"You're a bitch," Rebekah says. It's the first thing out of her mouth when I yank the dagger out of her back and her skin goes from nightmare green to her usual stuck-up movie-star pale. She frowns down at the red satin she made me choose. "And you ruined my dress."

I still hold the dagger, which is probably why Rebekah hasn't killed me yet. It is oddly weighted, heavier than something of its size should be. "He's not dead," I tell her. "Klaus."

Rebekah stills. "And my father?"

I shake my head. She still isn't looking at me, but she seems to register the movement. "Klaus killed him."

Rebekah doesn't say anything for a long time. "Good," she says, finally. She touches her fingers to her mother's necklace. "Good."

There are lots of things I could ask her, starting with What do you mean, good? and including If you kill me now, can you try not to make it hurt too much? but what I do ask is something almost conversational. Almost. "What are you going to do?"

"Well, I'm not saying here, am I?" Rebekah shakes herself, turns to her mirror. She stares at her glittering lips as she speaks. Her lip gloss remains shiny even after an evening as a corpse and I stop myself from asking her what brand it is. "Forgive me if I find your idea of hospitality a bit cloying."

It's difficult, stabbing someone in the back. Physically difficult. There are bones there, muscles. Damon showed me the place but I still had to push hard to get the dagger through, to make sure it pierced her heart.

It's an intimate act. Killing someone. "Look, Rebekah," I begin, but then Damon is in the doorway and I don't know what I'd say next, anyway.

Damon doesn't even spare her a glance. "Barbie Klaus. Out," he says.

Rebekah walks by him, slowly, slowly. "Aren't you just the cat who got the bird. Tell me, Elena," she says, barely looking over her shoulder, "did he pretend to save Stefan the whole time, or just when you were around to witness it?"

Like that, they're at each other's throats. "I'll end you," Damon grits. It would have been slightly more threatening if his voice had been louder than a wheeze.

The dagger clatters to the floor as I stutter forward. Because I'm going to, what? Pry her undead fingers from his windpipe?

Rebekah doesn't even sound strained. "I'd say I'd like to see you try," she lilts, "but I find mediocrity so tedious, don't you?"

She releases him, and Damon takes a stumbling step backward. He's off-balance. Damon is never off-balance. I'm reaching for him before I mean to reach for him and he waves me off, impatient. "Get out," he manages, glaring at Rebekah.

She smirks, keeping her gaze on Damon as she walks across the room - toward me, the opposite direction from the door - and dips down to pick up the dagger. The dagger I had been holding; my insurance policy. "I'll just take this," she says. "I would hate for it to fall into the wrong hands."

She looks at me then, and it's different from the way she'd met my eyes in the mirror the day before. Then, I'd been able to see the girl she'd been, once upon a time. Now all I can see is how very much older than me she really is. Older, and capable of inifinitely more destruction.

I keep my gaze steady but I know she can see the pulse in my neck, fluttering like crazy.

When she's sure I've gotten the message, Rebekah sashays out, all hips and heels. I let out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding. It sounds more like a sob. I can still feel the indentation of the dagger's hilt in my palms.

I'm aware of Damon by degrees, the way a room can go from chilly to sweltering: the extremes are the only thing you notice. First he's there and then he's there, his eyes on my face, his hands. "Breathe," he says, and that's how I know I've dropped to my knees.

"The dagger, Damon," I hear myself saying. "She has the dagger."

"She also has a wicked case of post-stabbing death breath," he says. "You win some, you lose some."

"We have nothing now. She could be waiting outside. She could be anywhere."

"You're still under Klaus' protection," Damon tells me. He's touching my hair and I want to clutch at his wrists, hold him still because the motion of his hands reminds me how ephemeral I am to him. How temporary. "Even if she's going after him, which I don't think even she'd be stupid enough to do, she wouldn't bother with you."

"I stabbed her, Damon. Worse than that, I pretended to be her friend and then I stabbed her."

"Still," he says. "She's not going to kill you."

His hands settle on my shoulders and I stop myself from moving forward. It would be simple, to insert myself into his arms. Simple, and disingenuous. The comfort I crave isn't something I can just take. "There are plenty of things she could do to me that wouldn't involve killing me. Plenty of people she could hurt. My brother. Bonnie." You, I don't say, because even borderline hysterical I recognize that there are lines.

"She won't come back," Damon says.

I search his face, because it must be written there if he's lying. "How do you know?"

"Because you have nothing she wants anymore," he says, and it's not me he's talking about, it's the fact that Stefan made a choice and I am not it. She could have him, he doesn't say, and I don't say Yeah, I know. Maybe she's what Stefan wants now. I don't know.

But I don't know anything about what Rebekah wants either, do I? She was loved, and she was betrayed. Or, she loved, and she loved a lie. She woke up and the world was different from what she'd always believed it to be, hard and cold and wrong, and the one person she'd clung to turned out to be the one who had hurt her in the first place.

I am the one who dropped the dagger. Just like I am the one who let Stefan go, the one who couldn't hold her breath and close her eyes long enough for the fairy tale to reassert itself. And I will never be able to pay for it, not the way I should.

I shrug out of Damon's grasp and stumble down the hall, out the front door and into the air that smells like rain, even though the sky is clear and blue. A storm is coming, I think.

When Caroline sends me a text the next morning asking why the evil blood slut's still angling to be head cheerleader, I'm not even surprised. Not really.