22. Leandra
They keep me locked down, tied down in this room that smells of my own sweat and the copper-sweet aftermath of everything he’s done to me.
The mattress beneath me is bare, stained with old and new proofs of my body’s betrayal, slick patches that never quite dry, rust-coloured blooms that spread like a slow infection.
My body has healed and that patchwork is barely visible now, like a spiderweb of silver scars etched into my skin, as if the breaking meant nothing, as if my rage has been reduced back to nothing.
And I’m right back at the beginning again, except now I know exactly what the beginning was leading to, and the knowing is a horror all its own.
I know we’re getting closer and closer to his precious deadline, to this great ritual he wants me and the other wives for. I can feel it in the way they have ramped up my ‘training’, the way Isaac punishes me harder for every purported infraction.
Yesterday he made me count my own climaxes while he carved a new symbol into my inner thigh, and when I lost count, when my mind went white and empty and I forgot language entirely he started again from one, and the blade bit deeper each time.
Time is running out. I know this for a fact.
My last few days of whatever the fuck this is are running out, and soon I will be his creature entirely. I will be a body with no inside left, just a perfect, pliant vessel that opens and weeps and thanks him for the privilege.
When the door opens, I do nothing. I do not react. I have trained myself out of reacting because reacting gives them something, a flinch to savour, a gasp to collect like a trophy and I have decided, in the cold and private architecture of my survival, that I will give them as little as possible.
Even the wetness that still gathers between my legs when I hear footsteps in the hall, that treacherous, conditioned answer my body makes without my consent, I have learned to hate in silence.
I keep my eyes fixed on the ceiling as I breathe through my nose, and I wait for whoever it is to do whatever they have come to do.
Will it be pain, pleasure, or both today?
Will he use the clamps that make me sob and beg, or the vibrator he holds against me until I’m screaming with a release that feels like being I’m flayed open?
Will he whisper scripture into my ear while he stretches me past tearing, telling me this is holiness, this is love, this is the only way a thing like me can be saved?
But then I hear her voice, hear a name I haven’t heard in so long. Not the pet names Isaac gives me, not the degrading little titles Ezekiel uses when he visits my dreams and my waking nightmares both but my name, my actual name spoken like it still belongs to someone human.
“Leandra.”
Every carefully constructed wall inside me simply falls, and what rushes through the gap is not relief but a fresh, nauseating terror, because now there is something left to lose.
My mother crosses the room in four steps, her colours swirling in muted greys and soft blues, colours of sorrow and resolve.
Her hands are at my face before I can process that she is real, that she is here, that this is not my mind playing tricks but something actually happening.
Her palms cup my jaw, and she is looking at me with an expression I have never seen on her face before.
Her colours deepen into stormy purples, a hue I associate with both horror and regret, and I watch her gaze travel down my body; the bruises that pattern my ribs like a lover’s handprint, the burns on my breasts that are still pink and glossy, the place between my legs where I am shaved, swollen, and marked with words I cannot read.
Her aura fractures into splinters of sickly yellow-green, the colour of a wound realizing it’s infected.
Does it hurt her so much to see what she and my father permitted, what they have turned me into, all to appease their cursed prophet?
Does she understand now that I have been made into a thing that comes apart on command, that I have been taught to find my own degradation holy?
“I’m going to get you down,” she says. Her voice is very quiet and very controlled, which means she is fighting hard to keep it that way. Her aura flickers with streaks of silver, determination. “Don’t make any noise.”
Her hands move to the straps at my wrists.
They are buckled, but not locked. After all, there is no need to lock them when I cannot move my hands close enough to simply unclip them, not after the sessions where Isaac dislocates my shoulders just to hear the sound, then pops them back and fucks me while I’m still dizzy with pain.
My mother works the leather with quick, practiced efficiency, and I wonder, with a cold, distant curiosity, where she learned to undo restraints like this.
When my right hand comes free, I flex my fingers and feel the pins and needles rush in like a tide, and my traitor cunt gives a single, exhausted throb, because even this small pain speaks the language my body has been forced to learn and crave.
