Chapter 6 #3
The room tasted of smoke and iron. My hands were knotted at my sides. The thing I’d held as identity—son, general, a name to live by—crumbled under his voice. Outside, the morning air held its breath.
I left the house on legs that felt like someone else’s, my father’s words trailing me like a stain.
Everything inside me had been marked.
I stormed to the stables, flung myself into the saddle, and tore through the streets like a demon unshackled. The leather of the reins bit into my palms; my jaw was clenched so tight I tasted blood—iron and fury on my tongue.
Reckless. Unworthy. Useless. Despicable.
Every one of my father’s insults burned into me like a brand.
And I would burn Helena for every one of them.
It had to be her. She’d opened her mouth. She’d told him. She’d ratted me out. She dug my grave with the words that’d killed me here.
Rage in me stopped being human. It was older, colder—a godless hunger, fed on worship and wounds. Let my father think I was broken. Let him believe I’d shattered. From what he destroyed, something immortal would rise.
I barreled into the market, hooves thudding, cloak snapping behind me. People flinched and parted, voices halting mid-haggle. I saw their eyes slide off me and whisper—There goes Salvatore—back from the grave. Something has crawled into him and taken the shape of a man.
The market dissolved. All that remained was a single, blinding need—her.
My vision tunneled. My hands curled into fists until my nails bit deep into my palms. I reached her door and didn’t knock. I drove my shoulder into it, wood splintering under the weight. The frame gave with a sound like something dying.
Inside, the silence was alive—not peaceful but waiting. The scent struck first—sweat, salt, and the fading warmth of another body. It hung in the air like smoke that refused to lift.
Weapons lay scattered in the corridor—two bronze swords propped together, a dented mace by the hearth, a sling coiled and forgotten.
They were not staged; they were the leftovers of a hurried night.
Not the kind of violence born of battlefields, but of something else—passion, pity, a comfort taken in grief.
I moved through the rooms like a ghost searching for a name.
And then I saw her.
Helena.
She was sprawled across the bed, silks twisted beneath her, her body slick with sweat and pleasure.
One man moved above her, hips thrusting in a steady rhythm, his hands gripping her thighs as he drove himself into her.
The other stood before her, his cock in her mouth, her head tilted back in surrender.
Her eyes were closed, lips stretched, throat working as she took him deeper.
She wasn’t just enjoying it—she was worshiping it.
Her hands clutched both men, guiding them, needing them. Her skin glowed with sweat, her breasts rising and falling, nipples hard, her legs spread shamelessly wide. Her moans weren’t soft. They were wild. Hungry. She looked like a woman in rapture—like a goddess fed on desire.
The door had been ajar, and she hadn’t even noticed me.
The air shrank around my lungs. For one sliver of a second, I could not pull breath through my teeth. Then everything inside me shattered, as if the world itself had split along a seam I’d never noticed.
“You lying fucking whore!” The words left me like stones torn from my throat.
The room fractured. The quiet was a thin thing that tore on that shout.
Helena jerked, a wet, startled sound dragged from her throat as a man inside her cried out and fell away.
Her hair clung to her face, sodden with sweat; her lips were red and slick, still parted from whatever had been on them.
She looked at me as if I were a ghost that had crawled out of the walls.
“Salvatore—please. I didn’t know—wait! Let me explain—”
I could not hear her. There was thunder inside my skull, the roiling of blood, a roaring that pushed every thought aside. All I saw was what she’d given away—the body I thought was mine made soft and open to strangers.
She had fed them what once saved my soul. She moaned for them. That sound—a knife across anything left of me.
One of the men struggled to his knees. Pale, scabbed, a boy-thing who wore his bruises like trophies. He lunged blindly for a small dagger on the bedside slab, as if a scrap of metal could stop what was coming.
I didn’t pause.
The bronze sword hung above the hearth—old, polished to a terrible sheen. I tore it free. The metal was cool against my palm, heavy and hungry. It sang when I lifted it, a single clean note that smelled like iron and promises.
He moved. I met him at the edge of his lunge and drove the blade through him so hard I felt the shock in my shoulder.
There was a sound I will never unhear—a wet, stunned gasp—and then something hot and coppery burst out between us.
It came in a ragged fountain, steaming in the light of the oil lamps, splattering the wall and soaking the linen that had been her sheets.
