Even from a distance, he was constantly failing @Nash.
![[Image: 5BdYuOb.png]](https://i.imgur.com/5BdYuOb.png)
She watched, she let Magg run the show. Isla need only be here when things got messy and complicated. Then things could be muddled into whoever's favor she wanted. Especially when the older man seemed so intent to go belly up on the two young women.
An eye for an eye would be too easy, too quick for how long everyone has suffered. And although she kept her tone low and flat, there was something brewing in her gaze. Sharp and pointed as if she might wound him with it alone. The Backwater needs payment for two daughters, you know. Isla had gone home, brief and fleeting where she had seemed almost an entirely different girl. She doubted that counted in her father's eyes. So she craved to bring down the Backwater's weight here too for no reason other than she could.
A pound of flesh would not be enough. One life would not have even been enough.
What on earth could make the tables balanced? Suffering required suffering.
In an ugly way, she wondered if her father had ever looked the same. Had he ever crumpled down from his heartbreak and loss? Maybe he had only ever been rage and maybe she carried that torch now as she looked upon this man. Magg had disengaged, had left these two here to stand in the smoldering embers of whatever string of tragedies bound them all together.
Go, Her voice low and cold. She did not speak with a striking venom or flaming anger. Oh she had felt those things welling in a grand amount within her chest, but out loud? She only wanted to ice him out.
Let them all come away from here colder.
Then I will.
Ultimately it hardly mattered who departed. Only that someone did. Her fur on raised ends, she turned at once. Figure hunched over and skulking. It would be just as easy to depart off into the shadows she had arrived from.
She imagined there was nothing he could say to make her stay. To make her look at those sad, heartbroken eyes. To remember every cold stab of grief when she looked upon his face.
She had not learned to hate him for who he was, only to hate him for what he represented to her. They had been doomed since Sephrina's death.