Page 44 of Decimation

A soft whimper, barely audible, comes from the corner of the room. A tiny, wounded animal sound. I move quickly, yanking the furniture back with what little strength I have, my muscles screaming, still weak from captivity, pulling what feels like a mountain of wood away from the cupboard. A broken dresser, a toppled bookshelf, all piled in a desperate barricade.

She hid him. She put him in here and hid him.

It’s the only thing that makes sense. Did she know what was coming? Did she recognize death when it came calling, and in her final moments, did she think of her son? My rage turns to something more complicated, something I don’t want to name, as I realize she at least tried to save him. The woman I hated, the monster who kept me in chains, had this one flicker of humanity. It doesn’t absolve her. It just makes the whole thing more unbearable.

I throw the broken pieces aside, tearing my fingers on bits of splintered wood, the pain a distant, irrelevant thing. He’s hiding right at the back of the cupboard, his small body curled into a ball, knees drawn to his chest, arms wrapped around himself. His face is pale, smudged with dust and a single streak of blood not his, I pray, not his. His eyes are wide with fear, those big brown eyes that could be mine, could be Konstantine’s, staring up at me from the darkness.

Christ, he’s grown so much. He’s no longer a baby, not even a toddler. How many years have I been trapped there? How long has Ines kept me as she has, stealing time from me, stealing this boy’s childhood from my sight? The thought fuels the rage again but I push it down, lock it away. Not now. Not in front of him.

“Ezra,” I say softly, crouching down in front of him, making myself as small as I can. “It’s me. It’s Uncle Laz. You’re safe now.” The words feel foreign on my tongue, a lie I desperately want to be true.

He doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. Just stares at me, with those big brown eyes filled with a terror so profound it seems to swallow the light. I don’t know if he even knew I existed. If he even realizes I’m not Konstantine, the man who held him, the father he knows.

I reach out, gently pulling him from the cupboard, lifting him into my arms. He’s trembling, his small body shaking uncontrollably, a fragile weight against my chest. I hold him close, my hand cradling the back of his head, my fingers tangling in his soft, dark hair. He smells of dust, fear, and something faintly sweet; baby shampoo, a remnant of the life that was just obliterated.

“You’re safe,” I whisper, my voice low, soothing, a promise I have no right to make. “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

I feel the lie in my throat, but I say it anyway, because what else is there? The world outside this room is still full of monsters. I know I am one of them, but for this moment, I am all he has.

I carry him out of the room, stepping over the destruction, the blood, the chaos. I don’t let him look. I press his face into my shoulder, shielding him from the sight of his mother’s ruined body, his father’s shattered mind. I glance back at Konstantine, still rocking, still clutching Ines’s lifeless body, a man who has become a monument to grief.

Perhaps I will still kill him. Put Ezra somewhere safe, somewhere he can’t witness it and then return here to see justice done. My lips curl at the thought and I hold Ezra tighter, feeling his small heartbeat against my own.

By the time I return there are too many people, too many witnesses to do it. He is still siting where I left him, still rocking back and forth like an invalid. It takes the better part of an hour before he lets them take her.

I watch from the doorway as two of the guards, men I don’t know, men from the secondary detail who arrived with the clean efficiency of people who weren’t here for the worst of it, crouch beside him and speak in low, careful tones. Their voices are the kind you use to talk a jumper off a ledge. I know that register. I’ve used it myself, when I needed someone pliable.

He doesn’t resist, exactly.

He simply doesn’t help.

They have to peel his arms away from her body with the slow, deliberate patience of men disarming a bomb. Her skin makes a sound as they do it, a soft, separating whisper that isn’t quite wet and isn’t quite dry, and I file that sound away in the part of me that still knows how to feel something like horror. She’s stiff as a board. Rigor has set in hard, turning her into a grotesque mannequin of the woman who kept me in the dark. Her right arm hangs at an unnatural angle, the elbow bent backward like a broken wing, and that tells me she’s been dead for a while. Long enough for the warmth to leave her. Long enough for the blood on the floor to turn tacky and black in the grout.

Konstantine just sits there with his hands open in his lap, staring at them like he’s never seen them before. His fingers are still curled into the ghost of her shape. I can see the exact imprint of her ribs in the way his palms won’t quite flatten.

Ezra is upstairs. The housekeeper took him to the far end of the villa, to the rooms that don’t smell of what happened here. I heard her speaking to him in soft, soothing words as she led him away, the way you talk to a frightened animal, just sound and steadiness and presence. He didn’t look back at me when he went. I took that as a good sign. Children who are truly broken don’t have the capacity to trust a new pair of hands. He still has that capacity. He’s still whole enough to save.

My son. My blood, and I have never held him. She made sure of that. She made sure of everything.

I cross the room and sit down on the sofa above where Konstantine is still on the floor. The cushions sigh under my weight. I don’t try to pull him up. Not yet. The thought of even touching him makes me want to grab the nearest object, the heavy crystal ashtray on the side table, the lamp with its brass base, my own two hands, and bury it in his throat, and I can’t do that. Not yet.

I have to be calm. Calculated.

The rage living inside me is a coiled serpent that has been feeding on darkness, silence, and the memory of her hands on me. I know if let it strike now, I lose everything.

So I breathe. I count the seconds. I let the serpent sleep.

“They’re going to come back,” I say.

He says nothing. The silence from him is like a third presence in the room.

“Konstantine.” I lean forward, elbows on my knees, and I keep my voice flat and factual because that’s the only register that will reach him right now. Anything softer and he’ll drown in it. Anything harder and he’ll shatter. I need him malleable, not broken. “If the Esau broke this perimeter once, they will break it again. You know that. You know how they operate. They don’t send messages and then retire to the countryside. They send messages, and then they send men to make sure the message was received.”

A long silence answers me. Outside I can hear the guards moving, the low crackle of radio communication, the sound of the gate being secured. All of it is too little, too fucking late. The Esau were already inside. They walked through his walls like they were suggestions. They put their hands on her, and they did what they came to do and they left. Every man out there with a gun and a radio is just arranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.

“They killed her.” His voice is barely functional. Scraped raw. It sounds like it’s coming from somewhere deeper than his throat, somewhere underground.

“I know.”