He went down like a slain lamb. When I shoved the blade free, his insides followed, a slick, red thing that spat and slithered. He hung halfway off the sword, convulsing, lips blue, eyes popping like drowned fish, before his knees slackened and he collapsed into a heap.
The next man, who fucked Helena’s mouth crawled like a rat, hands scrabbling at the floor as if he could dig himself out of living. Blood slicked his fingers and the boards below him; the room was a red mirror that swallowed light.
“Please—please don’t—” he whimpered, voice small and raw.
I did not answer.
My foot came down on the small of his back, and I crushed him into the planks.
He screamed—a high, animal sound—and his body bucked beneath me.
My leather sandal dug in. I slammed again, twice, until something inside him broke with a wet, unquestionable sound.
He convulsed, choked, and sobbed like a man whose world had ended in one step.
“Salvatore, STOP!” Helena shrieked.
She stumbled from the bed, naked, linen clinging to her like a second skin from where it had been dragged. Her cheeks were bright with shame or fever; her breath came ragged. Her beauty was a ruin under the scent of blood and wet fear.
I laughed then—low, cold, without warmth.
I picked up the dagger that had fallen from the first man’s hand. It was small, bronze, its edge dull from use but still wicked. I yanked the second by the hair, forced his head back until the roots screamed, and drew the blade across his throat.
The cut was not quick. The metal bit, the world became the sound of blood thundering into the wooden floor. He gurgled and clawed at air that would not take him back. His eyes stayed open until they did not.
I dropped him. The body slumped, another corpse added to the tidy ruin of that morning.
I turned to Helena. My mouth curved.
“You’re next,” I said.
Her face changed—not to pleading so much as to a practiced softness, the voice she’d used to make men forget themselves. “Salvatore… this isn’t what you think,” she breathed, like a woman reciting the lines that had gotten her what she wanted before.
“Do enlighten me,” I said and stepped over the fresh dark that welled from the corpses. The dagger left a ragged line of red on the floor as it dripped.
“They meant nothing,” she said, hurrying in the words. “I thought you were dead. I feared—”
“And now I stand before you.” I let the words hang. “Alive.”
She flinched, and then—as if the air itself had gone thin and cold—she sank back onto the bed.
The traded linen, stained and wet, clung to her.
Afternoon light slanted through the windows, dust motes drifting lazily and ignorantly in the gold; sunlight cut the room into warm bands that the blood answered with a colder shine.
Her face was a map of ruin—shame, calculation, fear, each line deeper in that harsh light.
Her voice slid low, practiced, the whisper of a woman who had always known how to bend men. “We can still make this right…”
“That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” I spoke without mercy.
I climbed onto the bed like something with nothing left to lose. The bronze dagger was slick in my hand; its weight felt true, unforgiving. My fingers found the fragile cords beneath her jaw and closed.
She clawed at my wrist, nails tearing at leather and skin, a useless, frantic sound. Her breath hitched; panic pulled color from her face, then dragged it back in ragged streaks. The pulse at her throat fluttered like a trapped bird.
“Salvatore—please—can’t—” she gasped.
Her face bled red, then purple. The same color as the blood on the floor. The same color as my temper.
I watched her gasp—one ragged, useless thing—then drew the blade across her throat.
Blood sprayed and struck my chest, warm and obscene. Her body shuddered with the last, grotesque echo of life and went slack. The bed drank the wet bloom, and the room filled with a new, heavy stillness.
I sat back and breathed deep. Linen clung in ruined folds. The house reeked of oil smoke and blood. I looked at what I had made—the ruin, the two men who would never rise, the woman whose bargains had been built on small betrayals.
She had thought me weak. She had thought I would forgive. She had been wrong.
I rose. The dagger in my hand was warm, sticky with other people’s lives. Without looking, I hurled it across the room. It struck the far wall and fell, dull and final, to rest in a shadow of plaster and dust.
The house went as quiet as a tomb. Perfume and the smoke of burned oil that had once hung like a promise were braided now with iron. I walked into the hallway, through the doorway, into the morning air. I did not look back. I felt no mourning. A chapter had closed, its pages soaked and stiff.
I had no use for what she had been. I had no use for my father. I had only one name left in my mouth with any warmth at all.
Lazarus.