Page 39 of Decimation

The ache in my body sharpens with her weight on me, the barely healed skin pulling, the burns singing, but I don’t say a word, I don’t let it show because I need this comfort, I need…

Oh god, he’s going to find us.

He’s going to walk in and see this, and he will make me watch what he does to her. Then he will make me thank him for the lesson, and I will. I will thank him, because he has already taught me how.

Perhaps she senses my fear, perhaps her own sense of survival kicks in because she moves quickly, she composes herself and undoes the last of my bindings.

I’m naked. Even in winter, I’m not permitted a blanket. My body is a map of his devotion, and he likes to read it often.

But he’s a prophet. He knows best.

Does he though? Is that true or another lie, another hook buried in my mind that I’ll keep tugging at until I tear?

My mother helps me sit upright, and the room tilts so badly I have to grip her arm. My body feels weak, unused, but I can move. I can walk. Between my legs, a slow, humiliated leak of arousal slides down my thigh, because my body doesn’t know the difference anymore between escape and anticipation, between terror and the beginning of a session. I want to scrub it away, to hide it from her, but there’s no time.

“We need to go. Right now. We need to get out of here,” she says, her voice urgent but steady.

Something in her urgency cuts through the fog that has long settled over my thinking. I look at her properly for the first time. Why is she even here? What the hell is this?

“What’s happened?” I ask. “How did you even…”

“I’ve had enough,” she says, her aura pulsing with dark reds, anger, but also a deep, aching sorrow. “I’m not letting him do this to you anymore, not after Cass. I have a plan. Fake passports, everything. We’re leaving before he can find us, before anyone can find us.”

Cass. The name lands in my chest like a stone. Cass, my poor dead sister. I haven’t thought of her, couldn’t think of her, not while I have been here, not while I am spread like this, used like this.

I start trembling uncontrollably, because I don’t know what happens now. Ezekiel will be furious. Ezekiel, who promised me I would be his masterpiece, his most beloved, the one who would finally understand that pain is the only honest intimacy, that submission is the only freedom. He has spent all this time, all this effort, and for what? He isn’t a man who simply shrugs off failure. He will want to make someone pay for it, and who better than me? He will find me, and he will take me apart so slowly that I will beg to be Cass, beg to be nothing, beg to be the thing he’s been sculpting all along.

“He’s going to kill me,” I whisper, and I know it’s true. But worse, I know he’ll make me love it first.

My mother takes my arm, not roughly but firmly, wrapping it around her neck to prop me up. Her aura shifts to a steady, calming blue; resolve. Her hand brushes the small of my back where a wound is still raised and tender, one that makes my cunt clench whenever I touch it, because he conditioned that response with hours of patient, reverent torture.

“He’ll kill us all if he gets the chance,” she says.

“Where is he?” I reply.

“I don’t know. There was an explosion, some plot to kill a Guardian that backfired. That’s why we’re moving now, while he’s MIA.”

“Wait…” I say, only she’s already pulling me to my feet.

The pain is immediate and total, the burns stretch, the deep, internal ache where Isaac spent last night teaching me to take him in ways my body still resists. I almost collapse back onto the floor but she’s grabbing me, holding me with a strength I’d never believe she possessed and she’s carrying me out the door.

“We’ll make it,” she says, her voice firm. “I promise you, we’ll make it.”

I want to believe her. I need to believe her. But all I can think is that he’s out there, that he will be hunting us, and he won’t stop until he finds me. And when he does, he will finish what he started. He will open me up in every way a body can be opened, and he will fill those spaces with himself until there is no Leandra left, only a warm, willing, endlessly responsive thing that prays with its hips and weeps gratitude with its cunt.

And the worst, most horrifying part, the part that makes me stumble even as my mother drags me forward is that some small, trained, treacherous part of me still wants to know what that would feel like.

“Trust me,” she says, her aura glowing with a fierce, unyielding light. “We’re getting out of here.”

I nod, and I let her pull me into the dark, my body a ruin of conditioned desire and fresh terror, my heart a war between the daughter I used to be and the creature I am almost finished becoming.

The corridor beyond is a pit of darkness, swallowing all light, all sound.

How she navigates this labyrinth I have no idea; she moves like a woman who has rehearsed this escape in the marrow of her bones, each twist and turn a prayer whispered in the dark, each gap a wound she has memorized.

We reach a door and she pushes through, and the night air rushes in like a gasp from a dying god. I inhale, and the outside world floods my lungs, cold and sharp as broken glass. My first breath is not of freedom but of a different kind of prison because I know I am not free, will not be free, not as long as Ezekiel is alive, not as long as he is still hunting me.

And hunt he will.