Page 62 of Decimation

Her name rises in my mind again, unbidden, and I let it come. I let it fill me the way the silence fills the room.

Leandra. Leandra. Leandra.

I whisper it into the darkness, and the darkness whispers it back.

She is mine now. She just doesn’t know it yet.

Consciousness returns to me like a slow poison, seeping through the cracks of whatever oblivion I’ve been drowning in. I become aware of my body piece by agonizing piece. My throat, God, my throat, it’s as though I’ve swallowed broken glass. And my head, there’s a woodpecker inside my skull, hammering against my temples with relentless, rhythmic cruelty.

Something is wrong. Something beyond the pain.

The scent reaches me before understanding does; soap, floral, overpowering. A fragrance that doesn’t belong to me, that I cannot name, that speaks of hands I didn’t invite touching skin I couldn’t defend. The fabric against my body is wrong too, something that clings like a second skin, something that whispers of being seen, being arranged, being prepared.

Then I feel it. That ache. That terrible, familiar ache between my thighs that my body knows even when my mind is still clawing its way back from the dark.

He fucked me. He raped me.

The words don’t land so much as they detonate, and I am left standing in the crater of what they mean. Our Grand Master. Our dear leader. The man who looks at me and sees a ghost, who touches me and feels a dead woman’s flesh. I want to scream but my throat is a wound, I want to cry but my eyes refuse, I want to understand but there is no understanding madness like this.

In what world, what shattered, broken world could he possibly believe I am her? Yes, I look like her. I know I look like her. But my eyes, my eyes are all wrong. The wrong is colour, the wrong soul is staring out from behind them. Besides, didn’t he see? Didn’t he watch her body broken and mutilated in this very place?

He has to be mad. He has to be completely insane.

But madness doesn’t make his hands any softer. Insanity doesn’t make his cock any less real inside me while I was unconscious, while I was nothing. While I was a body to be used, washed, and dressed like a fucking doll.

The scream tears out of me before I can stop it, raw and animal, my nails digging into my palms until I feel the skin break, until the pain gives me something real to hold onto. I am here. I am alive. I am…

The door opens. Silent. Smooth. The way nightmares enter a room.

My eyes snap to the movement and the horror doesn’t just rise, it erupts, it floods, it drowns everything else until I am nothing but terror with a heartbeat. Oh god, he’s back. He’s back and I am still here, still trapped, still wearing this dead woman’s face like a target.

“Please…” The word escapes before I can cage it, but the expression that twists across his features kills the rest in my throat. I’ve seen cruelty before, I’ve worn its fingerprints like jewellery. But this, this is something else. This is the face of a man who has already decided what I am worth.

He sets down a tray. The gesture is almost gentle, almost human, and that makes it so much worse. Then he approaches the bed and the way he moves, it’s not walking, it’s descending. It’s the grim reaper coming to collect what he believes is his. I can feel death in the space he occupies, can taste copper and endings on my tongue.

“I’m not her.” The words are a prayer now, a mantra, a shield I keep holding up even though it has not yet once protected me. “I’m not Ines.”

His lips quirk and there, there it is. The colours around him begin to swirl, to shift, to become something so majestic, so mesmerizing that a part of me, a treacherous, broken part of me wants to get lost in them.

My synaesthesia has always been a curse dressed as a gift, but never more than now, never more than when this monster wears a halo of beauty I can’t look away from. The colours pulse, dance, and beckon. I hate myself for noticing, for feeling that pull in my chest, that warmth spreading through me that has nothing to do with reason and everything to do with the way my body has been trained to respond to power.

“No,” he says, and his voice is gravel and honey, a wound and a caress. “But I need you to be, just for a little while.”

My heart stops. My breath catches. The words don’t make sense, or they make a kind of sense I cannot afford to understand. What the fuck does that mean?

Something inside me breaks. The last thread of composure I’ve been clinging to snaps, and I am throwing myself off the bed. I’m launching my body at him with nothing but desperation, nails, and the animalistic need to fight, to hurt, to make him feel even a fraction of what I feel.

His hand catches my throat. One hand. As if he anticipated this, as if he wanted this, as if my rebellion is just another part of his plan. The impact against the wall sends lightning through the bruise where he’s already bashed my head, and the pain is so bright, so white-hot that for a moment I can see nothing but stars behind my own eyes.

He presses his body into mine and I feel it, God help me, I feel all of it. The sheer, impossible strength of him, the heat radiating through his clothes. The way his body fits against mine like a key in a lock I never agreed to open. I realise now that I never stood a chance against this man. I never stood a fucking chance, and some broken part of me, some part that was trained on her knees, trained to survive by surrendering feels something dangerously close to relief at that knowledge.

“Be a good whore.” His voice is gruff, too fucking husky, and it does something to me. It does something I don’t want it to do.

“I am not a whore.” The words come out as a gasp but there’s steel in them, there’s years of being seen as only that, being used as only that, being reduced to nothing but a body to be fucked and discarded. I am sick of it. I am sick of being that in all their eyes when I never chose to be anything but a survivor.

His lips curl. He buries his face in my hair, my frizzy, out-of-control hair that Ines would never have allowed and I swear he is smelling me, inhaling me, consuming me through scent alone.

The intimacy of it is worse than violence.