Epilogue
Four Months Later
The air in the Black Orchid Club is thick with the scent of expensive cigar smoke, spilled whiskey, and the delicious perfume of exposed desire. At the centre, spreadeagled on the velvet-draped stage, is my masterpiece. My wife.
Grace.
The ropes of crimson silk bite into the generous flesh of her wrists and ankles, pinning her against the dark fabric. I had her dressed in black lace lingerie but it’s a futile gesture, a tiny decorum stretched taut over a canvas of decadent flesh.
I have fed her well these last few months. Meticulously, cruelly even. Every rich sauce, every decadent pastry, every forced mouthful was a brick in the colossal prison I have built around her.
The weight she carries is my safety, my assurance.
Her body, soft and immense, is an anchor that keeps her from fleeing. She is a creature of pure sensation now, and I am the master of those sensations.
She cannot run. She can barely walk unaided from how I have moulded her. I have turned her body into a tomb, into a cell she can never break out of.
Beneath the hot, focused lights, her skin gleams with a fine sheen of sweat.
I watch, my arms crossed as Richard finishes his appointed task.
He pulls out of her with a wet sound, and then he lowers his head.
The club falls into a hushed, anticipatory silence, broken only by Grace’s ragged whimpers.
Richard’s tongue works, cleaning his own spend from her arsehole and a shudder runs through her vast frame.
This is what I have made of her. This is what I need her to be.
Richard steps away, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, a smirk of satisfaction on his face.
I give a curt nod and another man, younger, more eager, ascends the stage.
He doesn’t look at me; his eyes are only for the offering, not that I can blame him.
My wife is the finest delicacy there is.
He fumbles with his trousers, and I step forward.
“The mouth,” I remind him, my voice low but carrying across the stage.
He nods hastily, positioning himself at her head.
I take my place between her legs, which are forced wide by their bindings.
The sight of her, so utterly vulnerable, so completely mine sends a jolt of possessive power through me.
As I push into her, that familiar, suffocating heat envelops me.
Grace cries out, a muffled sound as the other man fills her mouth. Her body arches as much as the ropes allow, and it’s like a tidal wave of flesh. A low moan escapes her, vibrating through both of us.
“That’s it, take it, take it all.” I command.
I bring my hand down sharply on the full curve of her breast. The sound is a crisp, sickening smack that echoes in the quiet room.
The pale skin flushes an immediate, angry red.
“You are my mindless whore. Nothing more. You feel what I allow you to feel, you enjoy whatever I choose to give you.”
I know she is feeling every moment of this.
I saw the glassy sheen in her eyes before we began, the sluggish dilation of her pupils.
The cocktail of opiates and stimulants has done its work, just like always.
She is adrift on a chemical sea, where pain and pleasure are just different-coloured waves crashing against the shores of her consciousness.
Her whimpers soften, transforming. The resistance I saw moments ago melts away, replaced by a deep, guttural moan as I thrust into her. Her eyes, when they flutter open, are vacant. The brown irises roll back, showing the whites before settling into a hazy, unfocused stare.
She is gone. That sharp, defiant woman is buried deep, and the creature I have forged is rising to the surface. Obedient, responsive, lost in the brutal rhythm of her own degradation.
A fierce, triumphant pride swells in my chest.
This is victory.
This is control.
“That’s it,” I praise, my voice dropping to a fervent whisper.
I lean over her, driving into her harder, faster, making the entire stage shudder. Her body rocks, a magnificent, terrible spectacle. The flesh of her belly, her hips, her thighs ripples and jiggles with the force of my movements.
And, Christ, is it hypnotic. Each roll, each undulation is a testament to my power. I have sculpted this. I have reduced a vibrant human to this primal, responsive mass of flesh.
“This is the wife I want. My perfect, mindless fuckhole.”
For a few precious moments, there is only this; the sound of our bodies meeting, her slurred moans, the oppressive attention of the men watching. This is my world, ordered to my exact specifications.
I am her God, and Grace is my living, breathing opus of submission.
A shift in the room’s atmosphere steals my attention. The collective intake of breath, the subtle rustle of dozens of men turning their heads in unison. The energy pivots, pulling away from my stage, drawn toward the main entrance like iron filings to a magnet.
