Fingers fragile as a wishbone ram into the door of @dukemassetti & @rafaellacapulet’s residence—the rap of them against the wood as furious as the woman they are attached to. One more second, one more second, one more second, Juliana Capulet stays herself... and tries to remember the early hour of dawn that finds her stood at their doorstep without turning her cheek to appraise it, unable to. Her eyes wouldn’t see it, anyway, this much she knows; only Rafaella’s face swims in her mind. It is MARCH 17TH, 2019: a few weeks since a bullet had lodged in her shoulder for the first time, and only a few hours since the second had been extricated from the muscle tissue Pandora Phan had embedded in it the night before. Juliana can still feel the cold of the night beneath ashen flesh – and somehow, it is Orion Massetti who was about to experience a world of pain, if the Capulet woman had anything to say about it.
[RECEIVED] ORION MASSETTI: This is a mass text to let everyone know Rafaella is home. With me, that is. My home. She's pretty fucked up, so for the love of Santa Maria or whatever, do not rush all at once to see her. We can set something up individually.
The text message still lights up the screen of the cellphone clutched in her grip. The fist is the same that knocks at their front-door – because it has to be, with the appendage’s counterpart caught in a sling that restricts movement, the only part of her that remains steady when the cool air nips at her through the thin garment. Hazily, Juliana registers the quiver of blanched fist out of the corner of her eye. A hasty flick of gaze, and she cannot deny the gauze. Tucked away at the back of her mind, perhaps it might be able to bother her that two bullet-wounds in such close proximity of one another mostly meant debilitating implications... were it not for the face that loomed in front of it, just as it obstructed the view of herself as the very vision of a madwoman, stood in the middle of a Verona street in the blush lace silhouette of a nightdress accessorised with stark white bandage-dressing. But she cannot think of any of it. She cannot think of anything but...
R A F A E L L A –
Oh, there had been an image in Juliana’s mind a matter of hours ago: bronze planes and sharp features turned ashen, gone cold; a golden halo of curls dully aglow in a sea of black-adorned mourning. Her blood on the grimy floor, and chains no longer holding onto her corporeal form. Her Rafaella: gone. Until... until this brusque, cavalier text message she’d woken up to, the sedative-drugs still laced in her bloodstream and tugging on her eyelids. After the agonising nightmares she knew as the reality jolted her in the bed she’d insisted upon laying in, refusing on another trip to a hospital, fiercely, until the Capulets had no choice but to relent to her wish. She had not wasted another moment on trying to convince anyone else of anything else – for how could she, how could waste another breath? All Juliana had left on her bed was a piece of parchment with the only name she’d been able to think of in weeks scrawled upon it with haste:
RAFAELLA –
What more could she have offered her soldiers when they checked upon their once more-slain principessa nesting in bedclothes stained with her blood & failure? There was only that name. Her name; her beloved Rafaella, her heart’s fire & the only sister she’d ever truly known – it was all she’d had to offer, all she’d been capable of, before she’d crawled out of her window like thief into the night, running & running & running. Running, down the streets her feet had tracked over & over, over the weeks slumber dared not graze her throbbing mind, grey matter turning darker by the moment, by the possibilities, by the soul the night leeched from her. There isn’t much left of her to lose. No loss could matter if Rafaella was gone.
No –
Not gone –
She’s pretty fucked up, he wrote.
This is a mass text to let everyone know Rafaella is home, he said.
Her fingers twitch, and she tells herself it isn’t for her gun.