "He didn’t even pay me a visit to know how I was doing." She paused, looking down at the servants doing their jobs. "Last night, in that room... he was not just protecting himself. He was also protecting her. The way he looked at her was different. He has never looked at me like that before."
She remembered the look on his face, his fury, his gentleness and and expression she couldn’t quite name. She remembered the way Marissa had so easily, so naturally, taken control of the entire, terrifying situation.
"She is just taking advantage of her closeness to him," Senna continued, her fingers tracing a pattern on the cold window glass. "She is a provincial, unrefined girl playing at being a duchess. But she is in the house. She is at his side. She has his son calling her ’Mother’."
Her hand clenched into a tight, white-knuckled fist. "If I don’t stir the pot, if I don’t find a way inside that estate, entering the Thompson family will not be so easy. I will always be the ’mistress’ he keeps in a pretty box on the outside and sooner or later he would cast me aside."
She turned from the window, her eyes, usually so soft and amber, now hard and cold with a new, dangerous resolve.
"Esme. Close the curtains. All of them. And lock the door. No one is to disturb me. Wait outside for me until I call you."
"Yes, my lady," the maid replied, her voice a quiet, unquestioning murmur.
Esme moved silently, drawing the heavy, velvet drapes, plunging the room into a deep, heavy, artificial twilight before leaving. The only light now came from a single, flickering candle Senna lit on a small table.
Hearing the click from the door, Senna went to her desk. From a hidden drawer, she pulled out a stick of dark, red chalk. She then knelt on the floor and began to draw. Her movements were sure. She drew a complex, angular shape on the floor, a five-pointed star, but its lines were broken, jagged, and turned inward, a sigil of chaos and destruction.
When she was finished, she sat in the very center of the shape, crossing her legs. She closed her eyes.
"By the loss I have endured, by the love I am denied," she chanted, her voice a low, hypnotic hum that seemed to make the candle flame gutter and dance. "By the shadow in the house, and the woman on the throne."
She was calling on a power that was not of this world, a dark, old magic from the very region she so vehemently denied being from. A practice that was declared forbidden.
"Let this building, my cage of gold, now break and burn and turn to cold. Let the fire be the key, to bring my Duke back home to me."
Her chant finished, she opened her eyes. They seemed to glitter in the dim light. She lifted her left hand, her fingers steady, and, with a wince of sharp, deliberate pain, she bit down, hard, on the tip of her index finger.
A single, bright, dark-red drop of blood welled up.
She held her finger over the exact center of the red chalk drawing. "One," she whispered, as the first drop fell. "Two." A second drop. "Three." A third. "Four." A fourth. She squeezed her finger, her face a mask of intense concentration. "Five."
The fifth drop of her own blood hit the floor.
For a long, silent moment, nothing happened. The candle flickered. The room was still. Then, the flame on the candle went off , plunging the room into absolute darkness. In some seconds, the chalk lines on the floor began to glow.
It started as a faint, dull, reddish-brown light, like a dying ember. Then, it brightened, the lines flaring with a hot, angry, crimson light. A wisp of black, acrid smoke, smelling of sulfur and burning wool, rose from the center of the sigil.
Senna stood up, stepping carefully out of the glowing, smoking shape.
WHOOSH.
It was not a small fire. It did not start in one corner. The entire room, as if doused in oil, erupted at once. The curtains, the bed, the velvet chairs, the tapestries on the walls—they all burst into a column of hungry, orange-red flame. The heat was so intense it was like a blow, pushing her back.
She knocked on the door. "Let’s go, Esme," She said, her voice perfectly calm, her face illuminated by the inferno she had just created. She did not even bother to grab a cloak.
Esme, who had been standing by the door, her face pale but her expression betraying no fear, bowed. "Yes, my lady."
She opened the door, and the two women walked calmly out of the room, Senna not even bothering to close the door behind them. They walked down the staircase, their steps unhurried, as the first, distant, muffled screams of "Fire! Fire!" began from the floors below. Servants were trying to put the fire out but no success. Everyone started running for their lives.
Senna and Esme were outside, across the street, hidden in the mouth of an alley, when the first, great, black plume of smoke punched through the roof. Her home was being consumed. She watched it burn, her face a serene, beautiful, and terrible mask in the flickering, orange light.
"In the evening," she said, her voice a soft, victorious purr, "when the fire is finally out, send some of the men. The ones who know how to talk, how to gossip. I want them to watch the show at the Thompson estate gate."
"Yes, my lady," Esme replied.
