Read Online Blood, Milk & Chocolate - Part 1 (The Grimm Diaries Book 3) by Cameron Jace - Free Book Online Page A

I
didn't want to be pampered. I just wanted to be a normal girl—something I
was never granted, neither then nor now.

 
    ***

 
    On my
seventeenth birthday I had asked for a bigger chamber with a better view of the
Pond of Pearls. My wish was granted a few months later only after endless
debate between my parents.
    I had to
promise them each day that I wouldn't break the rule. A look at the pond from
afar wouldn't hurt anyone. My father's soldiers guarded the gates leading to
the Pond of Pearls anyway.
    It was
only a few days until I realized the luxurious castle I lived in had been
nothing but my personal prison.
    But whom
was I fooling? Watching the Pond of Pearls each day from my window intensified
my need. I have never seen girls giggle as much as when they saw their
reflection in the water.
    The
curiosity was also sparked by admiring my mother's beauty —the
more she aged, the more beautiful she looked to me. Older,
but more beautiful, more graceful and elegant. She didn't know that,
though.
    "You're
so beautiful, Mother," I told her, fiddling with strands of my golden
hair, which I had to keep ridiculously short so I couldn't see it often—they
were afraid the sight of my beautiful hair would increase the need to see my
face.
    "Not
as beautiful as you," she said, combing her hair.
    "Do I
look like you?" I asked, although she had told me I did so many times.
"My father, maybe?"
    "A
bit like both of us," she said. "Didn't you see the pictures our
artists have drawn of you?" We had many of them, but my face painted in
oil wasn't satisfactory. What if they just lied to please me?
    "You
have your father's eyes," she said. "Ocean blue, almost like the
pearly waves of the pond…" My mother shrugged, and averted her eyes from
the window. She did it abruptly, as if she'd seen a ghost there. She just
didn't want to talk about the Pond of Pearls. "I'm really sorry,
Carmilla," she said. "It's all for the best."
    "I
don't need you to tell me this is for the best," I said. "I just need
you to tell me that I'm beautiful."
    "Oh,
God," she almost shrieked, her eyes moist. "You have no idea how
beautiful you are. If it wasn't for this curse—"
    "I
want you to tell me I am the most beautiful girl in Styria," I said. I
guess my need for appreciation had suddenly kicked in. Aggressively. The desire
of being beautiful crawled up my spine. It messed with my brain. I had been
tolerating my curse, suppressing my emotions, and lying to myself for seventeen
years. The anger had suddenly surfaced and reddened my soft cheeks.
    My mother,
who was about to hug me affectionately, stopped suddenly. Something about the
way I'd said my last sentence worried her.
    "Tell
me, Mother, that I am the most beautiful of them all." I nodded at the
girls playing outside in the castle's garden, those girls who saw their
reflections on a daily basis, those girls who combed their hair by the pond for
hours, those who pinched their cheeks to show ripeness and youthfulness through
the redness of their face. Those girls I was never going to be like. "Tell
me, Mother," I demanded.
    Come to
think of it, this was my first brush with the darkness in my soul, which
surfaced many years later. I don't think you have any idea what it felt like.
    "Fairest,"
my mother said, doing her best to hide her worries.
    "Fairest?"
I asked.
    "You
are the fairest of them all, Carmilla," she said, her smile old and
wrinkled and dry, like early autumn leaves.
    "Fairest?"
I repeated. "What does that mean, fairest? I want to be the most beautiful
of them all." I pointed at the girls gathering by the pond as I stepped
forward. I waved at the girls who had suddenly become my enemies, those girls
who could do things I couldn't, things any seventeen-year-old girl should've
been doing. The truth was that I didn't want to be the most beautiful. I just
wanted to be normal. "I don't want to be fairest!"
    "Carmilla."
My mother hiccupped against the tears promising to leave her eyes.