A pair of glittering purple eyes snapped open.
Amongst the noise and the chaos, a girl with hair as black as the night sky and eyes that glowed like a jewel stood up.
There was a look of confusion on her face as she surveyed her surroundings. A few feet away from her there was a group of people huddled close together. A woman with straight blonde hair was holding onto what looked to be her two children, two girls with similarly bright blonde hair. A man with green eyes and light brown hair was stood beside them, with his hand on the woman's shoulder.
As Yvette stared at these strange yet somehow familiar people, she realised something.
She died. She had definitely died. She remembered experiencing turbulence on her flight home, and she remembered hearing the screams of the passengers around her as the plane they were all on started to take a dive.
The next thing she knew she was... here. Standing up and looking at what should be a group of strangers, but somehow she felt an odd connection to them too. This was definitely... reincarnation, right? She was dead and now she was alive again.
Yvette was surprised. She would never have thought that she of all people would've been granted the chance to live again. After all, she was an assassin.
"But that is exactly why I chose you."
There was a sudden voice in her ear, and when Yvette turned around in surprise, there was the ghostly image of a girl standing in front of her. The girl had seemingly glowing purple eyes and sleek, straight black hair. She was beautiful. And she was obviously dead. There was a knife sticking out of her stomach, and in the area surrounding the wound, her dress was stained red.
"What is this?" Yvette asked. "What do you mean you chose me? Who are you?"
The girl smiled sadly. "My name is Yvette Decaux, and I... chose to bring you here to change everything."
And so the dead girl that shared her name told her story.
Yvette Decaux was born to a couple named Claude and Adele Decaux. She was their second born child, birthed two years after her older sister Sabine Decaux. Things went wrong from the moment Yvette was born, and it was all because of her purple eyes.
The Decaux family was known for their pink eyes. Any girls born to the Decaux line were blessed with gem like pink eyes. Until Yvette. The moment she opened her eyes and everyone saw that they were purple instead of pink, she was seen as an abomination. Unnatural.
At home they treated Yvette like an object, something they could use and discard as they pleased. Claude and Adele would lock Yvette up in the cellar for days on end whenever they felt like it, starving her on and off. Sabine would force Yvette to play dangerous 'games', ordering her to climb steep mountains just to 'fetch' a specific type of plant, to knock over a hive of bees, or to wait on her hand and foot as if she was a maid. Genevieve, Yvette's younger sister and the Decaux's third daughter, would often have tea parties where she would invite her friends over and call for Yvette to do humiliating things in front of them.
Yvette lived day to day being abused and ridiculed. There was not a single moment of reprieve for her in the Decaux manor.
But things changed the moment Yvette met Leon, by chance, in the woods one day. Sabine had ordered her to go find some rabbits to bring back for her to keep as pets, probably hoping that Yvette would get mauled by some wild animal in the process. Instead, Yvette ended up stumbling across the injured Leon, who was laid unconscious amongst the trees.
After she brought a rabbit back for Sabine, under the moonlight Yvette ventured out to the woods again, finding the injured Leon still there. She knew she couldn't bring him back to the manor, so instead she had returned with materials so that she could patch him up there. She cleaned and dressed his wounds, having experiencing from tending to her own wounds, and slowly waited for him to wake up.
When he opened his eyes again and they locked gazes, something passed between them in the moment. He thanked her for her care, told her he had to leave, but asked for her name so that he could find her again in the future.
A week later, while Yvette was once again locked in the cellar, Leon had come to the Decaux manor searching for her. What Yvette didn't know was that Leon was in fact, the crown prince of Royaume, Leon Chevalier.
She had rescued him in the woods, and in turn he came and rescued her from her family.
Yvette had thought that she had finally achieved her happy ending, that after all those miserable years with her family had paved the way for a bright future. But things were not so simple.
Leon was actually already engaged to another woman, and had been since he was a child. Louise Allain had been raised to become queen, and just because Leon had fallen in love and found another woman, it did not change that fact.
Leon would become the king, Louise would become the queen, and Yvette would be nothing more than a spare wife.
Even so, despite this, Yvette had tried to keep her mind open. Leon had promised her his heart, no matter who his queen was, and Yvette believed him. So she accepted her role as a mere second wife, she accepted the quiet but peaceful life in a separate part of the castle away from Leon and Louise, and she never asked for anything more.
It was a shame that despite Yvette's belief in her love with Leon, Leon's heart wavered. The more time he spent with Louise the more space he was making for her in his heart, and when she fell pregnant with his first child, he was overjoyed.
It was unfortunate that Yvette fell pregnant at the same time, and the news of this caused such distress to Louise that she almost lost her baby. Leon then knew that he had to make a choice, it was one wife or the other, one child or the other. And, at the end of the day, what was a mere second wife compared to a queen?
So, in the darkness of the night, Leon went to visit Yvette.
He hesitated, but in the end it was his hand that plunged the knife into her stomach, instantly killing the child, and later the mother.
As Yvette laid there, bleeding out on her bedroom floor, she wondered where it all went wrong. Then, as she was on the brink of fading away, she begged for only one thing: retribution.