Morte di un'Alleanza || ft. GZ
‘I’m alone, and unarmed, what could I do…’
“Don’t play me for a fool!” She fires back abruptly, the first lick of anger surfacing in response to the woman’s lukewarm suggestion that she’s harmless. You’ll never be that, Vivianne thinks bitterly. She’s always respected Genevieve Zhang enough to know that she is not to be underestimated, but after recent events, she knows too, that she’d be stupid to assume the Montague wouldn’t bring her to harm.
Still, she forces down that swell of fury. The last thing she needs right now is to look so weak before Genevieve that she’s incapable of mastering her own emotions. “Armed or otherwise, you’re no sheep, Gertrude, unless it’s in wolf’s clothing.”
The Montague’s steps come to a halt, and only then does Vivianne turn to face her. She doesn’t know what she expected to see upon turning; the face of that wolf? The ugliness of an adversary who’d asked for her aid under the pretense of peace, only to spit in her face a few weeks later?… Maybe it would’ve been easier if she could see those true colours. Instead, she looks upon Genevieve and sees only that queenly beauty and enviable composure. “A test of their loyalty?” Vivianne lets out a barking laugh. “Marcelo beat me to a pulp when they stormed the Cathedral. I’m sure you received their gleeful report. I had black eye, a brain bleed, and a concussion lasting weeks… Was that not enough to your liking? Not enough for your fucking Don?”
It’s rhetorical, even she knows the answer. Perhaps, only one question matters anymore. This one, not about Damiano, but about the once role-model standing in front of her now. “Did you know? Before it was meant to happen— did you know?”
Tell me you didn’t, some stupid, teenaged part of her still pleads. Tell me that it was all behind your back, that you’d have stopped it if you knew, that you’d have found a way to warn me. Tell me that I really don’t have a reason to fear you…
Laughter almost escapes from her following the realisation that Damiano’s perpetual state of barely-concealed anger, simmering eternally just beneath the surface. Numbed to the vitriol that spilled from Vivianne with little warning, feeling strangely hollow when she had been prepared to school a flinch that had never come. “Yet no one knows I’m here,” she tells the other, perhaps foolishly, but what was the point in retracting the cards she had set out during their previous meeting. Truth her final defence mechanism in a world that expected anything but. “And so should you wish to shoot me...” Genevieve trails off extending her hand in a slow deliberate gesture, anything sudden could have warped her truth into an assumed lie, that said be my guest. You’d be doing me a favour, the thought is bitter, but the truth of it stings the back of her throat.
“He is paranoid,” she tells her. Treason. The thought grips her, an icy hand around a still-beating heart, but it was obvious to anyone who had seen the Don in the last number of weeks; an ever growing paranoia, anticipating a knife in his back, spent energy that could have been better used elsewhere. Not unfounded, not entirely, given that her confession some months prior had seemed to act as a catalyst that pushed Damiano into deeper waters - an all consuming concern that had the woman he promoted orchestrated murder beneath his nose, who was to say no one else would? Disapproval plays briefly on her mouth as Vivianne lists her injuries from the Cathedral siege, something that could be pointed toward the recollection rather than the fact that it was someone she had once considered a friend.
Self-preservation implores her to answer no, while realism offers the rationale that Vivianne would know it to be a lie. Like with like, each Capobastone trained to seek out micro-expressions with the precision that sharpshooters sought their targets, sometimes knowing something was amiss before the target of their stare had known themselves. To utter a lie would be uncharacteristic of the woman who had spent the majority of her life clawing her way up to the throne; a moth drawn to a distant sun, relentless, longing to feel the flames kiss her skin. Genevieve was born for this, forged from hellfire in spite of icy circumstance. Something Howard didn’t have, lacking in his son as well. “Don’t ask questions you’re well aware of the answer to.” There is a flash, fleeting, as the familiar feeling of guilt settles in the pit of her stomach, and then. Quieter. “Of course I knew.”
Mouth purses, a twisted curiousness wrapping around her mind. “What is it you called me here for?” The corners of her gaze narrow with the thought. Of course, Genevieve remembers; the woman as a teen, the person whose hand she had held during childbirth, the one whom she had broken off a friendship with to maintain the favour of her husband. The husband she orchestrated the murder of. Huh. There might have been something ironic about that. A rose that had been plucked of their petals now rested with a majority of thorns, but that didn’t dismiss the fact that should she permit it - to allow herself to care - would be to tap into a part of her psyche that ( given the current state of affairs in Verona ) was better left untouched. Genevieve had made her peace with that, bleeding heart shoved, roughly, up her suit sleeve, only cradling it in her arms at night with no one else present to see the damage it had endured.
She didn’t care. She didn’t care. She didn’t - but she did. Too much.
