20. Leandra
Iwake up in my room, my head throbbing with a deep, sickening pulse that seems to beat behind my eyes which refuse to open fully, the lids gummed together with dried tears.
The space is silent, but it’s a wrong kind of silence. Not peaceful, but emptied out, the chaos of my outburst replaced by an eerie stillness that presses against my eardrums like a held breath before a scream.
All the furniture is gone. The broken glass, the broken pieces removed and disposed of no doubt just as easily as they disposed of my poor sister, swept away like debris after a meal. Leaving nothing but bare floor, blank walls and the smell of bleach covering something older, something metallic.
I’m tied to the bed. Spread eagled. Just as I was when I first arrived here, my wrists and ankles bound with the same impersonal efficiency, the restraints biting into skin already tender with old bruises.
My skin has been stitched back together. I look like a patchwork quilt now. A grotesque manifestation of how broken I am on the inside.
I cannot move so I lie there, staring at the ceiling, my mind replaying Ezekiel’s words over and over like some god awful broken record that carves deeper grooves into my brain with every repetition, each syllable a fresh incision.
“She has a nice cunt. That is all.”
“She is nothing more than any of the others.”
The love I felt for him, the devotion, the belief, it’s shattered into a thousand pieces.
I feel each shard as a separate, distinct wound, a glass splinter working its way through my chest cavity, scraping against my ribs, puncturing the soft tissue of everything I thought was true.
His colours, once proof of his divinity now feel like a cruel joke, a trick of the light I was desperate enough to worship.
Is God laughing at me? Are they all laughing at me?
I can almost hear it, a chorus of amusement echoing from somewhere far above while I lie here, naked and bound and finally, finally seeing clearly.
I was a fool to think he cared for me. The realisation is not intellectual but physical, a cold, spreading numbness that starts in my chest and radiates outward, as if my heart has stopped pumping blood and started pumping something else entirely, something that freezes rather than warms.
I was a fool to believe I was anything more than a warm body, a vessel to be used and discarded when it ceased to amuse.
I let him put his hands on me, I let him put his mouth on me.
I called it love, I called it sacred. I spread my legs and opened my throat and called it devotion, and all the while he was measuring me against the others, comparing the tightness, the taste, the sounds I made when he hurt me.
But beneath the pain and betrayal, something else stirs.
Not gentle, not healing but hot and sharp and alive.
Anger. It rises from the wreckage of my heart like smoke from a house fire, acrid and blinding.
Determination. It coils in my gut, a serpent waking from a long, forced hibernation.
I won’t let him use me anymore. I won’t let him destroy me, not completely, not the core of me that is only now remembering how to snarl.
Ezekiel may have broken me, my body certainly, my trust absolutely, something tender and hopeful that I will never get back but I will rise from the ashes, even if I have to claw my way up with fingernails torn to the quick.
I will pretend if that’s what it takes.
I will smile, kneel, and offer my wrists for the restraints.
When I am free of this place, when his guard is down and his cock is soft and he believes me tamed, I will do everything in my power to destroy him, to destroy them all, to make them feel even a fraction of what is tearing through me right now.