23. Lazarus
Two Years Later
Ilie here, staring at the same ceiling, the cracks in the plaster like veins, the shadows pooling thick as bruises under the damned flickering lightbulb.
My wrists have grown used to their bindings, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still weep where the fibres burrow in.
My body aches from what must be an eternity of stillness, every joint a rusted hinge, every muscle atrophied into something soft and utterly useless.
Between my thighs, the memory of her lingers like a disease. A dull, humid throb where she last touched me, where she always touches me, coaxing reactions my mind refuses but my traitor nerves surrender anyway.
Ines hasn’t been here in a while. She’s been busy, I suppose.
Busy ruling the world, busy ruining my brother, busy ruining me.
She would come with her cold hands and her clinical murmur, telling me how beautiful I looked when I broke, how sweet my humiliation tasted on her tongue.
She’d press her mouth to my ear and whisper what Konstantine was doing behind the glass, how he was watching, how he was touching himself, how my degradation was the only thing that still made him hard.
The drugs make everything hazy, turn my limbs to lead and my thoughts to syrup, but they never dull the shame.
That has stayed sharp.
That has stayed bright as a razor.
I can’t move, can’t fight, can’t even think clearly, but I can feel the rage simmering beneath the surface like a fire that refuses to be extinguished.
It lives in the hollow of my chest, feeding on the slick sounds of her visits, the ghost of her fingers inside me, the way my body would arch and weep for her even as my mind screamed.
I hate her.
I hate the way she makes me need her, the way she turns my own flesh into a traitor.
And I hate him. I hate my brother for watching, for letting her, for loving my ruin more than he ever loved me.
I hate this room, this bed, this cursed existence they’ve made of me, a living doll leaking on soiled sheets with a wound that never gets to close.
Shouting suddenly echoes beyond the door. Voices raised and frantic, a jagged music that cuts through the fog. I strain to listen but the words are muffled, distorted, or perhaps that’s just the drugs lingering in my system, wrapping everything in cotton and dread.
Something’s wrong. Something’s happening.
My pulse quickens in a sick, hopeful rhythm.
The door bursts open, and Konstantine stumbles in.
I haven’t seen him in months, not like this, not in the flesh.
He likes to watch now, likes to stand behind the glass where I cannot see him while his wife uses me.
He likes to hear the wet, helpless noises she pulls from my throat, likes to witness the exact moment my eyes go empty.
I know this because Ines told me, because she’d narrate his pleasure into my skin like a bedtime story.
I stare at him, unsure which of us is the ghost in this situation.
He’s a mess; blood splattered across his face in a fine, arterial mist, his clothes torn, his eyes wild and wet.
He looks like a man possessed, like a beast cornered and ready to lash out.
He smells of copper and terror, and something else, something acrid and intimate, the sweat of a man who has just watched his world end.
“She’s dead,” he screams, his voice cracking like a boy’s. “She’s fucking dead!”
My mind is sluggish, trying to process his words.
Who’s dead? Does it matter? Do I even care? The question drifts through me like smoke, and for a long, suspended moment, I feel nothing. Just a hollow emptiness, a void where my emotions should be. And then it hits me; relief. Sweet, intoxicating relief, rising from my gut like a prayer.
It has to be her. It has to be. She’s gone. The woman who turned my body into a crime scene, who made my brother a voyeur to my unmaking, who licked the tears from my cheeks and called them gratitude, she’s finally gone.
I imagine her cooling on some floor, her clever hands still, her mouth forever shut, and the thought is almost orgasmic.
A shudder rolls through me, half revulsion, half pure fucking ecstasy.
Konstantine turns and runs out, leaving the door wide open.
I can see the chaos beyond; guards rushing past, shouting orders, their faces bleached with panic.
My heart races, adrenaline surging through my veins like a resurrection.
I am still naked on this bed, still slick with the evidence of my captivity, but I am no longer just a victim. I am a thing with teeth.
“Untie me,” I growl, my voice hoarse from disuse, from screaming, from moaning when I was told to moan.
They stop, staring in like I’m some rabid monster they don’t want to get too close to. I see the disgust in their eyes, and the fear beneath it, the way their gazes snag on my exposed flesh, the dark bruises on my thighs, the bite marks that map my chest. They know what was done here.
“Un-fucking-tie me!” I roar, my voice echoing off the walls. “Or my brother will have your heads!”
They scramble to obey, their hands trembling as they fumble with the ropes. One of them gags at the smell of me; sweat, old sex, and something festering. I file that away, a small cruelty to repay later.
The moment I’m free I leap off the bed, my legs wobbling dangerously beneath me. Christ, my body is stiff, sore, weak from so much time of inactivity. I can feel the atrophy in my muscles, the sores on my skin, the tender places where she liked to press just to hear me whimper.
I take a deep breath, forcing myself to stand tall. Forcing myself to prove that I’m still alive, still breathing while she is dead. The air tastes like freedom, and my nakedness feels suddenly like armour.
Let them look.
Let them see what they allowed.
Every scar, every hollow, every place she invaded, I wear it all like a threat.
“Clothes,” I bark at one of the guards. “Now.”
I’m running on pure adrenaline now. A voice in my head is screaming that this is the moment, this is my revenge.
He hesitates, and I snap. I grab him by the throat, slamming him against the wall.
His eyes widen in terror, and I feel a savage satisfaction at that, the way his pulse flutters under my thumb, the way his fear makes him small.
I lean close, close enough to smell his sour breath, and I let him see the abyss swirling in me.
“Do it,” I hiss, my voice low and dangerous, a lover’s whisper from the end of the world.
He nods frantically and I release him, watching as he stumbles out of the room.
I stand there, naked and trembling, but alive.
God, for the first time in years, I feel alive.
The ghost of Ines’s touch still clings to my skin, a phantom caress that makes me want to scrub myself raw but beneath it, something new is kindling; a dark, hungry flame that has nothing to do with submission.
The guard returns with a pile of clothes: simple black pants and a t-shirt, nothing fancy.
I dress quickly, my movements stiff and awkward.
The fabric scrapes against my sores, against the places where the ropes left their signatures but the pain is good, the pain is grounding.
My body feels foreign, like it doesn’t belong to me anymore, like it belongs to her, to him, to the hours of forced pleasure and recorded shame.
I push through that thought, the weakness.
I have to.
This is my moment, my revenge.
I reach up, grabbing a ceremonial sword from the wall. It’s rusty, blunt, but it’ll do. The weight of it in my hand is the first honest thing I’ve held in months.
I don’t know if I’m going to kill the intruders, or if it’s my brother I’m gunning for.
Right now, I’ll happily take either. Right now, with the blood screaming in my ears and the memory of her mouth still disgustingly warm between my legs, I’ll happily butcher every living person in this place.
I’ll paint the walls with their guilt and call it justice.
I’ll make my brother watch one last time, watch me become the monster he helped create.