The dressing table where they sat strained under the silver and gold framed images of those who’d come before her, those who had long since turned to nothing more than dust and sour memories. There were no pictures of her in the collection; all of them predated her mother’s death, so Ruby had always reckoned it was her mother who’d assembled the photos there. Ruby glanced in the mirror, past her own flickering reflection, at her father as he lay rasping and shaking in his bloodstained sheets. Did the Judge hold on to the photos because he truly felt some form of affection for the people depicted, or did he just care so little as to never have them removed? No, more than likely they’d remained in place as a testament to his own origins, witnesses to his own greatness, betrayers of his own vanity. The portraits were all more or less familiar to her; she’d seen them many times during her life. One of them, though, had always fascinated her.
