Page 54 of Decimation

I kick out, I try to throw him off, my heels scrabbling uselessly against the floor, but in his mania he is far too strong to even stand a chance. My struggles are pathetic, the last twitches of a dying thing. Despair wraps around me, heavy and cold.

This is it. This is how it ends.

Not with a grand defiance, but with a broken head and a stolen name.

“You left me. You left me. Why?” His voice cracks, and for a heartbeat he sounds lost, a man drowning in his own grief, but the hands don’t loosen. They tighten.

I shake my head as pin pricks start to obscure my vision. The edges of the world go dark, closing in like a tunnel.

I’m going to die here.

I know it with a certainty that settles into my bones. I’m going to die in this non-descript room, and that’ll be the end to it all. The thought is almost peaceful, a quiet surrender beneath the terror. There’ll be no more pain, no more fighting. But then another thought, fiercer and more desperate, claws its way up; I don’t want to die, I don’t want to be forgotten. I don’t want my last moments to be about her.

He slams my head down again and again. Each impact is a detonation, a burst of light and darkness.

I lose count.

I lose time.

The world is just rhythm, pain, and the distant, animal sound of his screaming.

“Why?” He screams. “Why?”

But I cannot answer him, I cannot do anything but simply wait until my lungs empty and my body gives out. The darkness creeps in, soft and seductive and I feel myself slipping, my thoughts unspooling into silence.

My last conscious feeling isn’t anger or defiance. It’s a deep, hollow sorrow.

For the girl I was.

For the woman I’ll never become.

For the name he’ll never say.

Leandra. My name is Leandra, and no one will ever know.

Istand in the doorway, a spectator to my own damnation, watching as it plays out like some snuff film God Himself has projected onto the back of my skull. The air is thick, pulsing with the stench of sweat and blood; coppery, sweet, and fucking rotten. The sound of flesh hitting flesh echoes like a drumbeat in the hollow chamber of my chest, each impact a metronome counting down the seconds of my soul’s decay. My brother is a storm of rage, his hands gripping the girl’s throat as he slams her head into the floor. Over and over and over again. Her cries are muffled, choked, desperate, a litany that seeps into my marrow and sings there, a hymn of horror I will never unhear.

It takes everything I have not to rush in there, not to seize this moment to kill him. My muscles scream with the effort of stillness, my tendons pulled taut as violin strings ready to snap. I can feel the weight of the knife at my belt, a cold promise against my hip.

One lunge. One thrust. That’s all it would take.

The thought is a siren song, sweet and maddening. But I nail my feet to the floor with sheer will, because I know, I know that if I move now, I lose everything.

God is watching this, watching me. He has placed this chalice before me, and I must drink it to the very dregs.

“I’m not her.” she gasps, her voice breaking like glass. “I’m not Ines.”

But she looks like her. God help me, she looks so like her. The same perfect features, the same delicate nose, the same slender frame, a mirror image crafted by a cruel and meticulous hand. God, how I hated her, hated Ines but now, it is not hate I feel but something else entirely.

It is as if the Almighty has resurrected the dead just to test the living, to see if I can endure the sight of her suffering.

This is the test, I tell myself. This is the furnace where men are forged or incinerated.

When I woke, I thought I dreamt it all up. I thought my exhaustion had conjured some fever dream, some alternate reality spat out by a mind too long starved of sleep and justice. But as I look at her, I realise this is real. She is real. Her pain is real. The blood smeared across her temple is not painted there by nightmare, it glistens wet and dark, a sacramental oil anointing her for a sacrifice she never consented to.

My stomach lurches, but I swallow the bile. I cannot afford to be sick. I cannot afford to be weak.

Konstantine’s hands tighten around her throat, his face twisted into a mask of fury and lust, a gargoyle carved from flesh and sin. She stops struggling, her body going limp as she loses consciousness. It’s a small mercy, a fleeting reprieve, but he doesn’t stop. He yanks at her dress, tearing the fabric like a wild animal, his breath coming in ragged gasps that fill the room like the panting of a beast. The sound of rending cloth is a shriek in the silence of my skull, and I feel it in my teeth. I feel it in the place where my conscience used to live.