Page 42 of Decimation

A shudder rolls through me, half revulsion, half pure fucking ecstasy.

Konstantine turns and runs out, leaving the door wide open. I can see the chaos beyond; guards rushing past, shouting orders, their faces bleached with panic. My heart races, adrenaline surging through my veins like a resurrection. I am still naked on this bed, still slick with the evidence of my captivity, but I am no longer just a victim. I am a thing with teeth.

“Untie me,” I growl, my voice hoarse from disuse, from screaming, from moaning when I was told to moan.

They stop, staring in like I’m some rabid monster they don’t want to get too close to. I see the disgust in their eyes, and the fear beneath it, the way their gazes snag on my exposed flesh, the dark bruises on my thighs, the bite marks that map my chest. They know what was done here.

“Un-fucking-tie me!” I roar, my voice echoing off the walls. “Or my brother will have your heads!”

They scramble to obey, their hands trembling as they fumble with the ropes. One of them gags at the smell of me; sweat, old sex, and something festering. I file that away, a small cruelty to repay later.

The moment I’m free I leap off the bed, my legs wobbling dangerously beneath me. Christ, my body is stiff, sore, weak from so much time of inactivity. I can feel the atrophy in my muscles, the sores on my skin, the tender places where she liked to press just to hear me whimper.

I take a deep breath, forcing myself to stand tall. Forcing myself to prove that I’m still alive, still breathing while she is dead. The air tastes like freedom, and my nakedness feels suddenly like armour.

Let them look.

Let them see what they allowed.

Every scar, every hollow, every place she invaded, I wear it all like a threat.

“Clothes,” I bark at one of the guards. “Now.”

I’m running on pure adrenaline now. A voice in my head is screaming that this is the moment, this is my revenge. He hesitates, and I snap. I grab him by the throat, slamming him against the wall. His eyes widen in terror, and I feel a savage satisfaction at that, the way his pulse flutters under my thumb, the way his fear makes him small. I lean close, close enough to smell his sour breath, and I let him see the abyss swirling in me.

“Do it,” I hiss, my voice low and dangerous, a lover’s whisper from the end of the world.

He nods frantically and I release him, watching as he stumbles out of the room. I stand there, naked and trembling, but alive. God, for the first time in years, I feel alive. The ghost of Ines’s touch still clings to my skin, a phantom caress that makes me want to scrub myself raw but beneath it, something new is kindling; a dark, hungry flame that has nothing to do with submission.

The guard returns with a pile of clothes: simple black pants and a t-shirt, nothing fancy. I dress quickly, my movements stiff and awkward. The fabric scrapes against my sores, against the places where the ropes left their signatures but the pain is good, the pain is grounding. My body feels foreign, like it doesn’t belong to me anymore, like it belongs to her, to him, to the hours of forced pleasure and recorded shame. I push through that thought, the weakness.

I have to.

This is my moment, my revenge.

I reach up, grabbing a ceremonial sword from the wall. It’s rusty, blunt, but it’ll do. The weight of it in my hand is the first honest thing I’ve held in months.

I don’t know if I’m going to kill the intruders, or if it’s my brother I’m gunning for. Right now, I’ll happily take either. Right now, with the blood screaming in my ears and the memory of her mouth still disgustingly warm between my legs, I’ll happily butcher every living person in this place. I’ll paint the walls with their guilt and call it justice. I’ll make my brother watch one last time, watch me become the monster he helped create.

Blood. There’s so much blood.

I step into the room, and for a moment my mind simply refuses to process it; the sheer, glistening volume of it, smeared on the floor, the walls, the bedsheets, all of it. The air is thick with the stench of it, so dense I can taste it on my tongue, coating my throat like warm pennies.

I’ve smelled death before, metered it out more times than I can count but this, this is different. This isn’t the clean, purposeful death of a job. This is chaos.

The room is a slaughterhouse and I’m standing in the threshold, my feet sinking into the sticky pool of crimson that has already seeped across the floor, soaking through the soles of my boots, warm and obscenely intimate. The walls are streaked with it, smeared in arcs and splatters, as if someone painted with their hands dipped in red, a frenzied, desperate art. My eyes dart across the room, my pulse a dull roar in my ears, taking in the destruction. The bed is overturned, the sheets torn and soaked, the mattress slashed open and its innards are spilling out like guts, pale and obscene. The vanity mirror is shattered, shards of glass glittering like malevolent stars on top of the blood-soaked carpet, each one reflecting a tiny, fractured version of this nightmare.

And that’s when I see it; the hand.

It’s hers. Ines’s.

Her fingers are curled, frozen mid-grasp, her nails, painted a deep, glossy black are chipped and broken, some torn down to the quick. Her usually dark skin is pale, almost grey, the warmth already leached away. Her wrist is limp, dangling over my brother’s arm as he holds her pressed against him, a grotesque pietà. Her throat is slit, no, not slit, - it’s like it’s been torn open. A gaping chasm stretches from ear to ear, the edges ragged and raw, a second, silent mouth screaming. Her head lolls to the side, her braids sticking to her neck, clotted with gore. Her eyes are open. Those startling blue eyes, the ones I used to imagine dimming under my own hands are now glassy and vacant, staring at nothing. At everything.

Something hot and bitter rises in my chest, a tsunami of emotion I can’t hold back.

Hatred. Relief. Disappointment.

It all swirls inside me like the nastiest of cocktails, burning my throat, making my hands shake. God, how many years have I wanted, prayed, dreamed of her death? Every night in that cell, every scar she gifted me, I crafted her end in my mind; slow, intimate, a masterpiece of pain and suffering.