14. Lazarus
The ropes bite into my wrists, the coarse fibres dig deeper with every twist of my hands in a slow, intimate gnawing that has become a second heartbeat.
I’ve been working at them for hours, or maybe days.
Time is a meaningless thing when you’re tied to a bed, your body a map of aches, your mind a storm of rage and a humiliation so deep it feels like you’ll never crawl your way out of it.
The room is dim, the air thick with the scent of my own sweat and something sweet but also rotten. Blood, yes, which I know is mine. But also the ghost of her perfume, the memory of her hands, and that makes the fury curdle into something sicker.
I grit my teeth and pull harder, feeling the skin of my wrists give way in a wet, tearing kiss.
The pain is a clean, bright line compared to the fire burning in my chest. Ines.
Konstantine. Their faces flash in my mind, her smile, his indifferent eyes, and their laughter echoes in my ears, a duet of mockery.
I’ll kill them. Both of them.
I’ll unmake them the way they’ve unmade me.
The rope finally surrenders enough for me to wrench my hand free.
My wrist is a raw, glistening ruin. I sit up, my muscles screaming from the abuse, and I fumble at the other bindings.
My body feels heavy, like I’ve been drained of everything but my hate and something worse, something that pulses low in my belly when I remember the things she did, the things my body answered against my will.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand, forcing those unwanted images back down.
My knees buckle for a moment before I lock them. The room tilts, then steadies.
But the door creaks open. Ines steps inside, her silhouette a dark jewel framed by the light from the hallway beyond.
She’s wearing a flowing gown that clings to her like a second skin, her hair loose around her shoulders, and she looks like a queen, like a predator who has already fed and is savouring the memory.
The sight of her sends a bolt of something jagged through me.
Hatred, yes, but also a crawling, unwilling recognition of what we did.
“Lazarus,” she says, her voice soft, almost tender, the same voice she used when she, no. I shut the thought down, refusing to allow it to properly form. “You’re awake.”
I don’t think. I move.
In an instant I’m across the room, forcing my cramped muscles to work, and my ruined hand wraps around her throat. The contact is horrifyingly familiar. She gasps, her eyes widening in a shock that looks almost genuine, as if all of this has been some little game we’ve been playing.
I slam her against the wall, my fingers tightening, feeling the delicate architecture of her trachea, the frantic flutter of her pulse against my palm. Her hands claw at my arm, but I don’t let her go.
“You…” I growl, my voice scraping out of a throat raw from screaming. “You think you can do whatever you want, don’t you? You think you can crawl inside me and rearrange my soul and I’ll just…”
“I’m pregnant,” she chokes out, her voice barely a thread of sound, her eyes bulging.
I freeze.
Her words hang in the air between us, like a third presence in the room.
Pregnant. The word echoes in my mind, each repetition louder, more grotesque.
It’s a violation that keeps on violating, a seed planted in her body that extends their union into the future, a future that has no place for me.
I loosen my grip slightly, but I don’t let go.
My hand is shaking, and I can feel every ridge of her throat, the heat of her skin, the way her life pulses under my fingers like a secret.
“What?” I demand, my voice splintering.
“I’m pregnant,” she repeats, her voice stronger now, a sly, curving thing. “I’m carrying Konstantine’s heir.”
Is this a trick? It has to be. Ines doesn’t tell the truth unless it serves her, unless it’s a blade dressed as a gift. But the way she’s looking at me, there’s something in her eyes, a glint of triumph wrapped in vulnerability, and it makes me hesitate.
“Are you willing to murder the future of the Brethren?” she asks, her voice calm now, almost mocking, a teacher correcting a slow student. Her lips curve, and I remember those lips on me, the obscene tenderness of them as she slid them over my cock.
No, stop it. Just fucking stop.
I tighten my grip again, but I don’t squeeze.
My hand trembles against her throat, my fingers itching to finish what I started, to feel the life go out of her and take her poison with it.
But I can’t, not if she is telling the truth.
The thought of killing an innocent, even one made of her and him, hooks into some weak, stupid part of me I thought they’d carved out entirely and she knows it. She’s always known.
