22. Leandra #2
The pain is immediate and total, the burns stretch, the deep, internal ache where Isaac spent last night teaching me to take him in ways my body still resists.
I almost collapse back onto the floor but she’s grabbing me, holding me with a strength I’d never believe she possessed and she’s carrying me out the door.
“We’ll make it,” she says, her voice firm. “I promise you, we’ll make it.”
I want to believe her. I need to believe her.
But all I can think is that he’s out there, that he will be hunting us, and he won’t stop until he finds me.
And when he does, he will finish what he started.
He will open me up in every way a body can be opened, and he will fill those spaces with himself until there is no Leandra left, only a warm, willing, endlessly responsive thing that prays with its hips and weeps gratitude with its cunt.
And the worst, most horrifying part, the part that makes me stumble even as my mother drags me forward is that some small, trained, treacherous part of me still wants to know what that would feel like.
“Trust me,” she says, her aura glowing with a fierce, unyielding light. “We’re getting out of here.”
I nod, and I let her pull me into the dark, my body a ruin of conditioned desire and fresh terror, my heart a war between the daughter I used to be and the creature I am almost finished becoming.
The corridor beyond is a pit of darkness, swallowing all light, all sound.
How she navigates this labyrinth I have no idea; she moves like a woman who has rehearsed this escape in the marrow of her bones, each twist and turn a prayer whispered in the dark, each gap a wound she has memorized.
We reach a door and she pushes through, and the night air rushes in like a gasp from a dying god.
I inhale, and the outside world floods my lungs, cold and sharp as broken glass.
My first breath is not of freedom but of a different kind of prison because I know I am not free, will not be free, not as long as Ezekiel is alive, not as long as he is still hunting me.
And hunt he will.
The air reeks of wet earth and decay. I gulp it down, breath after breath, each one a small death, ignoring how my skin, so long untouched by anything but pain now riots with sensation, every pore feeling like a wound reopening.
My body shivers, and the shivering feels like the aftershock of a violation, a trembling that begins deep in my belly and radiates outward.
Above, the moon is glinting not with light but with a sickly pallor, like a mirage of hope that might at any moment curdle into nightmare.
It is beautiful, almost hauntingly so, a reminder that I have been trapped in another world, one beneath the skin of this one, and I am not certain I have returned whole.
My mother carries me past the barren stems of bushes, the silent, judging trees, onto a track that sucks at her feet with a wet, obscene sound.
Each squelch feels like a whisper of the earth trying to drag us back.
Her breath comes in ragged gasps, and I feel the tremor in her chest, the terror she has swallowed for years now leaking out in hot, panting bursts against my cheek.
We reach a parked car, and it’s so ordinary looking it seems a lie.
She unlocks it with hands that shake only slightly, helps me fold my broken body into the seat, and then she sprints around to the driver’s side.
I didn’t know she could drive. When did she learn?
The question is a splinter in my mind; what other secret selves has she been forced to birth in the dark?
“Blankets in the back,” she says, her voice a frayed thread. “Cover yourself and get warm. When it’s safe, I’ll stop and we’ll find you clothes.” Clothes, the word is foreign, a memory of a time when my skin was not a map of depravity.
I nod, reaching for a wool blanket that rasps against my fingers like a thousand tiny teeth.
I wrap it around my shoulders, and the contact is a revelation of ruin; my skin has become a single, exposed nerve, every fibre a scalpel tracing the memory of other textures; silk, leather, the wet heat of a mouth that should never have touched me.
I am used to nothing touching me, and now this scratchy wool is both a torment and a perverse comfort, a penance for the sin of being alive.
She drives without headlights, the car a blind beast slouching through the dark.
It tells me she has rehearsed this flight in the theatre of her mind until the script is etched into her muscles; the exact distance, the precise turn, the moment when the risk of light becomes less than the risk of darkness.
I watch her profile, a cameo carved from shadow, and I realize something; she has become a stranger, a woman forged in the sins that unmade me.
“How long have you been planning to run?” My voice croaks, the words scraping out of a throat raw from screams I no longer remember making.
Her aura flickers, a jaundiced yellow, the colour of old fear. “Long enough.”
“Mother?”
She exhales, and I hear so much pain, so much emotion in that one action.
“Three years. Perhaps four.” The headlights flare on as we turn onto a larger road, and the world resolves into the mundane of tarmac and hedgerows, the ordinary that hides so much.
Her aura steadies into a determined green, the colour of old bruises healing.