CHAPTER 2 — ASHES AND CROSSES
677 Words
The Night She Died. The Day She Was Reborn.
The storm didn’t come with thunder.
It came with footsteps.
Soft. Fast. Wrong.
The wind outside the manor had been gentle that night. A warm evening. Almost peaceful. The scent of jasmine had clung to the balcony curtains. In the dining hall, the crystal glasses still held unfinished wine. Her mother had laughed once. Her father had leaned close to whisper something that made her cheeks pink.
They had been human in that moment.
And Cirella—just five years old—had been curled on the marble floor, tracing her name into the fog on a glass door.
She wore white.
Tiny bare feet.
A silver cross around her neck, the chain too long for her body.
She had looked up just in time to see her father rise from his seat—slowly, curiously, like a man listening for a ghost.
Then came the first sound.
Click.
Not loud. But wrong.
Her father knew it.
She saw it in his face—the shift. The way joy vanished like a dream waking into nightmare.
⸻
He moved fast.
“Adele, take her. Now.”
His voice was no longer soft.
Her mother stood in heels and elegance and fear. Her hand reached for Cirella. “Baby, come. Come to me—”
Then came the second sound.
Bang.
Her mother jerked.
Her legs folded.
Blood bloomed across her dress like a rose in hell.
The sound shattered the air.
The glass.
The world.
Cirella didn’t scream.
She just watched her mother fall. One hand still outstretched. The other clutching at her chest, eyes wide with confusion—as if wondering why death had chosen her so suddenly.
Her cross clattered on the floor beside her.
⸻
Her father pulled the gun from his waist with shaking hands.
Not because he was afraid to fight—but because he knew it was too late.
Men in black entered from both sides.
Faces she knew.
Faces she had seen kiss her mother’s hand. Sit at their table. Bring her presents.
Now they pointed guns at her father and didn’t blink.
Her father fired first.
One man fell.
Two others stumbled.
Then the bullets came back—fast, sharp, endless.
Cirella didn’t close her eyes.
She didn’t cry.
She simply crawled to the corner—behind the piano—curled into her body, held her cross, and listened.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
Glass breaking.
A table overturned.
Her father’s voice one last time—“Run, baby. Run—”
Then silence.
Real silence.
The kind that steals air from a room.
⸻
She waited.
Maybe a minute.
Maybe an hour.
Then came another sound.
Soft shoes. Slow steps. Breathing.
Not a man.
Not a killer.
Someone else.
She looked up.
And saw eyes.
Not cruel. Not kind. Just still.
Eyes like winter stars. Watching her. Measuring her.
A man stepped into the light—a stranger with snow in his voice.
He didn’t speak.
He didn’t ask if she was okay.
He knelt.
Touched the blood on the marble.
Touched the cross she clutched in her hand.
And then… he bowed.
To her.
A child.
A little girl in white, surrounded by the corpses of her family.
He bowed as if she were already crowned.
Then he said only one thing.
“You are not dead. You are chosen.”
⸻
That night, the house burned.
By morning, no one could find her. No body. No trace.
The Devienne bloodline was declared erased.
But beneath the city, in a cold safehouse lit by candlelight, the girl named Cirella opened her eyes and whispered one word:
“Mama.”
And then—
Never again.
⸻
Cirella Devienne died that night.
What rose in her place…
What lived…
What learned to kill…
Would one day wear heels and silk, carry a gun in one hand, a crown of ghosts in the other—and return to the city that slaughtered her bloodline.
Not to ask for justice.
But to take it.
- Writer
