Page 102 of Decimation

I grind my heel down, twisting, feeling the last solid pieces give way until there is nothing left but a flattened, unrecognizable smear of dirt.

The air in this room still tastes the same, even after all these years.

Konstantine’s head lolls against my shoulder, a string of saliva connecting his slack lips to the cotton of my shirt. He’s heavier than he looks, a sack of useless, pampered flesh.

I carry him not with strain but with the deliberate, ceremonial pace of a man bearing a sacred offering.

My offering. To my own altar. To myself.

The bed is still here. The iron frame, the thin mattress where I spent years drowning in a chemical fog, while that bitch abused my body and my own brother stood and watched and did nothing.

I lay him down. The mattress sighs under his weight, a sound so familiar it makes my teeth ache.

My hands, moving with a surgeon’s precision, begin their work. I grab that very same rope they used on me, and I bind him with it. Bind him with my dried-up blood, with my pain, with my haunted memories.

First his wrists, crossed and lashed to the iron headboard, then his ankles, spread just enough to make him feel vulnerable, tied to the foot of the bed.

He is a starfish splayed out for dissection, and I am the one holding the knife.

He stirs for a second, making a pathetic mewling sound in his throat. His eyelids flutter, trying to open, but the sedative I slipped into his veins is a heavy, black tide pulling him back under.

“Brother,” I whisper, but he doesn’t respond. The drug will keep him in a twilight state, a hazy purgatory where he can feel, he can hear, but he cannot move, cannot scream.

He will be a prisoner in the cathedral of his own skull.

Just as I was.

As I step back, I look at him, truly look at him, at what he has become, at what he is now.

And there it is. All my hatred. All my rage. It all comes flooding back like a tsunami bursting through the floodgates.

His mouth is open, a wet, dark hole, and a soft snore rattles in his throat. He looks like a landed fish, gasping for a world it cannot comprehend.

“It should have been you.”

Our father’s words, a deathbed rasp, meant for me.

It should have been me. From the very beginning. I should have been the one anointed with the chrism of power. Because Konstantine was always too weak, too pathetic, too human to ever stand a chance of ruling anything more than a dinner party.

And I realise then that is not just hate I feel, but pity. A derision so profound it almost feels like mercy. You poor, stupid creature. You were born a lamb in a world of wolves, and you were foolish enough to think a title alone would give you fangs.

My gaze traces the line of his jaw, the vulnerable arch of his throat where the needle’s mark is a tiny, perfect ruby.

The helplessness suits him. It strips away the pretence of authority, the borrowed robes of an office he never earned, and reveals the truth of him; a soft, pampered object. A plaything. He was always drawn to the fire, even as he tried to smother it. Now I am the fire, and he is nothing but kindling, bound and waiting for the match.

God is showing me the way now.

Every step I have taken, every humiliation I have endured has been a rung on a ladder leading to this room, this moment.

I realise suddenly that God didn’t abandon me here; He forged me here.

He let them lock me in this box so I could learn the exquisite architecture of suffering. And now, He is granting me everything. He is handing me the keys to the kingdom, and my brother is the lock I must break to open the door.

And break it I will. Gladly.

I just have to keep him here, keep him contained. A ghost in the family attic. I will tend to him. I will feed him the same poison they fed me, drop by drop, and I will watch the light in his eyes dim to a guttering candle flame.

I will be his only visitor, his only God.