Page 73 of Decimation

My hips are moving. I can feel them moving with small, involuntary thrusts that match the rhythm of Konstantine’s relentless assault.

My breath is coming faster, and it’s not just from fear.

My heart is pounding with something that feels horribly, disgustingly like arousal.

I hate myself, I hate this body. I hate the men who made me this way, and I hate Konstantine for using it against me. I hate Ines for dying and leaving me to take her place.

“Yes,” Konstantine moans, and his hips are moving now, grinding against the altar. I realize with a fresh wave of revulsion that he’s aroused, that he’s getting pleasure from this too. “Yes, my love, I can feel her coming through. I can feel her stirring. You’re opening for her, aren’t you? You’re becoming her vessel, you’re becoming her.”

He’s touching himself. One hand is still forcing that bone into me but the other, the other he is using to pleasure himself. I can see his cock, I can hear his groans as he runs his hand up and down.

The bone plunges deeper, and I feel something tear inside me. The pain is white-hot, blinding, everything and nothing all at once. Blood trickles down my thighs. I can feel it, warm and wet against my skin, pooling on the cold stone beneath me.

And still my body responds, still my hips rise to meet the bone. Still my breath comes in gasps that could be mistaken for passion. My muscles clench and release around the object inside me, and I know. I know with a certainty that makes me want to die that my body is building toward something, that the pressure is coiling in my belly, that my conditioned flesh is going to betray me one final time.

“Please,” I whisper. “Please, please, please.”

Konstantine clambers onto the altar, straddling my face. The mask of Ines’s face has started to slide, the moisture from my tears and sweat loosening whatever grip it had on my skin. He’s quick to press it back into place and then he’s pulling those rancid lips apart, forcing his cock between them and shoving it down my throat while I gag.

“You are her,” he breathes. “You are my Ines. My wife, my love. My eternal bride.”

The bone twists inside me, and the pressure breaks. My body convulses, and I can no longer hold it back, can no longer stop it’s devastating conclusion.

The orgasm is horrible. It’s violation made flesh, despair made sensation. It tears through me like a blade, leaving nothing but shame and self-loathing in its wake. My back arches off the altar, and behind his cock I let out a muffled scream that’s half pleasure and half agony. The colours in my vision explode into a kaleidoscope of filth; brown, yellow, green and grey. The colours of rot, decay, and death.

As I slump back, as I give in entirely to my shame, I realise Konstantine is laughing. Or crying. Or both.

He fucks my throat one last time and then he comes with a groan while his come mixes with all that dried up bone paste coating my tongue.

“Welcome home, my love,” Konstantine whispers into my hair. “Welcome home at last.”

My eyes are open, but I cannot see.

Darkness presses against them, a soft, clinging weight that wraps around my skull. It’s fabric. A blindfold. The texture is smooth like silk, but it might as well be a second skin for how intimately it adheres to my face.

I try to blink, and my lashes brush against the material. Something beneath it shifts.

Something wet and cold.

The dead woman’s face. Ines’s face. It must still be pressed against my own, grafted to me in that nightmare ritual I cannot escape even in waking. My hands fly to my face, fingers scrabbling at the blindfold, and I feel it then; not the slick, gelatinous give of something that should not be there but cotton, like a bandage.

A scream tears out of me, raw and animal.

“Hold still.”

Konstantine’s voice cuts through my panic like a blade through my skin. It is calm. Terribly, horribly calm. The kind of calm that lives on the other side of fury, in a place where reason has already been butchered and buried.

I freeze. Not because I want to, but because my body knows what my mind refuses to accept. Predator. Prey. The old arithmetic of survival.

“What, what is this? What’s on my face?” My voice is a stranger’s, high and thready. “Konstantine, please…”

“Shh.” His hand finds my shoulder, pressing me back down. I hadn’t realized I was trying to rise. I hadn’t realized I was lying on something hard and cold. A table. The altar.

Oh God, am I still on that altar?

“Everything is being fixed now. You need to be still.”

Fixed. That word. The same word he used before, in the hallway when he dragged me by my hair and screamed about wrongness. The same word that echoes in my skull like a death knell.