19. Leandra
I’m taken to a room to bathe. The warm water soothes my aching body, and I ignore the tinge it turns from all my blood. I ignore the pain too, ignore all the signs that what I’ve endured amounts to torture, not love.
Instead, I tell myself that this is a reward for my good behaviour. I’ve earned this.
I’ve been obedient, submissive, perfect.
The words pulse in my skull like a second heartbeat, obedient, submissive, perfect, and I cling to them because they are the only thing I have left. My reflection in the bathwater is a girl with hollow eyes and a mouth that has forgotten not only how to say no, but that the word even exists.
I tell myself I am beautiful. I am everything Ezekiel wants me to be, I am the perfect wife for him now. The thought coats my throat like honey laced with copper and I swallow it down anyway.
When I’m finished, I walk silently back to my room.
My bare feet remember every cold stone, the path worn into my muscles by repetition.
The servants don’t watch me anymore, they know I won’t disobey, that I’m too good for that now.
Their averted eyes are a collar I wear with something dangerously close to gratitude but as I turn the corner, I hear voices.
It’s Ezekiel and Isaac, and their words carry down this cold, empty hallway, sliding into my ears even though I don’t want to hear it.
“She’s doing well,” Isaac says. “Progressing as expected.”
“Yes,” Ezekiel agrees, and my heart lifts for a traitorous moment before he adds, “She’s a good whore. Far better than her dead sister ever was. Cass was a bitch. We should have gone with the younger sister from the start.”
The word ’whore’ lands inside me like a stone dropped into a hollow place, and the echo it makes is my own voice whispering ’He means it as praise, he means it as love.’
I almost believe it until the rest sinks in; Cass was a bitch.
My sister. My dead sister, and he speaks of her like a broken tool, and I am frozen against the wall with my hands pressed flat to the stone so I will not move and give myself away.
Isaac chuckles, the sound wet and pleased. “The younger ones are always easier to train. They’re more docile, more naive. Cass screamed so much we nearly lost the others before the ritual even began.”
“Not always.” Ezekiel’s voice is dismissive, nostalgia without affection.
“Ines was young when we started her off, and look how she turned out.” There is a pause, heavy with something unsaid.
Ines is my cousin. I never asked what happened to Ines, where she went, why they occasionally mention her. I’m too busy being perfect to dare.
“You know the Brethren will try to put a stop to this. You know they will step in if they can.” Isaac’s voice has shifted, a needle threading through caution.
“Let them.” Ezekiel says. “Let them try.” The words are so soft, almost fond, as if he were speaking of a lover’s challenge.
“They could get hurt.” Isaac adds, and I realise he’s talking about me. About the other women, the other wives I have yet to meet, and the casualness of it. They could get hurt, as if we are collateral, as if our bodies are just geography he is willing to scar.
“If they are we will deal with it. It’s not like we haven’t before.” Ezekiel says in such a matter-of-fact tone. “Is this our third or our fourth attempt now?”
“Fourth.” Isaac mutters. “And it would be far quicker if you didn’t insist on breaking them in the way you do.
” Breaking. The word cracks against my ribs.
Fourth. Four sets of women. Four harvests of flesh and obedience.
The hallway seems to tilt, and I bite down on my tongue to keep from making a sound.
“Tsk,” Ezekiel replies, and I can hear the smirk in it, that shape of his lips when he is about to be cruel.
“Like you don’t enjoy the training. And besides, it is necessary.
I need my wives to not just be obedient, I need them to be whores, to be willing to fuck anyone and everyone I tell them to.
They are instruments to use. Weapons I can wield.
Their cunts open doors for me that steel cannot.
” The word cunts lands on my skin like a brand, and I feel my own sex clench in a reflex he trained into me, and the shame of it burns so bright I almost vomit.
“Even your precious Leandra?” Isaac says.
A laugh answers him. It’s cold, devoid of any warmth, a sound that should come from a dead thing.
“She has a nice cunt. That is all. Do not confuse the matter. I may enjoy fucking her but when it comes down to it, she is nothing more than any of the others. She is a warm hole I happened to break first this time.”
It feels like that knife is back inside me again, only this time it’s so much deeper, so much worse. I feel it slide up under my sternum, feel it bury itself in my heart.
Every touch he ever gave me twists in my memory, every whispered good girl curdles into poison. That carefully built charade crumbles entirely, and I cannot hold all the pieces together anymore.
He doesn’t love me, does he? He doesn’t… I’m just a tool, a means to an end.
The nights he held me down and called it dedication, the mornings he praised my tears as an offering, all of it was a lie carved into my body so deeply I mistook the wounds for devotion.
I’m nothing to him.
Nothing.
After everything he’s led me to believe.
After all the times he’s looked at me, touched me, told me I was special, told me I was the one who pleased him most. I remember the way he kissed my forehead after the first time I didn’t scream, the way he said That’s my girl, and I let those words knit themselves into my identity until I couldn’t breathe without them.
He unmade me and I called it love.
I hurry away, feeling like my mind is reeling.
The corridor stretches and warps, and my footsteps are too loud, the slaps of wet skin on stone that sound like a death march.
I press my hand over my mouth, and it comes away red from my bitten tongue.
I stare at the blood as if it might spell out a truth I can still reject. Only, it doesn’t.
I’ve been so naive, so fucking blind.
Ezekiel doesn’t love me. He doesn’t even see me as special.
I’m just a pawn in his game, a disposable piece to surrender and discard, just like every other person on this earth. Fourth attempt. Cass was a bitch. I will die for him, just like my sister did before me, and he will not even remember the colour of my eyes.
