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“Severine, be a dear and show this gentleman to his demise, would you?”
She bows her head, stays still.
(Good girls, or at least, people who play at being good girls, do as they are told.)
In this whole scheme, she is not innocent. Naive, she might have been once upon a time, but innocent, never.
“Darling,” Raoul Silva sings. “Surely this will not be a problem for you.”
No. This won’t.
Severine lifts her chin and smiles. She knows how she looks now, fragile and broken, the perfect kind of puppet to admire before the strings are cut and the limbs are smashed into bits. This is the look she’s perfected in the mirror, for how else is she supposed to please the monsters in her bed?
Severine is not naive enough to believe her fairytale will have a happy ending.
Before the love story begins, there is a little girl who dreams of freedom, of love. Other people bought and sold her innocence, until she learned what it meant to be a prize.
Then the cursed prince walks in, a gwailo who is actually a ghost. He is the first person she’s met who has died but not stayed dead.
“I can teach you to do the same,” he whispers to her. “Burn away your former self, and rise from the ashes. You could be such a beautiful bird, my darling.”
She likes the sound of that. Birds are beautiful and, most importantly, free.
Her new name is Severine. The cursed prince laughs as he walks her out the door. “Anything for you, my darling, anything to start your new life,” silver-tongued Silva promises to her.
Silva’s computer skills give her access to a world of possibilities, but she already knows what she doesn’t want.
There will be no wedding. The gwailos would insist on her wearing all white, and that dress is reserved for her real funeral.
(Red is the color that scares off monsters, and she needs their protection for now.)
Silva teaches Severine how to talk to monsters. There is a new language she has to learn, made of death, secrets, and betrayal. People have always been pawns: she’s known this ever since her body was turned into a reward for other people’s luck. Only now, she cannot tell if she is a piece or a player in her prince’s games.
”Beautiful objects do not look sad, darling,” Silva says to Severine. There will be no more tears in her eyes, she vows. There is no purpose in crying anymore.
“Yes, my dear,” she says. The pretty bird is best to play bait.
“Does he always get what he wants?”
“More than you know.”
When Severine sees James Bond in a crowded Macau casino, she knows that he will be the death of her. She has been at this game too long, for now she knows how a killer walks, how a hunter stalks, before she resigns herself to her well rehearsed part.
Here she is, a beautiful bird with a broken wing, perhaps two.
“I must ask you a business question. It has to do with death,” she says.
“A subject in which you are well versed,” says Mr. Bond. James Bond.
There is a long line of names she can recite off the top of her head, a long line of people who she has sent to their deaths. Every would-be-saviour shares their name before she steps back to let the bodyguards close in to protect Silva’s honor instead of hers.
Severine remembers all those people turned into pawns into corpses, even Patrice, who was someone else before he became a ghost in Silva’s machine. Every death adds a last breath that Severine carries with her like the brands on her wrists.
(Lucky number nine is burned onto her wrist.)
”I don’t gamble. I’m not very lucky.”
Her role in the story is to be the reward for someone else’s luck. Prizes don’t get to play the game, as Mr. Bond learns quickly.
“I’m guessing he was your way out. Perhaps you were even in love, but that was a long time ago,” says Mr. Bond.
Once upon a time, in a land far far away, a prince was transformed into a monster to match his true nature. Only when he learned to love, would he be turned human again.
The plot twist is that instead of learning to love, he learned to collect debt while hunting the witch who had cursed him. What is a monster without a damsel in distress?
“I’m sorry,” she says, as Mr. Bond is shoved away.
She is not sorry that they are about to die. She is sorry that he will have to continue to suffer, and she will not.
White is the color for a funeral and today Raoul has dressed his best.
“Someone usually dies,” Mr. Bond had said. She does not mind.
A gun fires.
She is free.