Chapter 214: What is it you want.
The air within the garden was noticeably cooler, heavy with the intoxicating scent of night-blooming jasmine, damp earth, and the curated perfus of a thousand exotic blossoms. The knot of tension between her shoulder blades finally began to loosen. She was on ho soil now, controlled, familiar ground.
"Have a pleasant outing, dear sister?" just as she took her first step, she heard an unexpected voice.
The voice was sweet, lodic, and laced with a venom so familiar it made Victoria’s pulse stutter for a heartbeat before it was consud by a flare of white-hot irritation.
’ Well if this isn’t a suprise, of all the people I had to et first, it just had to be you.’
She stood in place, her spine turning to iron, refusing to look back at the figure who had just stepped from the shadows of a towering flower bush.
"And why, exactly, does my private business concern you?" Rather than appearing unsettled, Victoria t the challenge with a frigid composure that dripped with pure disdain.
She pivoted with deliberate slowness to confront the interloper which was non other than her own younger sister, Esralda.
Esralda stood illuminated by the glorious sunlight which highlighted her golden features. She was a portrait of fragile, porcelain elegance, draped in a gown of pale blue silk that seed to emit its own soft luminescence.
However, the ethereal image was fractured by her expression, one of profound, unadulterated resentnt.
Her ticulously grood brows were knit together in a petulant grimace, marring the smooth expanse of her forehead, while her arms were locked defensively across her chest.
"Even after my warnings, you persisted in seeking him out... After what we discussed! Don’t you think you’re being a tad unreasonable sister. " Esralda didn’t fail to let her feelings known.
’So it was you after all...’ Victoria’s lips tightened into a thin, bloodless line as the final piece of the puzzle slotted into place with an infuriating click.
During her ti in the southern district, while navigating the labyrinthine path to her master’s residence, she had been haunted by a persistent, ethereal sensation of surveillance.
But she hadn’t been able to pinpoint it’s origins throughout.
Well it wasn’t that she wasn’t able to but the bird Esralda used to watch over her was basically flying about making harder to decipher who was tailing her, after all, she expected it to be a human not an ave.
She had initially dismissed it as paranoia fueled by the grit of an unfamiliar neighborhood. Now, the truth was laid bare.
’Esralda. To think you’ve beco so audacious, so consud by spite, that you would have shadowed. To monitor my every footstep like so commoner.’ The sheer violation of her privacy kindled a slow-burning fury.
"If mory serves," Victoria said, her voice dropping into a low, furious torrent, "I am your elder, not the reverse. By what authority do you presu to dictate my movents, my destinations, or my company?" The cordial, dutiful facade she maintained for family functions was discarded, replaced by a gaze of mirroring hostility.
Regardless of their blood tie, Esralda’s attempt to sabotage her connection with her master was an unforgivable transgression.
It was an overstep Victoria would not tolerate from anyone, least of all her sibling.
"But I encountered him first!" Esralda erupted, her cultivated poise finally shattering.
She had no idea why her sister was so he’ll bent on getting closer to a man she’d only t once, though her situation wasn’t completely different, she still felt that as the one who had been with him the longest, it should be her acting this way, not in the reverse.
She struck her right foot against the stone tiled path; the sharp clack of her heel was instantly muffled by the garden’s stillness.
"He ca to my aid! He was ant to be mine! not your’s. Why won’t you just stop this and leave him to !"
"The world is not yours alone, Esralda!" Victoria countered, her volu rising as her icy restraint began to fray under the heat of her sister’s puerile logic.
"Life does not bend to your whims. People are not baubles in a shop window that you can possess rely by pointing a finger!"
" Everyone is entitled to the sa things whether you like it or not!"
"Is this your eternal motive, sister? To always obstruct ?" Esralda’s voice wavered, now propelled by a current of sothing far more older and corrosive than re jealousy.
Her eyes, vast and stunning underneath the sunlight , began to shimr with welling tears that sparkled like damp sapphires.
Yet, beneath that watery veil, Victoria recognized the familiar, flinty edge of resentnt that had simred for years. "Is it because you refuse to share anything? Not our mother’s focus, nor our father’s accolades, nor the premier tutors... and now, not even the solitary man who offered a mont of genuine kindness?" She blurted out in a single breath her chest heaving.
Although it still stood to question whether the man in question actually saw her as anything besides a walking dumpster fire.
"Continue cataloging your imagined grievances if you must," Victoria replied, her tone reverting to a surgical sharpness intended to wound.
"But we both recognize these for what they are, the delusions of a child who cannot endure the slightest hint of rivalry. One who resorts to the past the mont a victory isn’t handed to her on a silver platter."
"It isn’t my fault that you are inherently inferior to ! The obvious issue is why you haven’t accepted it all this while."
The declaration escaped Victoria’s lips before she could suppress it, the raw, toxic residue of a lifeti spent in silent comparison.
It was now obvious that this wasn’t rely about a man; it encompassed everything from their magical proficiency to appearances, social circles, and a lot of other comparisons.
The bitterness she had swallowed for years while watching Esralda play the delicate doll, whil
e she herself trained until her knuckles bled, finally found a rupture and surged forth.
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