Malice:
-The intention/desire to do evil: ill will.
-Wrongful intention as increasing the guilt of certain offenses.
I fell through the open air like a stone through water. In all of my most dizzying daydreams I had expected the soft-looking clouds to cradle my fall, but there I was, dropping like a stone through the sky, away from God, and into the waiting arms of the Devil. Fitting though, that my body is already falling when I know my soul will continue after the breath leaves my chest.
A waste of a perfectly good bosom if you ask me.
I could see the pained look on Athos' face as I let myself fall. I have done a lot of things in my life, but none so cruel or as kind as this, my last act.
I have stolen from the house of God. I stole from the convent artifacts and wealth and a man. Evil runs in my veins with my blood and the seven sins sit upon my shoulders. My life up to this point has been filled with deceit and deception. Thinking back I wonder why it is that I have ended up in this position, what made me chose the greater of two evils at every fork in the road until all options of good had disappeared. I trained myself to have no emotions. To freeze all my feelings and trap them in never melting ice in my heart and taking the title of Milady de Winter. It's fitting for my name to be the season of cold. The season of death. For I seem to kill whatever I come into contact with, whether it be a young man's heart or his spirit, or even just a blooming rose. I am like an angel of death.
Though as I fell my thoughts were not of the hearts I've wounded, or even myself and what was to be my fate. My thoughts remained on the owner of the sorrowful eyes that watched me fall to the ocean below. Athos: the one man who set spring's warmth over my heart and showed me the good in this world. I had taken that man as a fool when I met him, and once I figured out he was smart, used my feminine charms to manipulate him to my will. The only man I ever truly cared for I lied to and used in the cruelest ways possible. I strung him along and then left him on the streets of Venice to be dishonored. While I enjoyed the rich luxuries of the find, Athos was forced out of the musketeers and into the taverns. To distract myself from addressing this fact I devoted myself to Buckingham and his creation of the ultimate war machine. Successful as it was, I still felt more hollow with this new way of earning riches.
Though coming back to the moment just before my body hit the breaking waves I thought I could see his eyes again. It really was kind to have spared him the task of killing me himself, and it is probably the only kind deed I have done in my life with my heart behind it. The cruelty of my action didn't escape me though, and I know the poor man will live with the sight of me falling from the ship forever in his mind and the pain of his love for me forever in his heart.
Still, I don't wish to change anything between us, lest he see what a softhearted fool I am beneath my many masks. I don't think anyone knows who I truly am, myself included for I have forgotten my true name long ago. The malicious character of Milady de Winter has eaten away my soul until only the greed and the pride remained. As my body hit the water, I made peace with myself.