Dahlia Voss laughed, but it wasn’t polite. It wasn’t sweet, like the practiced laugh she’d trained herself to give, the kind that landed softly, like tulle brushing the floor. This laugh was jagged and guttural, tearing from her lungs like a secret finally screamed aloud.

Around her, ruin stretched in every direction. The gallery was drenched in red. Canvases gutted, glass glittering beneath her bare feet like shattered promises. Above, the chandelier swayed uncertainly, like a question hanging in the air. Guests, all his, shrunk back in silk and pearls, eyes wide with the silent horror of witnessing something sacred shatter.

And there, in the center of it all, stood Dahlia.

Blood-speckled. Barefoot. Beautiful in a way that no longer begged to be understood or forgiven.

She was supposed to be the good wife, the pretty thing he paraded at gallery openings, soft-spoken, smile practiced. A muse on a leash, a woman seen but never heard.

“She’s fragile,” he would say, tightening invisible chains with tender pity. “She’s brilliant when she lets me guide her.”

They called her ethereal. Elegant. Obedient.

But none of them had seen how he cut her down behind closed doors. How he read her journal and laughed. How he held her paintings up to the light and sneered, “You’ll never be more than instinct. I am the vision. You are the vessel.” How he made her feel insane for needing affection, for crying, for asking to be seen.

“Stop embarrassing yourself,” he whispered in bed as she wept with her back to him.

“You're a nobody,” he reminded her, over breakfast, over brushstrokes, over bruises.

And so, piece by piece, Dahlia disappeared.

Sanity stripped like old wallpaper, colour draining from her cheeks, voice softening to silence, until she was nothing but a polished, pretty thing behind glass and on display. Caged.

Until tonight.

Tonight, Lucien stood beneath the spotlight, bloated with praise, holding her painting and calling it his own.

“She’s a dear thing,” he said to the crowd. “Tragic, really. But I channelled her madness into something coherent. That’s the role of a man, after all.”

The guests chuckled, because madness is only beautiful when it’s silent. Because no one wants to believe the golden man is a monster.

She had planned to leave quietly. A note. A final piece. A disappearing act. Let them mourn the muse.

But instead, she reached for the palette knife.

She hadn’t planned the blood. Hadn’t planned the scream that tore from her throat like a banshee set free. Hadn’t planned how good it would feel to shatter the pedestal beneath her feet.

Now Lucien was on the ground, bleeding, ranting, his mask finally cracked.

“You… you psychotic little bitch,” he gasped, crawling away. “You’re nothing. Nothing without me.”

Dahlia knelt beside him, slow and deliberate, like an artist poised before the final stroke. Her voice dropped to a trembling whisper as her fingers brushed a strand of hair from her face.

“You broke me, piece by piece. But I learned how to survive the silence.”

She leaned close, breath warm against his ear.

“Now… you’ll drown in the monster you made.”

She stood again, the light flickering overhead. Sirens wailed somewhere far off, a requiem for reputation.

Dipping two fingers in the blood at his neck, she wrote her name on the white marble floor beside him, bold and crimson: DAHLIA VOSS.

Turning to the stunned crowd, she met their wide eyes and open mouths, but no one dared speak.

“You liked me better silent,” she said softly. “But silence was your masterpiece, not mine.”

And then she laughed. One last time.

A laugh full of fury, freedom, and flame.

Nothing had gone according to plan.

But it was perfect.

She was no longer his pretty thing.

She was no longer his anything.

She was herself, at last.