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Her eyes were dead. They had no light, no life, no sparkle. All that her eyes retained was the unnatural pale purple color that made them so unique. But that color had now also paled to a deathly pallor, and in spite of the faint blush that ran across her peaches and cream complexion, she looked very much like the corpse she had been playing just moments ago on stage. And of course, why should she not? She had lost everything. Well, perhaps not everything. She had her home, her friends, her career. She even had a little something special baking in the oven that was her womb. And yet, in spite of all that, she felt like she had lost everything. A part of her, her heart, which contained within it all her hopes and dreams and aspirations, that part of her had been ripped right out of her chest, still beating, and now bleeding, and had been plunged right into a blender right in front of her, mixed with painfully stinging alcohol, and made into a Bloody Mary smoothie fit for the man who had ripped it out to enjoyably devour.

The young woman stood up from her dressing table, dressed in a beautiful empire waist nightgown in a blood red silk chiffon. Her hair, velvety black waves, fell loose from the loose chignon that it had been tied in, and cascaded down her shoulders to her mid-back. It had taken her a couple of years to get her hair that long, and those couple of years, all she had done, she had done for him. Not just her hair, but everything else too. Helping him overcome all the fears that he had over every little thing, showing him how to deal with the world around him, and just today, showing him what sacrificial love was and how it could kill you inside.

She twirled in front of the mirror one last time. Yes, she mused, she looked perfect. Striking. Calmly beautiful. As if she were attending her own funeral, almost. She smiled grimly at that. Today had been, she mused, her funeral in many ways. Parts of her had died a horrible death. Yet somewhere beneath all that, she knew, something else would be born. Something always arose out of something else, it was the way things worked. She might feel dead today, right now, but tomorrow things might look better.

It wasn't her fault she was what she was. But she would make things better.

Tomorrow, she might just find a way to get her husband Lorenzo back.

With that thought in mind, Brahma Orchid Frost-Micelli slipped under the sateen covers of her giant four-poster bed, and shut her extremely long- lashed lids to enter a dreamworld all her own, where things were just as they should be.