Unwanted

She would not be surprised nor show any sign of fear or remorse. She might have been able to pull it off, too if he hadn't moved so damned fast. One minute she was looking at him with her chin raised defiantly and her eyes practically begging him to do something in retaliation.

The next, he was standing directly in front of her, his hands gripping her upper arms tightly. She didn't have to look down to know that the skin beneath the beds of his fingers was going white.

The moment he let her go that skin would turn bright red, and the next morning she would have five little bruises on each arm that looked like Marino's fingers. All of this in the time it took to blink her eyes and for the first time since waking up in the dungeon Juri was really, truly afraid.

"You're damned determined to have it the hard way, aren't you?" He snarled, most of the pretense of his Victorian-era gentility gone.

Juri couldn't speak, couldn't even squeak, but she nodded her head slightly. She was damned determined not to let him get the best of her, is what she was. If Marino couldn't understand that he was a fool.

If he couldn't understand that, he had even less humanity left in him; then she had previously supposed.

"All right, if that's how you want things. Perhaps it's time for you to see what you were truly brought here for. Time to see your new position in life."

Marino let go of one of her arms, his fingers digging in all the deeper on the arm he still had a hold of. He moved for the large double doors quickly, almost violently. Even after seeing the way he could move, Juri was thrown by his speed, and she stumbled, almost falling to the floor.

She expected Marino to stop, maybe even to offer to help her up, but he did no such thing. He did glance down at her, however, and when she caught a glimpse of his face, she recoiled as if she had been lit on fire. What she saw was that he felt nothing.

At that moment, there was not a modicum of remorse, only a cold calculation. He pulled on her, hard enough that she thought he might yank her arm right out of its socket, and she cried out in pain. That did nothing to move him, either.

Marino only pulled again so that she had no choice but to run. He dragged her through hallways that were only partially familiar, her toes scuffing and threatening to catch on the ever so slightly threadbare runners.

He pushed on a door that was crafted to look like one of the wooden wall panels, and she gasped, shielding her eyes from a sudden bath of crisp white light.

Back amongst the toppers it probably wouldn't have been significantly bright, but down below it felt like she would go blind. Her time in the gloom of the underworld had done its work on her eyes already.

This terribly well-lit room was, apparently, their final destination and Marino let her go suddenly. He did more than let her go, more like tossed her across the floor like an unwanted ragdoll and she cried out again in fear and pain.

When she thought about it later, she would hate herself for that second cry, but at the moment there was no time to think about it at all. She was too busy trying to figure out her new circumstances. Too busy trying to decide if this was the end of the road for her, after all.

"Here," Marino spat, "if you would like to see another option. There is always this. See how you like it. See if the both of you get along."

She opened her mouth, whether to take it all back or to tell him to go fuck himself she couldn't be sure, but he was gone before she could make a sound. It was just her in the middle of a polished wood floor with a bright light beating down on her shoulders.

"Well hey there, sugar. What'd you do to piss him off?" A kindly voice asked from behind where Juri sat crumpled and miserable on the ground. Perhaps she wasn't on her own, after all.

"Easy, easy. Why don't you put that away before you hurt one of us?"

Juri started, panting without being entirely sure why. With her eyes still working overtime to adjust to the new light it was difficult to believe what she was seeing. Even without the abrupt change in location, she thought it would have been difficult.

Discovering that she and Marino weren't the only living beings inside of his opulent mansion after all of this time gone past was more than a little adjustment; it was surreal.

Matters weren't helped any by who she saw standing in front of her, either. If anything, it only made her sure that she had finally, belatedly, cracked up. None of what she was seeing was actually there. She was living in a fantasy world with the strong possibility of never waking back up.

"Put what away?" She asked, feeling very silly but compelled to know the answer all the same.

"Your little fists, darling. You're holding them up like you want to get into a boxing match and you're shaking like a leaf," the stranger's voice responded.

Said voice belonged to a soft, gentle-looking woman hovering just around five feet tall. Probably, that was too generous; four foot-ten sounded more accurate. She was plump, with white hair pulled up into a slightly messy bun, and her eyes were blue with smile lines crowding their corners.

To Juri, she looked like a character straight out of a Disney movie and the sudden urge to close the small distance between them and throw herself into a hug was overwhelming. She might really do it if she were sure that the woman was real.

Even after hearing her voice three times now, though, Juri just didn't know. She wasn't sure she trusted herself, and if she couldn't do that, she didn't know what she had left.

"Are...I'm sorry, but are you real?" She finally whispered.