Chapter Three: How to play risky games

My entire body goes into a shock and I jump from the door, shaking, seizing and screaming for help.

That thing that claims to be Sarissa has the chance to dive into my apartment and slam the door behind her. She grabs me and slams me on the ground. I try to crawl away, petrified, but I feel her strong grip on my hair as she forces me to rise and meet her cold, dead eyes.

I try to fight back, but before I could get my stance down, she counters. I try to charge again, but she aims for my legs and I lose my balance and hit the ground. When I dash up to my feet a third time and come at her with clawed hands, she grabs my wrists, slams me against the wall and pins me into it. I wince as I feel her twisting my wrists from behind, crying as my face smudges against the wall, dust and broken dry paint entering my mouth as I try to scream. Fighting her is no use. She was predicting my every move.

“Stay still, Indigo. I am not here to hurt you.”

Her voice is too calm, contrasting the aggression she has on me.

I am still panicking. My heart pounds dangerously. She can't be Sarissa. Sarissa is dead. Sarissa committed suicide and died five years ago.

“I am going to release you in three seconds,” she whispers to me, “If you stay still, shut the fuck up and listen to what I have to say, then, I won't have any reason knock you out.”

My chest heaves in and out as I feel her grip slowly loosen. I don't scream. I try not to panic. I stay still, just as she asked me to, refusing to leave the wall even after she has left me alone.

“Sarissa is dead,” I say.

She says nothing. I know she's standing there, but the silence that follows my statement is so loud. I hold my breath as I turn around, hands shaking uncontrollably as I face that thing that claimed to be my dead sister.

She stares right back at me with no words, with a silence that sends shivers down my spine.

Sarissa has the same gray eyes, but there is more ash than silver embedded in them. Same blonde hair, but streaks of brown dirties it, strand by strand. Her skin is white as snow, like she dug through her own grave and crawled out after years of no food, water, or sunlight. She stands there, cloaked in a dirty black hoodie that casts a shadow over the lids and bags of her dead eyes.

“Who are you?” I ask with a whisper.

She doesn't answer me, but she scoffs with something akin to amusement, stuffs her hands coolly into the pockets of her cloak and leans against the wall.

“Remember, ” she starts, her voice sounding hoarse, like what Sarissa would have sounded like if she had a cold that lasted a century, "Remember how I used to say that it would do the world a favour if some people just disappeared.”

“No, Sarissa always told me that,” I argue, “And she is dead. She jumped off a bridge and died in a river five years ago.”

I see a smirk playing at the corner of her dry lips, but I can't be sure if it's all in my head.

“And no one ever found her body,” She says boredly, sighing right after she blows off imaginary dust off her nails, “You know my favorite thing about being a creator is that all you have to do is just weave in the right trope, attach a cringe sob story to the piece-of-shit plot, and boom, you have a bunch of gullible humans slurping on your shit like a dick.”

I watch her, petrified and she walks into my room. She is so eerily calm in everything she does, even down to the way she sits on my bed and surveys the entire place in an uncomfortable silence. She shakes her head with a subtle chuckle.

“Was this the best you could do?” Her hands coolly rest against the wood edges of my bed as she judges my apartment, “You told me you always wanted to do one of those boring stuff like becoming a fucking surgeon or something like that. Never really fancied the idea of taking people's blood from a needle. A little unhinged, if you ask me, but, hey, if that was your calling, no judging, right? Just didn't expect all your dreams would die and come to—” she pauses, “this.”

“Sarissa was the only one who knew I wanted to become a doctor,” I say.

“Well, Sarissa faked her death.” she says straightly.

I stand there, dumbfounded, confused and on the verge of tears.

“I did what was best for the world, Indigo,” she says, “Everyone already hated me after what happened the night that Fraser won. Lawsuits were on my tail. They wanted me behind bars, so I did the world a favor and disappeared. But don't worry, I'm back now and I have a plan that would be for both our best interests.”

She had to be insane.

This woman, claiming to be Sarissa, had to be fucking insane!

“When’s my birthday?” I asked her.

“4th September,” she easily answered.

“Year?”

“2001.”

“Favorite color?”

“Periwinkle.”

“Comfort food?”

“Pasta.”

“Favorite series?”

“Cobra Kai.”

“Movie?”

“Smile.”

“Celebrity Crush?”

“Jacob Elordi,” she answers with a scoff, dusting her shoulders as she adds, “Could have hooked you up if you wanted.”

“Sarissa always said that,” I say with subtle realization, “Okay, and so what is one thing else about me that nobody else knows besides Sarissa?”

“Which one, when you got tonsillitis from messing around with a vibrator or when you followed your college crush and his fling down to his house and snuck into their room after you learned from snooping through their chats that they were going to fuck at his place and you wanted to find out if he was really nine inches or if he was just talking a big game in her DMs?”

My eyes bulge open. Mortification overwhelms me. Sarissa doesn't faze.