“Is this what he’s been doing to you?” she asks, not looking up from the second strap. Her colours shift slightly, a ripple of green, disgust, but also a need for truth.
I shake my head; my words can’t seem to form, but I want to scream out that this is nothing.
That this pain is nothing compared to the nights I spent suspended from hooks while Isaac whispered that my suffering was a prayer, that my screams were the sweetest hymn, that when Ezekiel finally takes me as his bride, I will understand pleasure so absolute it will unmake me.
I want to tell her about the things I have learned to want, the way my mouth waters when I see the instruments laid out, the way my hips lift now without being told.
But I can’t.
The words are locked somewhere behind the place where my consent used to live.
She makes a sound that is not quite a word and then she’s hugging me, wrapping her body tightly around mine like a shield.
Her aura envelops me in warm, protective yellows, a colour I feel like I haven’t felt in years, and the contact is almost unbearable.
Her clothed body against my naked, ruined one, her heartbeat against the bruises, her love a foreign language I’ve forgotten how to speak.
The ache in my body sharpens with her weight on me, the barely healed skin pulling, the burns singing, but I don’t say a word, I don’t let it show because I need this comfort, I need…
Oh god, he’s going to find us.
He’s going to walk in and see this, and he will make me watch what he does to her. Then he will make me thank him for the lesson, and I will. I will thank him, because he has already taught me how.
Perhaps she senses my fear, perhaps her own sense of survival kicks in because she moves quickly, she composes herself and undoes the last of my bindings.
I’m naked. Even in winter, I’m not permitted a blanket. My body is a map of his devotion, and he likes to read it often.
But he’s a prophet. He knows best.
Does he though? Is that true or another lie, another hook buried in my mind that I’ll keep tugging at until I tear?
My mother helps me sit upright, and the room tilts so badly I have to grip her arm.
My body feels weak, unused, but I can move.
I can walk. Between my legs, a slow, humiliated leak of arousal slides down my thigh, because my body doesn’t know the difference anymore between escape and anticipation, between terror and the beginning of a session.
I want to scrub it away, to hide it from her, but there’s no time.
“We need to go. Right now. We need to get out of here,” she says, her voice urgent but steady.
Something in her urgency cuts through the fog that has long settled over my thinking. I look at her properly for the first time. Why is she even here? What the hell is this?
“What’s happened?” I ask. “How did you even…”
“I’ve had enough,” she says, her aura pulsing with dark reds, anger, but also a deep, aching sorrow. “I’m not letting him do this to you anymore, not after Cass. I have a plan. Fake passports, everything. We’re leaving before he can find us, before anyone can find us.”
Cass. The name lands in my chest like a stone. Cass, my poor dead sister. I haven’t thought of her, couldn’t think of her, not while I have been here, not while I am spread like this, used like this.
I start trembling uncontrollably, because I don’t know what happens now.
Ezekiel will be furious. Ezekiel, who promised me I would be his masterpiece, his most beloved, the one who would finally understand that pain is the only honest intimacy, that submission is the only freedom.
He has spent all this time, all this effort, and for what?
He isn’t a man who simply shrugs off failure.
He will want to make someone pay for it, and who better than me?
He will find me, and he will take me apart so slowly that I will beg to be Cass, beg to be nothing, beg to be the thing he’s been sculpting all along.
“He’s going to kill me,” I whisper, and I know it’s true. But worse, I know he’ll make me love it first.
My mother takes my arm, not roughly but firmly, wrapping it around her neck to prop me up.
Her aura shifts to a steady, calming blue; resolve.
Her hand brushes the small of my back where a wound is still raised and tender, one that makes my cunt clench whenever I touch it, because he conditioned that response with hours of patient, reverent torture.
“He’ll kill us all if he gets the chance,” she says.
“Where is he?” I reply.
“I don’t know. There was an explosion, some plot to kill a Guardian that backfired. That’s why we’re moving now, while he’s MIA.”
“Wait…” I say, only she’s already pulling me to my feet.