Page 144 of Decimation

My heart stutters. “Yes.”

“I told you I would make them pay for what they did to you.”

“Yes.”

The door swings open. The smell hits me first; sweat, fear, and the copper-tang of old blood. My stomach clenches.

“Open your eyes.”

I do.

And the world stops.

They hang from the ceiling like slaughtered lambs in an abattoir. Chains looped around wrists rubbed raw and bleeding, bodies suspended just high enough that their toes scrape the stone floor. The position stretches their shoulders at angles that will ache for days, if they have days left.

My father.

And Astrid.

My father’s head lolls forward, chin against his chest, grey-streaked hair plastered to his forehead with dried sweat. He’s thinner than I remember. Smaller. The man who filled every doorway of my childhood, whose voice shook the very rafters of our house, whose hands, God, his hands, shaped every nightmare I’ve ever had.

He looks like nothing now.

Astrid hangs beside him, her face twisted in defiance, her dark hair matted with sweat and grime. She’s thinner than I remember too, but her eyes burn with the same venom they always did. The same venom she had when she stood beside our father, urging him to sell me to Ezekiel. The same venom she had when she watched Cass be taken away too.

I cannot move.

I cannot breathe.

Lazarus’s hand remains on my back with a steady, reassuring pressure. “They were found in Istanbul.” he says, his voice low and intimate, meant only for me. “They’ve had a somewhat difficult journey over here…” His words remind me of my own journey. How my poor mother and I were bound, gagged, and transported like livestock to the slaughter. God, I hope he experienced the exact same treatment.

My father lifts his head.

His eyes find mine, and he sneers.

“Leandra.” My name in his mouth is a curse, a dismissal. The same way he’s always said it, like I’m nothing. Like I’m worthless and always have been. “I should have known you’d spread your legs for whoever would…”

Lazarus moves.

One moment he’s beside me. The next he’s standing before my father, and there’s a sound like a branch snapping, and my father’s head whips to the side with the force of the blow. Blood sprays from his split lip, arcing across the stone floor in a pattern that my synaesthesia paints in such pretty crimson streaks.

“You will address your daughter with respect,” Lazarus says, and his voice hasn’t changed at all. Still calm, still measured, still that same deep timbre that whispers love against my skin in the dark. “Or I will remove your tongue before we begin.”

My father works his jaw, spitting more blood onto the floor and then he really looks at Lazarus; at the tattoos that cover his skin, the symbols of the Grand Master that I’ve traced with my fingers a hundred times already now.

His face changes.

The sneer crumbles, the arrogance flickers. Something that might be genuine fear, the kind I never thought I’d see in my father’s eyes, creeps in at the edges.

“Grand Master,” he breathes. “I, I didn’t…”

“You didn’t know.” Lazarus steps back, and I can see his colours shifting now, the blue darkening to something almost black, shot through with lightning-flashes of silver rage. “You didn’t know that the daughter you sold to the Ezekiel, the daughter you gave to be carved up and remade now sits at the right hand of the Brethren itself.”

My father’s gaze swings back to me. I watch him reassess, watch him register the fine silk dress I wear; the jewels at my throat, the way Lazarus’s hand returns to my back with such possessive familiarity.

“How?” The word comes out strangled. “How did this happen? You were a Covenant Bride. How did you go from that to-to-to, the wife of the Grand Master himself?”

God it’s good to hear him stammer, to hear him for once show a little fear. I open my mouth to answer, but Lazarus speaks first.