#jamsui

The sound of the gun still echoed in her head as she collapsed back against the cold tiles of the bathroom wall, finger still trembling over the trigger long after the bullet had been fired into her assailant's head.

Never before had she felt so appalled by her own actions. Actions she had never truly wished to commit, but had foreseen after her last encounter with the woman who now lay dead and bleeding on her bathroom floor. Bonnie Reynolds had made it perfectly clear that she'd wanted rid of Hisui as soon as she'd learned that the younger woman had become estranged from her father, and was no longer a source of wealth and notoriety. The D'Carina name had already infuriated her, once before, when she'd wished to have Toma for herself. So the threat that James' mother had bestowed upon the daughter of her long-since-dead nemesis had come as no surprise.

“ If you are not gone when I next grace this home with my presence, I will dispose of you myself. ”

The Reynolds matriarch, much like many other people who might claim to know Hisui, had assumed that she would not have stayed, and that if she had? She would not have fought back. Such a soft, feeble woman would surely perish at the hands of someone who already had many a person's blood on her hands. And perhaps she would have been right about that a decade or so ago, when Hisui had not known the people and the things that she knew now.

If Hisui had not learned to be a little more wise about who she believed, and who she did not, Bonnie would have been right. If Hisui had not believed Bonnie, if Hisui had not prepared for the moment when the older woman came for her with knife in hand, she would perhaps not have had a gun holstered to her thigh...and perhaps Bonnie would not have been dead.

Through the deafening silence; after a period of time that Hisui could not quite label or trace, the creak of the entrance door cracked through the deathly quiet rooms of the mansion home. Dark crimson continued to trickle out over white marble as his footsteps sounded through the halls leading to where the two of them lay. One still, the other weeping with trembling hands that could no longer cling onto her weapon of choice. The gun dropped and clattered against the tiles just as the man she loved opened the door onto a scene that he could quite possibly never have predicted.

      “ I'm so sorry, James...I didn't want to do this...I didn't mean to...I-I... ”