As I reach my room, the realization crashes over me like a wave.
My mind doesn’t just fracture, it severs into so many pieces I can’t hold back the rage that explodes there.
The room is a shrine of my obedience; the perfectly made bed where I let him do unspeakable things, the dresser where I laid out the clothing he chose, the mirror where I practised the smile he liked. I want all of it to fucking bleed.
A scream, more primal than anything I’ve felt before erupts from inside and suddenly I’m lashing out, smashing everything in sight with my bare hands.
My body moves without permission, a marionette whose strings have finally snapped and I am both the violence and the victim, watching myself destroy the only world I have left.
The mirror shatters.
The furniture splinters, and I don’t stop.
I can’t fucking stop.
This rage inside me is all consuming.
I slam my fists into the wall until the plaster cracks and my knuckles bloom open, white bone glistening through the gore.
I rake my nails down the wooden door and feel splinters bury themselves in deep, hot delicious slivers of agony that I welcome because at least this pain is mine, at least this hurt is something I chose for me.
I can feel my skin tearing, I can feel as my flesh literally rips apart and my blood starts to stream out, pooling on the floor in dark, obscene slicks.
A shard of the mirror catches the light and I see my own reflection in fragments, my mouth stretched wide in a silent howl, my eyes two wet voids, my frizzy out of control hair half-matted now with sweat and blood.
I look like a thing already dead, a ghost that doesn’t know it’s been buried.
My fingers tighten around the broken shard as I pick it up and before I can think not to I’m slashing, cutting, slicing my skin up, carving myself anew. Carving the pieces of him out of me, cutting out where he branded my skin with his runes, his sweet nothings, and his fucking lies.
My blood streams down my arms, down my chest, and it feels like a baptism, that all my sins are here, pouring out of me and when it is done I will be reborn, I will be free.
I don’t understand why I’m not enough.
I’ve done everything he’s ever asked of me. I let him carve runes into my inner flesh with a razor while he whispered that pain was prayer, let him press my face into the mattress while he told me I was beloved, I was chosen, I was his.
I let him use my body as an altar, and I mistook his desecration for worship.
I’ve been obedient, submissive, perfect.
I let him fuck me, let him use my body in whatever depraved ways he can think of, all under the guise that it is ‘what our Prophet enjoys’.
I swallowed his seed and called it communion, I arched my back for his friends and called it duty.
I smiled when he bruised me and called it favour.
I am the hollowed-out cathedral of his appetites, and I called it a heaven when really it was the very pits of hell.
What more can he want from me?
What more do I have to give, do I have to sacrifice?
My sister’s body is probably rotting in some unmarked grave, and he talks about her like she was a faulty instrument.
I know I will be next. I will be a name he says with casual disdain to the next girl he breaks.
The thought detonates behind my eyes, white-hot and total and my scream pitches higher, a frequency that feels like it is stripping the lining from my throat.
The door bursts open and a servant rushes in, trying to calm me, a girl with terrified eyes and hands that flutter like wounded birds. She says something, maybe my name but it doesn’t reach me, nothing can reach me in the state I am in.
I scream out, I curse, snarling at her as if she is suddenly the focus of all my rage, this girl who has seen me kneel and suck more cocks than I can count.
My bloody fingers close on her wrist, and she shrieks as I dig in, and the part of me that would have recoiled from causing pain is buried so far beneath the ruin I can’t find it.
Ezekiel and Isaac appear in the doorway, their faces clearly confused by my sudden change in behaviour. That confusion is the final wound. He doesn’t even understand what he has done, that his words could unmake me, because he never thought of me as someone who could be unmade.
Afterall I was a tool, and tools don’t fucking feel, do they?
When I see Ezekiel, his aura is that same swirling mass of red and gold, frightening me but also enraging me more.
I used to think those colours meant passion, meant destiny.
Now I see them for what they are; fire and slaughter, a butcher’s glow.
That feeling consumes me, a hate so pure it is almost sexual, a heat that coats my thighs and makes me want to tear the whole world open.
I throw myself at him, screaming, clawing, wanting to rip his face off, wanting to hurt him as much as he has hurt me. My body is a weapon I finally understand, every wound he ever gave me converted into fuel.
“Why aren’t I enough? Why don’t you love me?”
The words tear out of me, raw and bleeding as the rest of me and I hate myself for still needing to ask, still needing the answer to be different even as I try to gouge out his damned eyes.
My nails make contact. I feel as they dig in, as they drag down his cheek, four deep furrows that open like red mouths and the sight of his blood, his blood is the most exquisite thing I have ever tasted.
I hear him hiss, a serpentine sound and for one endless delicious second, I think I might actually kill him.
Then Isaac grabs me by my hair. The yank is brutal, ripping strands from my scalp, and my head snaps back so hard I hear something pop in my neck. I kick out, I thrash in his arms, animal and undone, my heels slamming against his shins, my fingers clawing backwards for his face.
But his grip is iron, and my body is already broken, already far too used up.
Isaac throws me down onto the floor, and the impact drives the air from my lungs, my vision going starburst white.
I try to rise, to keep fighting because the rage is still eating me alive from the inside, but then his hand strikes my face.
The blow is surgical, precise, a lesson in stillness.
My head snaps sideways, and the world splinters into shards of light and dark.
I hear Ezekiel’s voice from very far away, calm and curious, as if I am a puzzle he is mildly interested in solving.
And then the darkness rushes up and everything goes black.