A woman’s greatest asset is always her looks. Or at the very least, that is what my mother claimed. Late at night, after daddy had retired to bed with the remnants of a glass of bourbon in his belly, mother would sneak into my room and climb into bed with me. She would hold me there, in the dark, and press me to her linen nightgown and whisper all the truths she had learned in her lifetime.

She told me that I needed to be beautiful. That I needed to be strong. That, no matter how intelligent I was, or how talented, men only respected two things; money and beauty. Because she had been beautiful once, I would have money. But I needed to be beautiful myself to have power.

I don’t know if she ever visited my sisters the way she visited me. By then, Adrienne was already daddy’s little darling; falling all over herself to please him and make him proud, and Cordelia was too little to understand the sorts of things my mother murmured in the dark.

As I grew older, my mother’s nightly visits decreased, and with the aid of vallum, she began to sleep more frequently. Normally she would rise around noon, spend a day staring out the parlor window, and then retire to bed around six. My sisters and I were lucky if we even saw her.

It was not long after, that mother passed away. I remember standing and looking down at her in the casket during the visitation. She looked like she was only asleep, and that the sleep was peaceful and would yield pleasant dreams forever. It would, in a way. She had overdosed on vallum.

With mother gone, it was only natural that Adrienne, being the eldest, would become the woman of the house. Daddy was so frequently away on business, and only Cordelia still required a nanny. I was thirteen at the time. Adrienne was three years older.

I had begun to blossom from a shy, quiet child, into a quiet and composed young girl. I will admit, I was not unaware that the subtle changes in my body were starting to draw lingering looks from the opposite sex. It was what I was meant for. What my mother had prepared me for.

And I was also not innocent to what went on between my father and my sister behind closed doors. Adrienne had grown into a ripe and stunning young woman, and she was, after all, daddy’s favorite.

But how long can beauty last? Who measures when it’s past its prime?

I was growing older, and at the same time growing up.

I became more and more beautiful with each day’s passing. At luncheons and charity functions I began to amass a crowd of admirers, not all of them near to my age. I’d like to think that Cordelia remained blissfully ignorant of what was transpiring, but Adrienne certainly seemed to notice.

I realized that she was jealous of me when she began to woo my courters with promises of physical intimacy. If I wore an attention-getting outfit, she would wear something even more extravagant in an attempt to outdo me. She began to spread nasty rumors about me, always claiming innocence when I confronted her with what I’d learned. And yet, I trusted her. She was my sister, after all.

But truthfully, both Adrienne and I knew what was coming and we were both powerless to stop it.

It was a tepid summer night when my father, reeking of scotch, motioned me into his study. Seating himself in his favorite leather armchair, he patted his lap and asked me to sit. I knew I was far too old to be sitting on my father’s lap, but I decided to humor him. I hardly ever saw him, and he was so rarely affectionate.

After I had made myself comfortable, he poured himself another drink and began to kiss me on my forehead and cheeks. Of course, this made me a little wary, but he was still my father and this sort of affection wasn’t completely out of the realm of fatherly love. Eventually, he proceeded to my mouth, at which point I pushed him away and attempted to leave.

My father, of course, would have none of it. He pinned against the arm of the chair with one hand, his wet mouth roaming over me, reeking of alcohol, and began to fondle my breasts. It was then that I began to scream, and to thrash and kick furiously. Finally, in my struggling, I managed to knock the bottle of scotch off the end table and it shattered in a pungent mess upon the hardwood floor.

My father, startled at the sound, turned to mourn the loss of his precious liquor, and I managed to roll out from under him and crawl on my hands and knees toward the door. When I was halfway there, I froze in my tracks. The door to the study had not been closed. Standing there was Adrienne, furious, with her hands on her hips. From behind her, Cordelia peeked, eyes wide with fear and confusion. I don’t know how long they’d been standing there, but judging by the look in Adrienne’s eyes, it didn’t matter what she had seen; she knew. I made a hasty retreat to my room upstairs and locked the door behind me. My father came noisily up the stairs a short while later, to bang on the door while screaming my name, but I ignored him.

I did not sleep easy that night. Nor did I ever again in that house.

I spent days in my room, not eating, barely sleeping. I was afraid to come out. Afraid that my father was only waiting for another chance at me. I wasn’t safe, nor would I ever be again. It was during this time that the voices came. At first they were faint, the barest tickle at the back of my mind, but then they began to increase in volume and frequency, and always came when I was at my weakest. Eventually, I began to recognize the voices as portions of thoughts; or more specifically, the thoughts of those around me.

There was the downstairs maid, folding laundry and thinking about her teenage son who had gotten his girlfriend pregnant. The gardener spent a great deal of time musing over which of the inexpensive fertilizers was the best one to use on the rose bushes. And my family. Adrienne’s sharp hatred of me, and her weakness at wondering why she wasn’t good enough to retain my father’s interest. My father’s ruthless, lecherous thoughts.

And then there was Cordelia.

God, Cordelia.

She knew. She knew about daddy and Adrienne’s ‘special relationship’, and she knew what daddy had been trying to do in the study that night.

And, most frightening of all, she knew that he would someday turn his attentions to her.

After this, I could no longer deal with the voices. On top of everything else they simply compounded my lack of control. I needed to be in control. I needed to be strong. Mother knew. But why hadn’t control come with my beauty?

And then, something broke. I don’t remember when the screaming began, only that it was my own voice that served to drown out the static in my head. I couldn’t continue like I had been, and both I and my family knew it. It was shortly after the screaming began that Adrienne called the police.

The policemen entered our house and broke down my bedroom door. They hauled me away to a mental health institution where I was admitted as a danger to myself and others. I spent the better part of a year in that horrid place, but during the course of my visit I learned to control the voices.

I suppose you know the rest of the story. About how I escaped from the institution, became powerful but lonely, and eventually fled into the arms of the Hellfire club. How both my sisters grew to hate me; one of them endlessly jealous of my beauty and control, the other forever betrayed because I had knowingly left her there, in that house, to fend for herself.

But that part of the story is over now. The fairy tale where the unhappy princess escapes her wicked relatives and their imprisonment is almost at an end. The princess is now queen of her own castle. A white castle; for white is the color of purity. And now the wicked relatives will be forced to dance in their red-hot shoes until they are dead.

Truthfully, I cannot think of a more satisfying ‘happily ever after’.