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Morning dawns, red and angry, as Hero steps into a dress black as the deepest night. When she’d first shown her wedding dress to her mother, cousin, and entourage late last night, she’d been met with gasps.
“Oh Hero!” Margaret had exclaimed. “Surely you can’t be expecting to marry in that! Why, even your other wedding dress was better!”
“It’s a mourning dress, my dear,” her mother had said softly, hand closing over Hero’s where it’d rested on the hanger.
“Well,” she’d said, a wry twist to her lips, “I thought it fitting, considering we are to be wed in the morning.”
She’d looked into her mother’s eyes and had seen the grief and pride warring in the reflection of her welled up tears. “So be it, then,” her mother had whispered, before leaning in to kiss her forehead.
Now she stands outside in the garden, eyes watching the sun slowly crawl up the sky. In the moment before the sun goes too bright and blinds her entirely, she lowers her gaze to the bushes. And there she sees him.
He sits there, the young, impassioned fool that he is, guzzling down a bottle of what seems to be cheap liquor.
And this is the brave soldier I am supposed to marry, Hero thinks, traitor heart twinging with emotion even as the corners of her mouth twitch in distaste.
She sighs and makes to turn away when her eye catches on a metallic glint. Squinting, she turns back to see Claudio fiddling with a gun.
Her heart stops and starts again with a loud, painful thud when he closes his eyes and lifts it to his head, face twisted with anguish. Unknowing, unbidden, she steps forward, cracking a stick ‘neath her feet.
Claudio startles and whirls around. His eyes are unfocused, clouded with drink, but Hero sees the moment he registers her in front of him. He leaps, scrambling back on his elbows until he bumps into a pillar.
“H-Hero?” he chokes out. “Oh Hero, is that you?”
Her lips tremble with the force of emotions not yet spent, with betrayal and love mixing into a poison so heady it could rival the contents of the bottle lying at her fiance’s feet. She looks away to see the gun lying a good distance away from Claudio, and something in her chest eases.
Good, she thinks. Good.
She takes one last look at Claudio’s face, tear-stained and splotchy with guilty grief, before stepping into the shadows and turning away, pretending not to hear Claudio’s frantic cries.
Behind her, the sun rises.