Page 65 of Decimation

I want to point out that I’ve clearly already been bathed today, but I know what happens when I resist. My body moves on its own, a puppet whose strings he’s been patiently threading all my life. Reluctantly I shrug off my dress, feeling my cheeks burn not just with shame but with a horrifying, reluctant awareness of my nakedness before him; before our Grand Master, no matter how coerced this scene is.

The air kisses my skin and his gaze drags across it, it lingers, hungers in a way that makes my stomach turn.

The water is hot, almost too hot as I lower myself into it. The heat seeps into my muscles, forcing them to loosen against my will, and the contrast with the cold terror in my chest makes my head swim. I sit stiffly, every nerve screaming. Bubbles cluster around my breasts, my thighs, hiding nothing from him.

He kneels beside the tub, and the proximity of his body radiates a wrongness I can feel in my teeth. His hands dip between the bubbles and when they find my skin, I have to bite the inside of my cheek to stop a sound, half gasp, half whimper. He begins to wash me, his movements slow, deliberate, each stroke a question he’s not asking aloud. How far can I push before you break?

Some traitorous part of my flesh responds to the gentleness in his fingertips even as my mind recoils. I feel sick, violated in layers, body, mind, the deep core of self that is supposed to be mine alone. His touch is an invasion, a slow mapping of territory he already thinks he owns, and the fact that my pulse quickens with anything other than pure fear makes me want to claw my own skin off.

Is this real? Am I really here, being bathed like a doll by a man whose sanity has curdled? Or is this another of his games, a hallucination induced by something in my food, in the wine, in the very air?

I have to make this stop, I have to.

I think I’m going to scream if I sit here any longer and play this docile fucking creature.

“Where’s my mother?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper, the words scraping past the lump in my throat. I need to claw back something real, some anchor to the world outside this fever dream.

He pauses, his hands stilling in the water. The sudden absence of movement is worse than the touching. He looks at me, his eyes narrowing and for a moment I see something flicker behind the yellow, a shadow of the old contempt.

“That woman isn’t your mother,” he says, his voice cold, so cold it burns.

I want to argue, to tell him he’s wrong, but I know better than to contradict him directly. Still, I can’t just abandon her. I can’t let him erase her from my life, and I know what her fate will be if I say nothing, if I let this slide into silence. They’ve already murdered half my family. I know they will do the same to her.

“Where is she?” I ask again, my voice trembling, the words shivering out of me like a prayer to a god that only answers with pain.

His reaction is instantaneous. The shift from false calm to violence is a rupture, a tearing of the thin veil he’s been holding over the abyss. His hand lashes out, striking me across the face with a sound like wet silk tearing. The force of the blow sends me reeling, my head slamming against the porcelain edge of the tub, and white light explodes behind my eyes. Before I can even gasp his hands are on me, pressing, pushing me under the water.

Panic detonates in my chest. The water closes over my face like a liquid shroud, and I thrash, but the heat makes everything slippery, dreamlike. The water fills my nose, my mouth, my lungs; a burning, intimate invasion, like his breath forced inside me.

I can’t breathe. I can’t fucking breathe.

The words are a primal scream in my skull. I can’t think, I cant do anything but fight. My arms flail, my legs kick as bubbles and water churn in a grotesque parody of passion.

But he’s too strong. His grip is unrelenting, his weight a terrible, steady pressure, like a lover who will not be denied.

My vision begins to blur, the world above the waterline smearing into dancing light and shadow. My struggles grow weaker, my body betraying me even in rebellion, softening into his hold.

I’m drowning.

I’m going to die here. In this villa, in this bathtub, at the hands of a man who thinks I’m someone I’m not and the worst, most secret horror is the way the surrender almost feels like release.

I wake up coughing, water spilling from my mouth in a warm, humiliating gush. My body aches with a deep, intimate soreness, my lungs burning as if I’ve swallowed liquid fire. I’m lying naked on the cold floor, every inch of my skin exposed and goose-bumped, the air licking at my wet flesh like an unwelcome tongue. Konstantine is standing over me, his expression completely, irrationally calm despite the colours swirling like a hurricane around him; bruise-purples and fever-reds bleeding into the air, a visible madness that makes his serenity a knife’s edge against my throat.

“You shouldn’t have asked about her,” he says, and the words fall like stones dropped into the hollow of my chest. “She’s not your mother. Your mother is gone. I am your family now.”

I want to scream, to cry, to claw my way out of my own skin but I can only lie here, half-dazed, half-drowned. My body a wet, trembling thing pinned beneath the weight of his attention. The terror is a living creature coiling in my belly, slick and cold while somewhere deeper, a shameful heat stirs at being so utterly seen, so completely unmade.

He kneels beside me, and the nearness of him is a pressure, a gravity that pulls at my bones. His hand brushes my cheek, and the touch is feather-soft, almost reverent yet it sears like a brand.

“You’re safe now,” he says, his voice a silken murmur that coils around my throat and squeezes. “You’re home.”

I close my eyes, tears slipping down my cheeks.

Home. The word feels like a mockery, a caress that hides the sting of a leash. This isn’t home, this is a prison. Another prison, its bars forged from his tenderness, its locks clicking shut with every gentle word. I’m the one always trapped in a role I never wanted to play; the beloved captive, the cherished doll, my horror and my unwanted arousal tangled together like the colours still swirling behind my closed lids.

Ileave the villa, leave my brother alone with her. I don’t have any choice in the matter, but that doesn’t stop the fury from coiling in my gut all the same.

Every step away feels like a betrayal carved into my soul, a silent scream that no one hears.