Bouquet stained with blood
The rain pounding on the stained glass sounded like the devil beating a drum.
Elvira's white yarn hem was stained with dark red wine, and she clutched the cold marble pillars of the cliff church, her nails grinding against the relief angel wings. Ten meters away, in front of the altar, her fiance slipped an heirloom sapphire ring into her stepsister's slender ring finger.
"The Corin family needs a healthy heir." When Leon said that three days ago, his hand was still gently pressed against her bulging abdomen. Now those hands were around Sophia's waist, and Sophia's flat belly under her pearl veil was as glaring as mockery.
"Pregnant women should not wear belted wedding dresses." Sophia had chuckled in her dressing room half an hour earlier, fingering the ribbon around Elvira's back. "After all...... The dead need no respectability."
There was a sudden knife-like pain in her abdomen, and Elvira stumbled and knocked over the champagne tower. The smell of blood in my throat as the crystal glass crumbled. She looked up and stopped breathing.
In the third row of guests, silver masks reflected the glow of candlesticks. The man's slender fingers held the wine glass gently, the emerald pupils more burning than in the fire five years ago. Leo Winterlow - the lover who was supposed to die in flames, now looks like the evil spirit has returned in a suit.
"When --"
Wedding bells went off at the same time as thunder. Elvira felt the amniotic fluid running down her legs with blood, and the rose brooch on her stocking burst hot. It was a gift from Leo for her 18th birthday, and there was black slime oozing from the back of the stone.
"The bride is giving birth!"
Amid the screams, the chandelier suddenly went out. Elvira touched the hidden door behind the altar in the darkness, and the smell of sulfur came over her face. Behind him came the dull thud of military boots over rose petals, mingled with Sophia's sweet exclaims: "Leon, our child......"
"You can't get away with this, Vera." Leo's sigh wrapped around her earlobe, leather gloves clasped around her trembling wrist bones, "Like you can't escape that night's kiss in the vineyard."
As the pain blurred her vision, Elvira yanked at Leo's shirt. Beads of blood ooze from a broad-leaved epiphyllum tattoo just below his collarbone - the same mark Leon showed while wearing his tie this morning.
"You guys...... Are they monsters?" She screamed, and the baby suddenly kicked violently. Leo's pupils contracted into wild vertical lines, and the church floor burst open with scarlet vines.
Torrential rain and hail smashed through the glass dome, and Elvira gave birth under a bloody moonlight. As the baby cried through the thunderstorm, she saw Leo take off his mask - the burn scar on the left side of his face was healing as fast as the naked eye could see it.
"Welcome home, my rose." He licked the fetal blood off his fingertips and grinned with his fangs. "The game has just begun."
Elvira grabs the bloody silver candlestick on the altar and thrusts it at Leo's throat, only to have it held between his fingers. The metal melted into a liquid in his palm, dripped onto her collarbone and burned it like a rose.
"I haven't seen you in five years, and your welcome is still so warm." Leo's fangs brushed her trembling eyelids and his fingertips caught the moonstone necklace around her neck. "You know why every time I lie I get a stomachache? The moonstone I gave you wasn't even a moonstone --"
The baby gave a sudden, inhuman shriek, and the church's remaining glass burst. Elvira was horrified to see that the baby's pupils had turned completely amber and were scratching the bronze chain between Leo's wrists with his tiny, fat-stained hands.
"Just like your mother." Leo chuckled as the baby tore his expensive shirt, revealing a ferocious cross-shaped scar over his heart. "But little things are more polite than the crazy woman who stole half my heart."
The storm wrapped the burning curtains in the church, and through the smoke Elvira glimpsed the lines of the bronze pendant - exactly matching the sonogram of the fetus that had disappeared from the birthing room file. Three days ago, the doctor said the baby had a malformed heart, and now the baby's chest is a blood-colored totem that mirrors Leo's scar.
"Let go of my baby!" She bit the tip of her tongue and spat at Leo, her blood frozen into ice picks in midair. This was the power that had suddenly awakened on the night of the fire five years earlier, and now the ice pick had pierced Leo's hollow body and driven into the melting Madonna behind him.
Leo suddenly grabbed her chin and leaned in, breathing with the smell of old wine and gunpowder. "You should ask your dear husband why he has twelve baby corpses hidden in the closet of his study."
The baby suddenly giggled and the suspended bottle burst into purple flames in the air. Leo's pocket watch slipped from his pocket and Elvira saw two small lines carved on the inside of the dial:
【1983.7.7 First encounter with a vineyard 】
【2003.7.7 Reunion at Cliff Church 】
the very date of her birth and this day.
"The rules of the game are simple." Leo ripped through her bridal sash with her tusks and crossed her bloody chest. "Guess who eats your heart first, the little monster in your arms or me?"
As the lightning broke through the dome, Elvira grabbed the burning Bible and hurled it at Leo. As the flame licked the flyleaf of the Bible, she saw the wedding message on the yellowed paper - her and Leo's names, dated twenty years ago today.
The baby suddenly let out a deafening cry, and all the flames froze into ice crystals. Leo's silver hair danced furiously in the storm. He stroked the tiny horns of the baby's hair and chuckled. "Looks like our little rose has inherited her father's bad temper."