“Call a truce,” she says, her voice soft again, a lover’s murmur. “I don’t wish you harm, Lazarus. I never have. I just wanted you to understand what Konstantine and I have. Why it’s so special.”
She says “special” the way someone might say “sacred,” and it makes my stomach turn because I can hear the echo of my own longing in it, the longing for a bond that excludes everyone else, that devours the world.
She took that, she corrupted it, ruined it, turned it into something she could use, something depraved and disgusting.
I laugh, the sound harsh and bitter, tearing out of me like a sob. “You raped me,” I snarl, and the word is a grenade in my mouth, shattering the lie that this was anything but desecration.
She laughs too, the sound light and airy, like wind chimes in an abattoir.
“Please, Laz, you were enjoying it enough at the time.” Her eyes flick down my body, a deliberate, knowing glance that makes my skin crawl with a heat I can’t control. “Your body doesn’t lie as well as your mouth does.”
I slam her head against the wall, and the sound it makes is a dull, wet crack that echoes in the room. She cries out, her hands flying to her head, and a thin trickle of blood blooms at her hairline. But I don’t let go. I can’t. My hand is a claw now, a thing separate from my will.
“We can move on,” she says, her voice trembling now, but the tremor feels rehearsed. “I can speak to Konstantine. I can help you repair all the damage. We could even… find a place for you. Close to us. Close to me.” The offer is a silk-wrapped hook, and I feel it catch in my flesh.
“I don’t trust you,” I say, my voice low and dangerous, a growl from the pit of my ruined self. “Not for one fucking second.”
“It’s not Ines you need to look out for.” A voice says behind me.
I turn, spinning on my heel, but he’s too quick for me. And I’m too weak from how they’ve kept me tied up, kept me drugged, kept me as a plaything for their twisted games. My body betrays me again, slow and stupid.
I was so busy focused on her, so consumed by that anger festering inside me that I didn’t even notice the sound of his footsteps, the fact that the door was wide open, that any guard walking past would see what was happening.
I feel the needle slide into my neck, a cold, precise violation. I stare at my brother’s identical brown eyes, my eyes, the eyes I’ve trusted since we were boys, the eyes that used to crinkle with shared laughter.
Now they’re flat, curious, like he’s watching an insect under glass before setting it alight.
“Why?” I whisper. The word is a child’s word, small and broken.
He’s killing me. He must be.
Whatever this drug is, it’s like ice slithering through my veins, a winter that starts in my throat and spreads outward, claiming me inch by inch.
My legs go weak, my heart does one dramatic, desperate thud like it understands we’re in the fight of our life, like it’s reaching for him, for the brother who was supposed to be my other half and then it slows, far too fucking much.
“You’re her pet.” Konstantine replies, his voice casual, almost bored as he watches me fall.
He watches my legs collapse, watches me crumble into a mass of limbs at his feet, and there’s nothing in his face but a faint, satisfied disgust. The words are a door slamming shut on everything I thought we were.
“My pet.” Ines repeats, curling around him in that snakelike way of hers, her body moulding to his side, her hand sliding up his chest in a caress that is both possessive and obscene. She looks down at me, and her smile is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen, because it’s fond.
As if I’m a beloved dog who’s finally learned its place.
“Guards.” Konstantine barks, and the word echoes over and over and over in my head, a hammer on the anvil of my skull.
Two men stride in. Men I know, men I have drunk with, shared jokes with, men I fucking trusted. Their faces are carefully blank, but one of them has the decency to look away. The other meets my eyes with a cold professionalism that cuts deeper than the needle.
They haul me up by my arms, and my body is a sack of meat now, a thing to be disposed of.
My eyelids grow heavy, and my body refuses to do anything but surrender to the ice spreading through me. But behind me I can hear that coo-cooing, Ines’s voice soft and lilting, a lullaby for the damned and I know this is the end.
That they have won.
That she has won.
The betrayal is a deeper cold than the drug, a black hole where my heart used to be and as the darkness swallows me, the last thing I feel is not the fear of death but the unbearable, intimate horror of being unmade by the two people who knew exactly how to break me.