Page 51 of Decimation

I raise an eyebrow, feigning disinterest, though something in my chest begins to tighten, like some sort of premonition coiling around my ribs. “A present?” From the U.K. Chapter Lord? What the fuck is this?

The guard nods. “Konstantine has already squirrelled the bitch away.”

The words sink into me like a stone dropped into still water, and I feel the ripples spread outward, disturbing everything they touch. The bitch? What bitch? Konstantine has never showed any interest in any woman beyond Ines, beyond the corpse he keeps like a saint’s relic after they desecrated her grave.

Without a word, I stride toward the hidden chamber where Konstantine keeps his secrets, where he thinks I won’t look. Where he believes his shadows are deep enough to swallow whatever monstrosities he chooses to hide.

This part of the building is old, too old. It speaks of a legacy polite people don’t talk about, of chains and screams and that particular silence that follows violence.

God, has he laid her corpse out here? No, that cannot be it. Magnus wouldn’t be involved in such a thing as that. He’d have no need to traffic in the dead.

The door at the bottom is heavy, reinforced with iron. I push, and the scent of damp earth and decay hits me, the perfume of things buried and forgotten.

But it’s not a corpse that greets me.

She’s alive.

I freeze. The air leaves my body as if God Himself has reached into my chest and pulled it out, as a sacrifice, an offering, a holy violence done to my lungs. My breath catches in my throat, sharp as glass, and I feel something inside me crack; something fundamental, some wall I have spent years constructing brick by careful brick.

The woman lies on a makeshift bed, her body bruised and battered, her breathing shallow. But her face, her face is almost identical to Ines’s. The resemblance is uncanny, impossible, a mirror held up to a ghost. My mind reels, stutters, tries to make sense of it and fails.

What trick is this? What cruel joke has God played on me now?

I step closer, my heart pounding in my chest in a way that feels biblical, apocalyptic, the kind of heartbeat that precedes revelation. The floor seems to tilt beneath me. She stirs weakly, her eyelids flutter open and I brace myself for that piercing blue, for the accusatory stare of a dead woman made flesh.

But instead, I see brown. A beautiful, deep brown. The colour of earth after rain. The colour of something untouched, unspoiled, alive.

Her gaze meets mine, and for a moment the world stops its spinning, stops it’s screaming, stops everything. I see her; not Ines, not a reflection, not a cruel echo, but her.

Something entirely new.

Her lips part slightly, a tremble, a question she is too weak to voice. And something primal stirs within me, something I haven’t felt, haven’t ever dared to uncage. That part of me that I locked away, that I barricaded up while Ines had me in her clutches, seems to break free. The chains I forged around my heart snap like thread, and I feel it all at once; a deluge, a drowning, a salvation and a destruction wrapped in this same fevered moment.

She is not Ines. She is something else entirely.

And I am instantly, irrevocably, catastrophically obsessed.

I can’t help myself.

I can’t control myself.

The feeling is too vast, too sudden, a tidal wave crashing against the hollow architecture of my chest. My hands tremble as I reach for her, and when my fingers brush against her cheek I feel it in my teeth, in my bones, in the deepest and most secret chambers of my being.

She flinches, her breath hitching as her body starts to recoil.

But I don’t stop. I can’t fucking stop.

I have been starved for something I didn’t even know existed, and now it is here, warm and breathing and mine. All fucking mine.

“Who are you?” I whisper, my voice rough, desperate, a prayer torn from the throat of a nonbeliever. The words scrape out of me like confession.

She doesn’t answer. Her eyes are wide with fear, dark pools of terror that should reach something human in me, should stay my hand, should remind me of mercy. But I don’t have that. Any mercy I had left was torn out of me years ago.

And anyway, I don’t need her to speak. Words are meaningless right now.

I need her to be mine with a ferocity that terrifies me, that undoes every pretence of civilization I have ever worn.

I’m on her before I can think, a creature of pure, ravenous instinct. My hands are rough, desperate, the hands of a drowning man clawing at his very salvation. My movements frantic, uncoordinated, stripped of all the careful control I have cultivated these last few years.