Sasha's Suffering

**Because Tempest asked for it...**

Sasha wiped away tears, her fingers leaving swatches of her blood and his powdered flesh across the arch of her cheek. The sanguine pasted liquefied with her tears and trickled down, running across her bottom lip. Absentmindedly, she ran her tongue along her lip, taking in the potent poison of vampire flesh and human pain.

The key of the music box cranked over a turn as she clutched the box tighter to her chest. When she exhaled in a sob, the key turned the box through one chord of the haunting song Raenos had chosen for his bride-to-be. Her heart pounded, hurting in the music box's unnatural rhythm and the ache wrenched a fresh sob from Sasha's throat. She dropped the dagger back to the ashes, and turned the box so that the hinges were away from her. A fouled fingertip ran along the gilded edge, and then she pried the box open. The fixative fumes rushed through her nose, heavy with the iron scent of her lover's last blood. Sasha coughed, the acrid scent burning her nose, and then she dropped the box as well.

She knelt there, amidst his strewn ashes. Her raw wounds soaked in his dusted remains, her throat coated with a mix of his flesh and her tears, her heart now nothing more than an aching organ playing a forced, foreign tune.

A sick numbness settled into Sasha's body. The chill grip of death coiled tighter around her, squeezing the air from her lungs and tears from her eyes. And, when she thought she could ache no more, she twisted the music box's key again to allow the tune to torment her soul. If she was to die by his bite, poisoned by his ashen flesh, then she meant to die listening to the song he chose for her. Sasha wished to slip into the darkness, riding his tune into an eternity of death immersed in his rhythm.

Her body pitched backward, limbs jerking violently in the throes of death. Her lungs seized, her jaw fell open and then her joints locked, yet Sasha's heart pounded in that savage cadence. Her mind throbbed with the rhythm. Her tears, mingled with his toxic dust, dripped between her lips and soaked through the back of her throat.

Everything ceased and the music box's tune was her only perception...

**Tempset Darling, do you realize that there is an entire short story on Sasha in the back of my book Sacreligious? Small price, great story(ies) *wink*... Click here.**