You couldn’t help yourself, could you? You tried and tried to deny the inevitable, yet when it came down to it, you folded just like you swore you never would. You let the opportunity slip right through your fingers. There wasn’t a fight. You promised them that there’d be at least a struggle. But there wasn’t. You lied. You took their trust and threw it away like it was nothing.

You snuck around in the night. The deafening silence was pierced by your clumsy footsteps. Somehow, through skill or blind luck, you managed to not alert anyone to your presence. If you had, if you had not recovered your missed step on the stairs, or had dropped that precious vase you carelessly bumped into, then surely you would have been caught.

And you would’ve been better off for it.

But you remained blissfully ignorant as you circumvented the security measures. A dog was your first challenge. She met you with a growl. You offered her a treat from the nearby basket. She forgave you quickly for stepping on her tail and went back to sleep. You started to sweat now. You were wondering whether this excursion was worth the reward. All you had to do was wait until morning to earn your share in it, but you couldn’t wait and you certainly couldn’t share.

Greed coursed through your veins and urged you forward. You traced the memorised steps to the room your target was in, glancing hesitantly at the shifting shadows that the moonlight cast. The door was locked this time. You were sure that it wouldn’t be, that they would have kept it open, even after you accidentally hinted at your motive to the wrong person earlier that day. Your lock picking skills weren’t to be underestimated though. At least, you knew exactly where the key was hidden.

You quickly backtracked to where the keys for the building were hidden. The metal gave a loud clang at your touch. You shot a glance behind you and listened for a few seconds, but nobody came to investigate. So you carefully grabbed the correct key and hurried yourself back to the door. This whole thing was taking far longer than you expected and you weren’t about to be caught for being slow. You unlocked the door and eagerly swung it open.

The keys dropped to the floor as you stared blankly at where your prize was hidden. A nearby streetlight illuminated the room in a pale yellow and caused you to squint for a moment. You rushed forward and brought out your prize, carefully placing it on a nearby bench. For a moment, you considered attacking it with your bare hands. You soon found the sense to use the appropriate tools. It took less than a minute for you to set yourself up, half crawled on top of the bench for a better view of the object of your desire.

And then you attacked. You were like a starved predator devouring its prey with a primal force. Pieces of it flung against the walls, staining everything in the room with a deep red. It stuck to your face as your forced large amounts into your mouth, swallowing it without the least care for why it was kept from you for so long. Here it had been waiting for you for what seemed to be years, when it reality was mere hours. Yet it was years of preparation that went into it, and you, you were never intended to receive it.

You realised this once it was already half gone. A strange swimming feeling flooded your head and sent you crashing into the floor. The light changed colours, first to the red of the walls, then to a pale green, and then to a bright, bright blue. It was the blue of your mother’s eyes. Those eyes that were so, so wide as they filled with tears while staring down at you. The green belonged to your father who was shouting and shouting about the thing you had devoured, which was poisoned and never, never meant for a six year old to handle.

In the midst of their tears and shouting, you lay there, with your eyes rolled back and a numbness spreading from the very ends of your toes right up to your chest. It tightened as you struggled to breathe. Every breath produced a rasping sound from your throat, as if it too was numbing and constricting at once. The dog you passed earlier was now fully awake, howling at your side as if to alert the whole world that her best friend had fallen.

For in that moment you died, with a smile on your face, because you had finally eaten that cake.