Chapter 4
Chapter four
Carrson
It’s a dream.
A nightmare.
I always know it, the moment I look down and see the unmarked skin of my arm, no rose tattoo to remind me that the world is full of liars. As soon as I see the softness in my chest, the lack of definition, the near-boy body I no longer inhabit, I understand.
I’m having the dream again. The kind that drags me back into memories from when I was younger. This time, it’s the ceremony, the real one that happened when I was fifteen.
The me who’s asleep now, twenty-three and exhausted, knows exactly how this works. I won’t wake until I’ve relived it all. That long-ago night. Start to finish. In excruciating detail.
In the dream fear coils through young me like a serpent, slow, sinuous. It slithers along my spine, cold scales pressed tight to my warm flesh, but I don’t show my terror.
Never show weakness.
The first rule my father taught me.
His first lesson, administered with the lash of his belt across my back.
The walk is silent. No words. No instructions. Just the shuffle of shoes on stone, mine and my brothers. I don’t have to count to know there are twenty-one of us here.
We started with twenty-five.
But not everyone survives the tests.
Hands on my back guide me forward, firm and insistent.
This is an honor, I remind myself. I am one of the privileged few.
A son of The Order.
I don’t buy that shit for a second. Most of my brothers do. They’re blinded by their upbringing. They’re drunk on the power they’ll receive when they become men, but I am not like them.
Their fathers are demons.
Mine is the devil.
In the dream, they strip me to the waist at the door. Not roughly, but like it’s part of the rite. A reminder my body doesn’t belong to me. It never has. It, along with my mind and soul, belong to The Order.
Beneath my breath, I beg, plead, with myself to wake, but it’s no use.
Dream-me keeps walking, moving forward on numb feet.
We descend into the vault.
It’s cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature, but the kind of freezing that settles in your bones. That crawls beneath your skin and whispers, you don’t belong here.
Above us, my father’s house looms. Built hundreds of years ago, when we gave the land a name.
But this place?
This place is much, much older.
Ancient.
The entrance is hidden through the cellar. A locked door behind the wine racks. Stone stairs spiraling downward, steep and narrow, carved by hands long dead.
The rounded space is lit only by candles, blackened stubs jammed into rusted iron sconces along the walls.
Their flames flicker weakly, casting shadows that move a little too much.
Symbols pulse beneath them, carved onto the floor and darkened with age.
Spirals. Crosses. Jagged runes in languages no longer spoken. Petroglyphs no scholar has ever seen.
The story goes that Druids once performed dark rites here. That they spilled blood, both animal and human. My father’s house wasn’t built in this location by chance. It was placed here. This spot was chosen for the vault that lies underneath the mansion like a grave of secrets.
The stone is uneven beneath my feet, slick enough that I have to concentrate not to slip.
Manacles hang from the walls, and the sight of them makes my stomach clench.
In some places, the floor is permanently stained dark, where blood sank into the cracks.
There’s no water here to wash it away. No forgiveness to rinse away the sins that occurred here, either.
Although the original vault is ancient, it’s been enlarged. Dug out with rough hand-made pickaxes and crude hammers. Tools wielded by my ancestors, the pilgrims.
The history books say they crossed an ocean in search of freedom.
But that’s a lie.
They didn’t come seeking liberty. They came to take it from others, to keep it only for themselves.
This vault is their cathedral, and I am their dark legacy.
Twelve identical men stand in a circle along the walls. Cloaked in thick gray robes, their waists cinched with coarse rope. Their hoods hang low, swallowing their faces in shadow, but I can feel their eyes on me.
All of them. Watching me.
My father is among them. Indistinguishable at first, until he steps forward and speaks.
I’d know that voice anywhere. That deep baritone is as familiar as pain.
I’ve heard it scream at me. Curse me. Break me down to nothing.
Once, when I was small and stupid and still believed in things, I used to pray he’d speak to me gently.
That he’d tell me he loved me. That he was proud.
He beat that hope out of me with every lick of his belt, his whip.
Now, as a teenager, I find myself fantasizing about the day I’ll force him to beg. To plead for mercy like I have so many times before.
As the High Father, he will preside over this ceremony.
“You understand what is asked,” he says to me.
