beware the serpent // val&seb&nacho
Feb 4, 2023 13:37:36 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2023 13:37:36 GMT -5
v a l e n t i n o s a l a z a r
It wasn't his first time being shot at, but he never expected it to be his last.
The final day of Valentino Izan Salazar's life started as any other, he presumed, as he woke up to another empty house. His children had grown up without him ever giving them permission to: Jacinta, far and away out of his life, Lucrezia and Violetta both burned and buried, too weak to survive in this world, Sebastien, the prodigal son he always imagined he would be, and Elena, hiding from monsters just as she always did. Even his wife, Marina, avoided him these days - since his first affair, with Talon Irvine.
A mistake he didn't regret, he lived without love just as he was always meant to. Valentino could never remember a couple throughout history who's love actually lasted; it died, long, long before they did.
When the first bullet comes, he suspects she had been the one- Marina. She had threatened to kill him before, and today seemed as green a day as ever to fulfill an old promise. He ducked in his grandiose kitchen, the stained glass bursting on impact with chartreuse shards scattering across the onyx tile floor. Valentino shudders with the shattering, but doesn't hesitate, scuttering his way to the staircase.
One might think to run out of the house, out of the fire rather than deeper into, but Valentino realized as a second, third, forth- shot rang into his manor, this was no attack of passion. He thought, perhaps, a Captiol assassin? Maybe even political, the Zodiia's making a revenge attack on his life for his slaughter of half their clan. He remembered the day with the taste of gunpowder in the air, how he shot down seven of twelve siblings all with one round of an assault rifle. He would do the same today, with just a pistol in his underwear if he had to.
He'd done worse with less.
The shoot off takes place in the master bedroom, a massive room with a curtained bed larger than the kitchen in some people's homes. It's he, Valentino, with a Winchester pistol, decades years old with tens of bodies slain with its bullets, against that of his own son, Sebastien, with what he recognizes to be his own shotgun, a serpent etched into the wooden body.
"Il figlio," he says, with a fat cigar between his teeth, "it was always going to be you, eh?"