“Was that a bomb?” Anaztasia asked.
“I think so,” Romaine said as she put her glass of passion fruit juice down. Rozelyn doesn’t know how many glasses of that juice her stepmother had consumed.
‘She only drinks a lot of juice when she’s nervous.’ She thought. Rozelyn decided to peer into Romaine's mind when she remembered about Laara and Isla.
Rozelyn’s speculation became wilder. She had once glanced in Avril’s mind that Romaine was an accomplice. But, the question is, accomplice to whom? And why would she do that? Why would her stepmother do that? Why would Romaine betray the coven that had sheltered her ever since she ran away from her home in Romania?
As soon as they heard the explosion, Laara and Isla were eager to sprint there.
“That was our home!” Laara cried as she seized her daughter and both went away from Rozelyn’s sight.
“But there’s nothing else you could do!” It was too late for Rozelyn to hold them back from running.
The mother and the daughter had gone running; sprinting for their apartment that is obviously with the ground now, turned to ashes, debris, and with the earth.
All they can do is watch and watch. But to Rozelyn, she had seen that smirk on Maebh and Ludwig’s face.
‘What do they have to do with this incident again? With this again?’ She pondered, as if there was someone else who’s gonna answer her questions.
So she stood and went after Laara and Isla. Romaine and the werewolf couple were about to halt her but she was too strong and eager to go after the mother and daughter who just be with each other on this very day.
Rozelyn was left alone to investigate the sudden collapse of the apartment…again.
***
Isla saw that black-clothed person that was running away many times.
“Could that be Hans?” She said to her newly-found mother. Her cries was so loud that Isla thought Laara’s tears could water a whole ranch.
“I have been in that apartment for years…it is also where I found your father, my memories with him…gone with the wind!” Laara’s shaky voice and crying had mixed together and that made Isla frowned and almost in tears as well.
They stayed where they were standing for another minute. Then another. Then another.
After ten minutes, Laara then looked at her in a way Isla had never seen.
“We will leave. Now!” That was all she heard what Laara muttered as her sight went pitch black.
***
“I am truly sorry!” Ludwig then wiped the water that he ‘accidentally’ spilled on Rozelyn’s place; Maebh was mumbling something that Avril and Anaztasia do not give a damn even an inch.
“It’s okay, Mr. Vergara.” Anaztasia put that saccharine smile on her face like Rozelyn’s usual smile; a too-sweet smile that is more annoying than admirable.
She saw Ludwig roll his eyes in the corner of her stare.
“I gotta go to Isla and Laara…and to Rozelyn. They are probably having a hell in there already.”
“But Anaz—” Romaine tried to halt her stepdaughter’s best friend.
But Anaztasia had already gone far away, following Rozelyn’s tracks in the nearly winter ground.
***
“I must ask Isla about the rose, my father, and Tanzania...” Rozelyn said to herself as she was walking.
She could see the devastated apartment by now. Even when she was just trekking, she could see the rubbles and rubbles stacked to one another.
“Isla?” She called out for her father’s former acquaintance.
“Isla, I want to ask something!” Rozelyn reiterated.
But there was no Isla. Neither is Laara.
‘Shit!’ She thought. The time that she had the answers to all of her questions on the edge of her grip just slipped away without her seizing the opportunity she once had.
There, at the very entrance of the apartment that was nothing more than an archway was a letter. It was a handwritten one.
Rozelyn read the contents of the letter as soon as she unsheathed it. After a couple of minutes after reading, still, she shrieked Isla’s name; as well as Laara’s.
“Isla?! Laara?!” Rozelyn repeated those until Anaztasia and Avril reached her.
“What happened?” Anaztasia asked her bestfriend; both on the verge of giving up already.
Rozelyn ducked by the ground and sat by the stack of rubble. “They left…and will probably never return.”
“Just like that?” Anaztasia barely managed to ask.
She nodded with utter discernment. “Yes. Just like that…”
***
“Thank you,” she beamed at the two people she had paid to steal the flower from Isla’s now destroyed room.
Maebh never saw this flower before. It was so red, like that of fresh blood. And its thorns, its thorns are pretty much thornier than most thorns of common roses. One thing Maebh is certain of: the Blood Rose is beautiful.
“It’s a withered blood rose. It cannot be used,” Romaine said as she sipped from her glass that contained a passion fruit juice.
The flower turned slowly brownish. Its texture is like that of a vintage paper that can easily be crumbled.
“I know. It’s just that I am admiring the flower despite it being withered. It’s so beautiful even though it’s already dead, how much more when it's a vibrant and alive one?”
“Hide that, honey. She might see that and will kill you in your own orchard instantly,” Ludwig warned her.
“I am a heathen, remember? Rozelyn is not the only one powerful enough to take down a whole apartment, so do I.”
Romaine glared at the couple.
“Did you do that?” She then pointed to the now-devastated apartment.
Maebh just shrugged. “If I were to be the one to do that, I would not do it in broad daylight to where the residents are not at home, I will do that in the middle of the night in which the ground is the only witness and be soaked in blood bath…”
Romaine and Ludwig just looked at each other.
“So you did not do it?” Romaine asked her one last time.
“No. She did not do it,” Ludwig was the one who replied.
“Then who did?”
Maebh rolled her eyes before replying, “The girl herself: Isla. She knew I had minions who had been eyeing the flower for so long so she decided to take down the whole apartment all by herself so that no one would find that flower of hers.”
“Yet, here it is. In our own hands,” Ludwig said as he took it from Maebh’s grip and hoisted the withered blood rose into the air.
“Long live the blood rose,” was all Maebh managed to say as she took one last sip of that secret red wine that was actually a blood from one of her victims.