I nod once, not flinching even as the blade is unsheathed. My father hands me the dagger, black-handled, gold-tipped, etched with the symbol of The Order: a cross, each bar of equal length.
“Speak the vow.”
Dream me lifts my gaze and catches a glimpse of my father’s eyes beneath the hood. Cold. Dead. Eyes of a snake. A spider.
“Nos sumus ordo. In sanguine nexuimur. In potestate surgimus. Perfectionem quaerimus.” I repeat the words automatically and translate them in my mind as I go.
We are The Order.
We bond in blood.
We rise in power.
We seek perfection.
Words I’ve heard my entire life. A twisted lullaby told to me by my father every night before I went to bed.
My father continues, saying words that have been repeated for generations, “Your offering?”
I don’t hesitate. I turn the dagger on myself and slice my right palm, deep and clean. Blood wells immediately, warm and bright in the candlelight. I step to the bowl at the center of the circle and hold my hand over it, letting the blood drip into the pool of my brothers who came before.
We will all bleed tonight.
“You are now a man. Bonded to The Order,” the High Father, my father, says, voice thick with finality.
“Someday, when you are older, you will bond women, but always remember who your original bond is with. The Order is your parent, your lover, your God, as it has been since the day you were born. This is your destiny. Your purpose. Through you, the world shall be made perfect.”
The iron, glowing so hot the metal has turned white, comes without warning. That, too, is part of the lesson. Obedience is not chosen. It is taken.
Whenever and wherever The Order pleases.
My knees lock as the brand is shoved into the skin over my right shoulder blade.
I will not scream.
I will not.
My body seizes in agony, my teeth clamping shut to keep from making a sound. The pain is blinding. Overwhelming. My throat swells, but I hold it in.
Others scream that night, every one of my brothers, but not me.
I wear my silence like armor. Like victory.
This is good, I tell myself. This is what survival looks like. If I can gather enough power and control, then someday no one will ever hurt me again.
When it is done, I stumble forward, skin seared, vision tunneling, but I do not fall. It doesn’t matter. Father’s hand is on my shoulder, and he forces me to my knees anyway.
Through the pain, his voice comes again, calm, final, holy. “Rise, Son of The Order.”
I rise.
Burned.
Bleeding.
Reborn.
***
I wake with a start, my heart pounding, mouth dry. I fucking hate that dream. I hate them all. The dreams plague me at least once a month. Often more. My nightmares aren’t always this one, though. Not always initiation night. Sometimes it’s the other trials. The tests.
The Order had a hundred ways to break us, and my brain insists on replaying every single one, like it’s trying to process it. The old trauma. All that buried shit. As if I could ever make peace with it. The things I’ve seen. The things I’ve done. The things that were done to me.
I roll over and freeze. The other side of the bed is occupied.
Oh, yeah.
The woman I bonded.
Well, kinda.
Tradition calls for a full ritual. A father standing behind his son.
A blade to the palm, the blood oath made with vows spoken before witnesses.
It’s supposed to be sacred. Permanent. Binding in every way that matters.
But my father’s out of town, as usual, which means there won’t be an official ceremony, at least until he gets back.
If I’m lucky, he won’t come here until I’m done with her. Then she’ll never have to bleed for me. For now, the words I spoke are enough. I verbally bonded her, claimed her in front of all the brothers. They heard it, and they know the rules.
She’s off-limits.
Mine.
At least for now.
I peer in her direction, but I can’t see much in the dark. Just the shape of her body tucked beneath the blankets. Breathing slow, oblivious.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling, knowing I won’t sleep again tonight. I never can, not after the dreams, but then she sighs, turning her head toward me.
I shift back so I’m facing her. I can feel the warm puff of her breath cross the mattress to gently caress my face, and it’s…nice. In a weird, unusual way. I’ve fucked more women than I care to count, but I’ve never slept beside one.
Not like this. Not all night.
I scoot a little closer. Just enough to feel the warmth of her beneath the sheets. She doesn’t move. Doesn’t wake. Maybe it’s the exhaustion, or maybe it’s her. Either way I close my eyes and by some miracle sleep comes for me, carries me away to a place where, for once, nightmares can’t follow.