Chapter 10
Lazarus
The cold here wasn’t a feeling. It was a being.
It gripped with a crushing weight, creeping beneath the skin, burrowing deep until I couldn’t tell where it ended and I began.
So, I let it take me.
Fighting only made it worse. Resisting meant believing there was something left to save. And hope had no place in this tomb.
I curled into myself, tighter and tighter, until I thought I might fold into nothing. A serpent devouring its own tail. If I could make myself small enough, maybe I would vanish. Maybe the gods—if they still bothered to look this far down—would forget I was ever here.
Our cell wasn’t a room. It was a hollow in the belly of Ugarit, carved not by craft but by cruelty.
The air stank of wet limestone, old blood, and flesh too long denied burial.
The walls were rough-hewn, hacked out in haste and hatred, their edges jagged and sweating with water that dripped like a clock that never stopped.
The stone breathed.
Sweat. Sorrow. Something older than both.
Bronze shackles bit into my wrists, ankles, and neck, chafing skin already raw.
The metal was ancient—green with age, etched with the ghosts of countless hands.
I found myself wondering who had forged them.
Some blacksmith from centuries past, sweating over his anvil in the glow of a temple fire, believing his work would serve the gods.
Now his work served damnation.
Divine craftsmanship, turned to chains.
The air never moved. It sat heavy and wet in my lungs. Every breath tasted of copper and decay, of piss dried into the stone and blood ground into dust. The smell made sure we never forgot where we were—or what we had become.
Sound was the only thing that ever escaped.
The groans of the dying. The whispers of the broken. The drip of water counted down the hours of those who no longer kept time. Sometimes a sob would echo down the corridor, soft and thin, like a ghost relearning how to breathe.
I tried to shut it out. To imagine somewhere else.
But the Dreadhold didn’t allow escape—not even in the mind.
Its echoes clung to you.
They crawled beneath the skin, nested deep, and whispered until your thoughts no longer sounded like your own.
And when the silence finally came, you learned it wasn’t mercy.
Only when they sent us deeper—into the caves—did it change.
Down there, sound became labor.
The clang of bronze on stone.
The grunt of chained bodies.
The scrape of iron, the hiss of breath through clenched teeth—over and over, hour after hour, until your ears forgot what quiet was and your thoughts dried up like dust.
And beneath it all, the earth murmured—a low, constant groan that rose through the stone.
It felt like Ugarit itself was weary of holding us.
Like the city wanted to sink, to bury us where no god could find what was left.
It had been days since the branding, but my shoulder still burned as if the iron had only just lifted. The flesh throbbed with fever, the pain crawling down into the bone.
Across from me, Salvatore sat in silence, his back to the wall, head bowed. We hadn’t spoken since the day the Dreadhold had stolen our words, leaving us alone inside our own pain.
The only sound was the chain between us, shifting when one of us moved.
I missed Amara with a grief that came in waves, sharp enough to make breathing feel like betrayal. But it wasn’t her face that haunted me most.
It was my mother’s.
I hadn’t meant to lose control that day. I’d come home from war with one question burning in my chest—who was my father? She refused to tell me. I was angry, hurt, tired of living beneath a lie, of being handed a story I was never meant to question.
When she still wouldn’t speak, I brought up her past—and it gutted her. The look in her eyes when I said those words would follow me until I died.
She left that morning in silence. When she returned later, she locked herself in her room. I told myself I’d give her time, that I’d apologize when she was ready to listen.
But the gods never gave me that chance.
The next time I saw her, she was gone. Dead. Her blood was soaking the clay beneath her like the earth itself was trying to hold her.
And I’d had to live knowing that my last words to her were cruel ones. That the son she died remembering wasn’t the one she’d raised.
The guilt had teeth. It chewed through every thought, every prayer, until I didn’t know where the wound ended and I began.
“Why her?” The question escaped before I could stop it. My throat was dry, my voice raw. “She didn’t deserve to die.”
The sound echoed off the stone.
Across the cell, Salvatore stirred, his movements slow, stiff.
“Lazarus…”
His voice was rough, cracking through the silence like a splinter.
“I’m sorry about your mother. I lost my father, too.”
I looked up at him through the fever haze. His words reached me warped by the fever—muted, distant, gone before they touched anything real.
He hesitated, then said quietly, “We’ll get through this. Together.”
I shook my head. The word tore out before I could stop it.
“No,” I snapped, quick enough to sting the air.
“Don’t.” My voice trembled, thin and cutting. “Don’t fucking comfort me.”