Annoyed, I follow their gaze, my rhythm faltering for a single, crucial second.
And I freeze.
Konstantine is here.
Our Grand Master.
He has become more and more visible of late, and I can’t quite figure out why. I had assumed it was because the threat of the Esau is over, but it doesn’t feel enough, it doesn’t silence the nagging in my gut.
He stands there commanding the very air in the room. But it is what, who, is beside him that steals the breath from my lungs.
Held by a thin, delicate silver chain attached to a cuff around her wrist, is a woman. Tall, lithe, with an unmistakable afro. She looks exactly like Ines.
Her face, her eyes, it’s her. A ghost given flesh.
My blood runs cold. This is impossible.
I saw her body, I saw her blood, her mangled, mutilated flesh, I saw it all.
Konstantine’s lips curve into a smirk, his eyes scanning the room before landing, with deliberate weight, on me.
On my stage. On my wife. He pulls the woman into his lap, his hand possessively on her waist. He leans in, nuzzling her neck, and she tilts her head back in a move that is half obedience, half something else entirely.
It’s a grotesque pantomime. A resurrection play for a dead love.
As he shifts, the collar of his jacket gapes slightly and the light catches the ink on his neck, and I know that tattoo. Every member of the inner circle knows it. The Phoenix of Konstantine, rising from the ashes of his past, a symbol of his unkillable power.
But the light is wrong. Or the tattoo is.
Instead of the elegant, flaming wings of a phoenix I see the stark, sharp lines of a raven.
I blink, then blink again, as the pieces of an impossible puzzle click together in my mind.
This is not Konstantine.
The man I murdered in that cathedral, the man whose death I orchestrated to save my ungrateful bitch of a wife, that was Konstantine. The real Grand Master.
And the man now sitting in the shadows, holding a woman made to look like a dead wife, watching me with cold, knowing eyes is Lazarus. Konstantine’s twin brother. The quiet one. The angry one.
As I stare, someone else sits beside him, a man with a scar above his eyebrow, a man whose name is all but branded into my melted, mangled skin. Ezekial Sewell.
No. No fucking way. How the fuck is this possible?
Ezekial leans in, whispering into Lazarus’s ear and Lazarus nods back in some form of agreement and it hits me then, the reality of all of it.
He played me. He was playing us all. Lazarus. He used me. He used me to kill his own brother and seize power.
Lazarus raises his glass to me, a crystal tumbler of amber liquid. He doesn’t smile. He simply tilts it in my direction, an infinitesimal gesture. Like a toast. An acknowledgment.
The world tilts on its axis. The foundation of my power, my safety, my very reason for existence feels like it crumbles to dust in that single, silent moment.
A guttural sound brings me back. The man at Grace’s mouth groans, his body tensing as he spills down her throat.
She gags instinctively, her body convulsing around me, but the drugs turn the convulsion into a long, shuddering sigh of pleasure.
Her eyes are completely rolled back now, a mindless vessel receiving whatever is given to her.
I look down at her. At the woman I sacrificed everything for.
My love.
My hate.
My utter ruin.
This is all I have left. This bloated, broken woman on a stage. This is the prize for which I committed an unforgivable sin that now, it seems, was for a master I never truly served.
I can feel Lazarus’s eyes upon me, feeling my revelation, tasting my fury.
There is no escape. There is only the abyss I have dug with my own hands.
A savage, desperate energy floods me. This is all I have, after everything, after all my hard work, it is this. This broken, shattered empire.
Well fine then. Fine, I will take this, I will consume it. I will lose myself in the ruin I have created.
I shake my head, and it’s a futile gesture to clear out the terrifying truth. I look away from Lazarus, from the ghost of Ines, from the watching, judging eyes of the club and I focus only on the body beneath me. On my dear wife.
With a snarl tearing from my throat, I grab Grace’s hips, my fingers sinking deep into the soft flesh. I begin to fuck her with a renewed, brutal ferocity.
It is no longer about pleasure, power, or even punishment. It is an act of annihilation.
Of hers. Of mine. Of us.
This is my wife, this is my kingdom. This is the price of my ambition, rocking and shuddering beneath me, and I will beat against the walls of this flesh-and-bone prison until there is nothing left of either of us.
THE END