Page 36 of Decimation

The words tear out of me, raw and bleeding as the rest of me and I hate myself for still needing to ask, still needing the answer to be different even as I try to gouge out his damned eyes.

My nails make contact. I feel as they dig in, as they drag down his cheek, four deep furrows that open like red mouths and the sight of his blood, his blood is the most exquisite thing I have ever tasted. I hear him hiss, a serpentine sound and for one endless delicious second, I think I might actually kill him.

Then Isaac grabs me by my hair. The yank is brutal, ripping strands from my scalp, and my head snaps back so hard I hear something pop in my neck. I kick out, I thrash in his arms, animal and undone, my heels slamming against his shins, my fingers clawing backwards for his face.

But his grip is iron, and my body is already broken, already far too used up.

Isaac throws me down onto the floor, and the impact drives the air from my lungs, my vision going starburst white. I try to rise, to keep fighting because the rage is still eating me alive from the inside, but then his hand strikes my face. The blow is surgical, precise, a lesson in stillness. My head snaps sideways, and the world splinters into shards of light and dark.

I hear Ezekiel’s voice from very far away, calm and curious, as if I am a puzzle he is mildly interested in solving.

And then the darkness rushes up and everything goes black.

Iwake up in my room, my head throbbing with a deep, sickening pulse that seems to beat behind my eyes which refuse to open fully, the lids gummed together with dried tears.

The space is silent, but it’s a wrong kind of silence. Not peaceful, but emptied out, the chaos of my outburst replaced by an eerie stillness that presses against my eardrums like a held breath before a scream.

All the furniture is gone. The broken glass, the broken pieces removed and disposed of no doubt just as easily as they disposed of my poor sister, swept away like debris after a meal. Leaving nothing but bare floor, blank walls and the smell of bleach covering something older, something metallic.

I’m tied to the bed. Spread eagled. Just as I was when I first arrived here, my wrists and ankles bound with the same impersonal efficiency, the restraints biting into skin already tender with old bruises.

My skin has been stitched back together. I look like a patchwork quilt now. A grotesque manifestation of how broken I am on the inside.

I cannot move so I lie there, staring at the ceiling, my mind replaying Ezekiel’s words over and over like some god awful broken record that carves deeper grooves into my brain with every repetition, each syllable a fresh incision.

“She has a nice cunt. That is all.”

“She is nothing more than any of the others.”

The love I felt for him, the devotion, the belief, it’s shattered into a thousand pieces. I feel each shard as a separate, distinct wound, a glass splinter working its way through my chest cavity, scraping against my ribs, puncturing the soft tissue of everything I thought was true. His colours, once proof of his divinity now feel like a cruel joke, a trick of the light I was desperate enough to worship. Is God laughing at me? Are they all laughing at me? I can almost hear it, a chorus of amusement echoing from somewhere far above while I lie here, naked and bound and finally, finally seeing clearly.

I was a fool to think he cared for me. The realisation is not intellectual but physical, a cold, spreading numbness that starts in my chest and radiates outward, as if my heart has stopped pumping blood and started pumping something else entirely, something that freezes rather than warms.

I was a fool to believe I was anything more than a warm body, a vessel to be used and discarded when it ceased to amuse. I let him put his hands on me, I let him put his mouth on me. I called it love, I called it sacred. I spread my legs and opened my throat and called it devotion, and all the while he was measuring me against the others, comparing the tightness, the taste, the sounds I made when he hurt me.

But beneath the pain and betrayal, something else stirs. Not gentle, not healing but hot and sharp and alive. Anger. It rises from the wreckage of my heart like smoke from a house fire, acrid and blinding. Determination. It coils in my gut, a serpent waking from a long, forced hibernation. I won’t let him use me anymore. I won’t let him destroy me, not completely, not the core of me that is only now remembering how to snarl.

Ezekiel may have broken me, my body certainly, my trust absolutely, something tender and hopeful that I will never get back but I will rise from the ashes, even if I have to claw my way up with fingernails torn to the quick.

I will pretend if that’s what it takes.

I will smile, kneel, and offer my wrists for the restraints. When I am free of this place, when his guard is down and his cock is soft and he believes me tamed, I will do everything in my power to destroy him, to destroy them all, to make them feel even a fraction of what is tearing through me right now.

The room is dimly lit, the air thick with the scent of sweat and musk but beneath it is something else, something metallic and sour, like old blood left to dry in the cracks of the floorboards. My wrists are bound above my head, the coarse rope biting into my skin with every involuntary twitch. I tug against it, but it’s useless. She’s made sure of that. Ines stands before me, her naked body glistening in the flickering candlelight. Her dark skin is flawless, her curves hypnotic but I know the beauty is a mask, and beneath it lies something monstrous, something disgusting.

She smirks, her lips curling into a smile as she steps closer. Her fingers trail down my chest, her nails dig into my flesh, not scratching but carving shallow furrows that sting and weep. I grit my teeth, refusing to give her the satisfaction of hearing me cry out. My cock is hard, throbbing with a need I despise almost as much as her, a need they planted in me with the drugs my brother constantly slips into my veins. I hate the heat pooling in my gut, hate the way my hips want to rise to meet her touch. It’s not desire; it’s a violation my flesh welcomes against my will.

“You’re so predictable, Lazarus,” she purrs. “You hate me, but your body craves me. Isn’t that delicious?”

I glare at her, my jaw clenched so tight my teeth ache. “Go to fucking hell.”

She lets out a low, throaty laugh that sends a shiver down my spine not of arousal, but of primal dread. “Oh, darling, I’m already there, and I’m taking you with me.”

She climbs onto the bed, straddling me. Her weight presses down on me, her heat enveloping me like a fever. I try to turn my head away but she grabs my chin, her nails pinching the bone, forcing me to look at her. Her eyes are dark, filled with a twisted hunger that makes my stomach churn. There’s nothing human in that gaze, only appetite, only the cold curiosity of something that wants to see how much I can break before I stop being me.

“Look at me,” she commands. “Look at me while I take what I want from you.”

She lowers herself onto me, her wetness engulfing my cock. I groan, hating the pleasure that surges through me, hating the sickening wave that makes me feel complicit in my own defilement.