I turned toward him. My blood was boiling. My hands were shaking. My throat felt like it was closing.
“You don’t get it,” I said. “You can’t.”
My voice broke apart, ragged and small.
“Your father?” I spat. “You hated him. You wanted him dead. You prayed for it. Don’t you dare sit there and compare that to this.”
My chest heaved. My skin burned.
“I needed her.”
The words ripped out of me like something being torn from bone.
“My mother was everything.”
I dug my fingers into my scalp until my nails bit blood.
“She was my only parent, Salvatore—and now she’s gone.”
My breath hitched.
“Taken. Torn out of the world like she was nothing.”
The heat rose in my neck; I could taste salt and blood in my mouth.
“She’s dead because I wasn’t there. Because I left her alone.”
My voice cracked. I tried to breathe, but the air burned.
“I should’ve stayed. I should’ve protected her.” The words came faster, desperate, wild. “Instead, I walked away. I went to the beach. I fucking left her.”
The cell tilted. The floor swam.
“I left her,” I whispered, the truth souring in my mouth. “And now I’m here—rotting in this gods-damned pit—and she’s gone.”
A tremor ran through me, my whole body shaking. My shoulder burned, the pain blooming down my arm, searing through my bones.
“I’ll never see her again,” I gasped.
I looked at him through blurred vision, the shadows splitting and warping.
“You got what you wanted,” I said, voice breaking apart. “Your father’s dead.”
Tears finally came, bitter and hot, cutting through the dirt on my face.
“I didn’t get to say goodbye. I didn’t bury her. I left her alone.”
My voice wavered. “And now I’ll rot here with the same gods who let her die.”
The silence that followed was unbearable. It filled the cell—thick, heavy, grief made sound.
I folded into myself and whispered, half to him, half to the dark, “She died hating me.”
“Lazarus—”
Salvatore’s voice cracked. It wasn’t sharp or proud; it was fragile. The sound of a man breaking quietly. His eyes glistened in the half-light, and for a moment, he looked less like my friend and more like someone made hollow by his own sins.
“Tell me the truth, Salvatore.”
My pulse thundered, each beat an accusation.
“Did you kill Helena?” My voice barely carried. “Her lovers. Your father.”
He went still.
The chain between us stilled too, its clink swallowed by the air. His jaw tensed. His breath hitched.
That silence told me everything.
Then his lips parted, and his voice bled out, thin and shaking.
“I did,” he whispered. “I killed them. Helena. Her lovers. But I didn’t mean to. I was just…” He swallowed hard, his voice fraying. “I was so angry.”
The words struck like a thrown stone. I could feel my heartbeat in my teeth.
“Angry?” I said, the word hollow, foreign in my mouth. “That’s your excuse?”
“You don’t understand!” His voice broke, loud in the small cell, bouncing off the walls. “Do you know what my father did to me that day?”
His hands clenched, bronze cuffs grinding against the limestone floor.
His whole body shook, the chain around his neck rattling softly.
“He beat me until I couldn’t stand. Spat on me.
Called me nothing less than the dirt beneath his sandals.
Said I had disgraced the Lorian name.” His breath came in ragged bursts.
“I was already broken, Lazarus. Already fucking broken.”
He pressed his palms to the ground, the tremor in his arms barely contained.
“I went to Helena’s house,” he said, quieter now. “I just needed something. Someone. Anything that didn’t hurt.”
He drew in a shuddering breath. “When I got there…” His words trailed into a whisper. “She was in bed with two men.”
His head bowed low, dark hair hiding his face. “Not one. But two.”
He laughed once—a hollow, joyless sound, like air escaping a dying fire.
“They were fucking her, Lazarus.”
His voice shook, each word dragging out like it hurt to speak. “She moaned for them like she never did for me. She promised to be faithful. Swore it before the gods. And she spat on it. On me.”
His hands curled into fists, the bronze cuffs grinding against the limestone floor.
“She betrayed me,” he said, the words shaking loose. “And I snapped.”
I barked out a laugh—dry, cracked, ugly. “Promised to be faithful to you?” I mocked. “You defiled your brother’s wife. You fucked her before Julian was even in the ground. Are you really that fucking stupid, Salvatore? That you thought she’d ever be faithful to anyone?”
His face twisted, anger and grief tangling into something monstrous. “When I saw… what I saw—something in me broke.” His voice quivered, every syllable raw. “I lost control.”
He looked up at me then, eyes wide and desperate, like he wanted me to save him from his own truth.
But I felt nothing.