“And, then you came ranting to me after you found out he had nothing more than a fullstop on those hairy balls,” she rolls her eyes as she speaks. “At least it killed that weird obsession you had for that loser. He looked like a fucking goat.”

“This can't be happening…”

“Take a seat, Indigo,” she tells me, “We have a lot to discuss. I think you'd like my offer.”

“Are you being serious right now?” I ask her, as I feel the anger rising in me at her audacity.

“Indigo.—”

“Sarissa, you just walk in here from nowhere and tell me that for the past five years, you have been pretending to be dead and you think it's okay to follow that up by demanding something from me?! Are you sick, Sarissa? I grieved for you! Do you even know what it's been like since you left? Look at this shithole I live in! Look at the mess I became because of you!—”

“And THAT'S why I am back, Indigo! I can get you out of here, change your whole life and make you a fortune! You can have everything you have ever wanted! A billion dollars, Indigo!—”

My blood boils even more as I let her have it.

“I don't CARE about a billion—woah.” I stop, frowning and taking a step back, “What did you say, Sarissa?”

She smiles. “Billions, Indigo. You could have a billion dollars.”

“And what's in it for you?” I ask.

“My name and dignity as Sarissa Mae, by simply overthrowing Gabi Fraser and taking back everything she's taken from me.”

I stay quiet, watching her for a moment longer.

“I am still pretty fucking pissed at you,” I say, “But, tell me how the fuck do you intend to do that? ”

“Do you have a laptop?” She asks me.

I search around for it with my eyes and find it somewhere on the ground.

“Well, yes, but it's got a virus so it’s not really the best you can find out there—”

Sarissa grabs the laptop before I am done talking, opens it, correctly types in my password and starts to search a bunch of nonsense online as she speaks, her words coming out in a disjointed stream.

“Roots. Spring. Manipulation. Shine…”

“Sarissa…”

She stops typing for a second and faces me.

“If I want to take over Gabi Fraser, I have to beat her in her own game,” she says with a manic smile.

“Your plan is a comeback, Sarissa,” I said dryly, unimpressed.

“Not just any type of comeback,” she clarifies, “I have to write a book in the same genre she excels in, using her tropes but taking it up a notch enough to beat her off her own genre and throw her off the market completely, until she is a forgotten name that no one remembers.”

“Gabi Fraser only writes books on the Mafia-billionaire genre. You have never written in that genre before, Sarissa. You don't know anything about it,” I tell her.

“Exactly,” she answers.

I'm lost.

“I studied Gabi's lead females. How they think and operate, down to how to predict their next moves. I tried to figure out what it was about them, all of them in all these different books, that got all these dangerous Mafia men so head over heels obsessed with them…”

I sit there and listen to her, waiting to see where she goes with this.

“Then, I picked up certain traits and qualities, likes and dislikes, do(s) and don't(s) from all these different female leads, and guess what?” She asked me, a manic glint in her gray eyes. The first thing akin to a glow that I had seen in them since she came here.

“What?”

“I created a fictional character called Anabel Waverly and I made her the complete opposite of the kind of women Gabi Fraser writes about.”

Sarissa speaks with psychotic passion as she starts to type again, fingers clicking loudly against the keys of my poor keyboard as she continues.

“She's perfect!” Sarissa says, “She’s not submissive. She's not soft. She's not your perfect Mafia's sweetheart! And she's a thorough, untamed madwoman.”

My eyes meet with her glinting ones when she turns back to me again.

“Imagine adding that kind of rawness to Gabi Fraser's tropes and it doesn't even end there! ” Sarissa says to me, “She has to win this Mafia man over and walk on thin ice every chance she gets, and so, to set this story to another level, I need to get practical.”

I listen carefully.

“I wondered how a fictional woman like ‘Anabel Waverley’ could get a Mafia to fall in love with her in an actual real-world setting. And, how the hold she can have over him would make her escape the consequences of pushing him...”

Okay...

Sarissa continues:

“The plan is simple: Find a worthy Mafia man to be my Lab rat and have him meet his ‘Anabel Waverly’.”

“Sarissa…”

“They say his name is Alessandro Ferrara,” she says as she turns the laptop to me.

All I catch is shadowed images of a man's form. Nothing that gets his face up close in any of the shots. Sarissa scrolls down countless images of countless horror deadlines as she continues talking.

“They say that he is dangerous,” she says, laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world when she comes across posts and articles highlighting his horrors. “They say he is a vile, wicked killer. No-mercy man. Always ready to put a bullet in the head of anyone who dares to cross him or betray him.” She looks at me, eyes crinkling with excitement, derangement and pure anticipation. “Isn't that perfect?”

I looked at Sarissa and swallowed, realization setting in.

“So, how do I fall into all of this?”

The smile Sarrisa gives me is nothing short of pure terror as she says to me:

“I want you to be Anabel Waverley.”