Laci couldn’t watch any longer. He was consumed by the cream mare, entangled-but she was a liar. That wasn’t even the worst part. He was convinced that Laci was some insane pariah meant to live out the rest of her days in a cage.

To the relief of Laci, they wandered away. Together. Intertwined as an insidious vine winds around the bone-hard trunk of an oak tree. She settled back down onto the bed, her muscles tightening, her skin whining to be ripped away again. She stared at the ceiling, Sultan’s comforting voice began again, and she was still. For but a moment.

She heard the splintering of wood on her right, where the door was, and suddenly felt her heart drop to the depths of her chest. Something horrible was happening. She should not have let them leave. She should’ve said something, done something…

She pulled her legs beneath her miraculously. Standing like the first time, like a shaking little filly on a cold hospital floor. She tried to steady her steps. Her whole body screamed in protest. It was wild with pain and fear. She kept striding forward. Some unimaginable force gripped her. It told her that she must go on.

Speeding up now, she had to pick up speed. She opened the broken door and surveyed. Asher had split open his coronet on the door, and he was trying to quietly nurse it on his lap. He looked up at her with tears in his eyes. She kept running, lopsided, but still indescribably fast. Again her body tormented her, was trying to force her to stop, but it felt so fine to feel the force of air in her mane and on her face. She turned the corner and heard mad giggling. “You’re too funny!” she heard a mare’s voice laugh. “Oh, Alissa…I can’t, I really shouldn’t…” “Who would know? You’re such a silly colt, Marshall.” Laci ducked around the corner and almost screamed. It took everything to hold her back. The pain of her skin separating from her flesh, her joints crying out, her face was hot with anger. It was too much.

She was fully undressed, save a tail ribbon. She had her bare arms around his naked neck. She was rubbing up against him like a wild bitch-wolf. Her eyes were wide and filled with some false emotion from the pits of hell. He was still wrapped in his cloak, but she was playing with the frayed ends, slowly unwrapping him. He didn’t try to stop her. His cloak soon dropped to the floor, and she could see all the scars she had given him, all the time they’d spent together, all the years she’d worn into his beloved body. Now he took that and threw it all away. Threw it away for someone who couldn’t care less for any of what really made him shine. Calling Laci names and telling everyone she was a bucking horse, selling her body. The only difference, she thought, between him and her was that he sold not only his body but his soul. All in a few minutes while his clothes were pulled off by some cream mare he knew nothing of. She turned on the shower. “Come on!” She pulled his arm. With little hesitation he ducked into the water with her. It ran down their hair and soaked in to them like blood does when you cut someone up. Nothing could stop Laci now. She painfully rolled each hoof across the floor in absolute silence. Sultan’s whining and smoking form filled her vision. She crept closer. Inches away from the curtain now. Just one pull on it and she could end their lives in minutes. They had no idea that she was even here.

She heard footsteps in the hall, panicked, ripped the curtain off the shower, screamed in their faces, bore their skin, wiped them on the walls. She threw them out of the shower, flipped the water from steamy to ice cold, as she was used to from the old days, dropped to the tile floor and waited to pass out. She was bleeding everywhere, her bandages had started to come loose again and now her wounds were open.

“It’s okay, little dove. I love you. You’re so beautiful. Even if it’s the last thing you do, you showed him up."