That’s always been your problem, Alice, Regina Javonivic, the Great and Terrible, said. You think like a boy, you act like a boy. But there’s nothing swinging between your legs, in case you haven’t noticed. Try being the woman God intended you to be. Find purpose. Find a man and let him take care of you. Have some children and quit pretending you have a penis.

“No, goddammit,” Javonivic said out loud, immediately clasping a hand to her mouth.

No, no, no. This wouldn’t do. She wouldn’t let that awful bitch torment her and traumatize her as she had when she was a teenager. She had worked hard to be where she was now, a member of the elite DSU. She had succeeded in a profession ruled by men and she would not let that bitch take it all away from her now.

The idea was unacceptable.

You exorcised her years ago, Javonivic thought. Why are you letting her get to you now that she’s been dead ten years?

That was the question, wasn’t it? The very one that she fought with day in and day out. Her mother (she didn’t much care to refer to Regina by that term) still had a hold on her. From beyond the grave, that evil witch was still tormenting her. Javonivic made herself calm down. Regina was dead. She was powerless. If anyone was truly tormenting her, it was herself and she knew it.

But the memories of Regina were carved into her soul, electroplated onto her brain. Even on those days when she successfully purged that awful woman from her conscious mind, she was never really gone; she was merely hiding in the cobwebbed sub-cellar of her subconscious, a monster skulking in the shadows under the stairs waiting to reach out and grab her.

Javy’s childhood had been shit.

Her father died when she was five (lost at sea in a fishing boat, or so she was told) and that’s when Regina’s reign of terror began. Maybe the siege itself didn’t really begin until she was ten or so, the true devastation and bloodshed being her teenage years, but it had been apparent that something was off about her mother from her earliest memories. That narrow, pallid face, those hot eyes that would burn right through you.

Sitting there, Javy realized she was breathing hard, beads of sweat on her brow.

The torment itself was rarely physical, mostly psychological, but it had been horrendous. Physical scars healed, but the ones slashed into the psyche of a young, impressionable girl never went away. They scabbed over, yes, but sooner or later, she picked at them because she couldn’t help herself and then the poisoned blood ran hot and feverish.