17. Lazarus
The room is silent, save for the wet, ragged tear of my breathing.
The cold has teeth, gnawing deeper into the marrow of my bones and I close my eyes, trying to block out the memories of her touch, the way her mouth whispered devotion against my skin, the way her words coiled around me like warm silk before they became a garrotte.
But they linger, haunting me, taunting me like a ghost that presses against the raw edges of my mind and refuses to let go.
I don’t know how long I have been here now, how long they have kept me in this dark part of hell.
As the sound of footsteps approaches, I tense.
Is it one set or two? I don’t know if it’s better when my brother is here or not.
At least when he is, she spends half her time fucking him and not me.
Her body a weapon she wields with liturgical precision, her pleasure a hymn sung for both our ruin.
I can hear it through the walls, that sacrilege of flesh, and it flays something deeper than pride.
But the humiliation of him seeing me like this…
No, it’s not humiliation I feel.
It’s something far worse, far deeper, a black and sucking undertow. Because he allows this. He permits this. He has put me here, in this fucking room, his own blood, bound and broken for her amusement.
As the door unlocks, it clangs with an echo that taunts me, that licks into my ear and whispers that even if I could undo the ropes holding me down, even if I chewed through my own wrists, I could never make it out of this room.
The sound is the voice of the house itself, a beast that has swallowed me whole.
He steps in first, his face a mask of triumph so pure it is almost beatific and then she slides in after, her presence a temperature drop, a scent of myrrh and something animal.
I stare at them, letting them see the contempt in my eyes, the hatred that has become my only prayer.
Letting them see that they can keep me here for months, years, an eternity, and I will not break.
I will not give into whatever the fuck this sacrilege is.
And then something squeals.
The sound is small, wet, impossibly fragile. It cuts through the room like a scalpel through infected flesh.
I narrow my eyes, my heart stuttering against my ribs. Ines is holding something. It’s small, swaddled in white, clearly precious.
Fuck. It’s a baby. Their baby. She had their child, then. And I’ve been here, in this hell for nine fucking months.
The realization doesn’t land, it metastasizes, spreading through my chest like ice cracking stone.
“It’s a boy.” Ines says proudly, triumphantly. “God has given us a boy.”
I think my mind snaps then. I think what little reality I have left slithers away.
Why would God do that? Why would God reward them?
After everything they have done, after every desecration they have committed, every sin they carved into my flesh, He still favours them?
He has given that bitch the one thing that makes her untouchable, given her the greatest of all blessings, a child born from this unholy union while I rot in the dark, forgotten by grace.
It feels like a trick, a sick game someone is playing with me.
It feels like all the walls are closing in, and very soon they will shatter.
That I will shatter. That our entire empire, our bloodline, all of it will shatter into something monstrous and new, with that mewling thing as its heir.
The baby’s cry is a coronation anthem for the end of everything.
I start raging, start pulling against the ropes, my wrists weeping fresh blood. I buck my body, half hoping my spine will snap and I will die right here and finally end this, end the image of her cradling that child, like she’s some sacred symbol of motherhood.
“Laz…” I don’t know which of them speaks it. I don’t care. Their voices are the same now, a single instrument of my damnation.
I want out,
I want out of this.
I no longer want to be a part of a world where they get to destroy everything our family has built, where they get everything they desire; each other, a child, a fucking future, and I am left to suffer here. A discarded sacrament, a ghost in the floorboards of their disgusting love story.
The baby’s cry fades to a gurgle, a contented sound, and that is the worst of all.
It is happy.
It is loved.
While I am nothing but a wound that will not close.