mandy waters

“Oh, just a little something to help you relax, so I could bring you here,” she smiled impishly, slowly stalking closer until she was even with my hip, her sexy, four-inch heels clicking on the floor. She was seductively licking her full, pouty lips, and began to trail her pointed, lacquered red fingernails up and down the back of my thigh. “And another little something, to make sure you'd be in the proper mood for what I have planned. But I'm not talking about when we met tonight, at the party. You and I have met before. Don't you remember, Brian?”

Maybe you and I do deserve to suffer for our wrongdoing. If that’s so, then it means that when things get painful, when things get difficult, we don’t have the luxury of quitting. We don’t get to end our lives to escape what we did. Whatever form the pain takes, we bear it, we endure it, we welcome it, all while we try to make this world a place where people like us, like how we used to be, have no place, and the people who would be hurt can instead live in peace. The next time you encounter an obstacle you cannot overcome, when you just want to curl up into a ball and quit on the world, remind yourself that you don’t deserve the peace of surrender. You have to keep working, to keep fighting, to keep suffering, until the day when you’ve fully repented.

The last time he saw her was just before the Night of a Hundred Heads, when he had been brought to the War Room. Her head was shaved back then, but since her fall from grace, it seemed she was letting her hair grow.“Unhand me, you godless bastard!” she hissed, trying to loosen the iron grip on her throat.