25. Lazarus
By the time I return there are too many people, too many witnesses to do it. He is still siting where I left him, still rocking back and forth like an invalid. It takes the better part of an hour before he lets them take her.
I watch from the doorway as two of the guards, men I don’t know, men from the secondary detail who arrived with the clean efficiency of people who weren’t here for the worst of it, crouch beside him and speak in low, careful tones.
Their voices are the kind you use to talk a jumper off a ledge.
I know that register. I’ve used it myself, when I needed someone pliable.
He doesn’t resist, exactly.
He simply doesn’t help.
They have to peel his arms away from her body with the slow, deliberate patience of men disarming a bomb.
Her skin makes a sound as they do it, a soft, separating whisper that isn’t quite wet and isn’t quite dry, and I file that sound away in the part of me that still knows how to feel something like horror.
She’s stiff as a board. Rigor has set in hard, turning her into a grotesque mannequin of the woman who kept me in the dark.
Her right arm hangs at an unnatural angle, the elbow bent backward like a broken wing, and that tells me she’s been dead for a while.
Long enough for the warmth to leave her.
Long enough for the blood on the floor to turn tacky and black in the grout.
Konstantine just sits there with his hands open in his lap, staring at them like he’s never seen them before. His fingers are still curled into the ghost of her shape. I can see the exact imprint of her ribs in the way his palms won’t quite flatten.
Ezra is upstairs. The housekeeper took him to the far end of the villa, to the rooms that don’t smell of what happened here.
I heard her speaking to him in soft, soothing words as she led him away, the way you talk to a frightened animal, just sound and steadiness and presence.
He didn’t look back at me when he went. I took that as a good sign.
Children who are truly broken don’t have the capacity to trust a new pair of hands.
He still has that capacity. He’s still whole enough to save.
My son. My blood, and I have never held him. She made sure of that. She made sure of everything.
I cross the room and sit down on the sofa above where Konstantine is still on the floor.
The cushions sigh under my weight. I don’t try to pull him up.
Not yet. The thought of even touching him makes me want to grab the nearest object, the heavy crystal ashtray on the side table, the lamp with its brass base, my own two hands, and bury it in his throat, and I can’t do that. Not yet.
I have to be calm. Calculated.
The rage living inside me is a coiled serpent that has been feeding on darkness, silence, and the memory of her hands on me. I know if let it strike now, I lose everything.
So I breathe. I count the seconds. I let the serpent sleep.
“They’re going to come back,” I say.
He says nothing. The silence from him is like a third presence in the room.
“Konstantine.” I lean forward, elbows on my knees, and I keep my voice flat and factual because that’s the only register that will reach him right now.
Anything softer and he’ll drown in it. Anything harder and he’ll shatter.
I need him malleable, not broken. “If the Esau broke this perimeter once, they will break it again. You know that. You know how they operate. They don’t send messages and then retire to the countryside.
They send messages, and then they send men to make sure the message was received. ”
A long silence answers me. Outside I can hear the guards moving, the low crackle of radio communication, the sound of the gate being secured.
All of it is too little, too fucking late.
The Esau were already inside. They walked through his walls like they were suggestions.
They put their hands on her, and they did what they came to do and they left.
Every man out there with a gun and a radio is just arranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.
“They killed her.” His voice is barely functional. Scraped raw. It sounds like it’s coming from somewhere deeper than his throat, somewhere underground.
“I know.”
“In her own home.” He looks up at me then, for the first time since I found him, and what I see in his face is not the brother I know, the brother who revelled in his power, in his divine right to do whatever he wanted.
All that has been stripped away. What’s left is a ruin.
A man who has been unmade in a single night.
“She was…” He stops. Starts again. “She was trying to protect him. She was… she didn’t deserve this. She didn’t…”
He trails off, and it takes all the strength I have not to start laying punches, not to let out the rage that is swirling inside me out.
She didn’t deserve this. The words are a match dropped into gasoline.
She didn’t deserve this. I want to grab him by the hair, drag his face through her blood, make him lick it off the fucking floor and ask him if he knows what six years in the dark feels like.
If he knows the particular sound a lock makes when it’s the only thing between you and the rest of your life.
She didn’t deserve this. He’s right, she deserved worse. She deserved everything the Esau did to her and then some, and the fact that they robbed me of the chance to do it myself is a grief I will carry in a different chamber of my heart.
Christ, even now he still doesn’t give a fuck about anyone but her. Even now, with her body cooling on the floor and her son, my son hiding upstairs, his grief is a shrine and she is the only god in it.
“Ezra cannot stay here.” I watch his face as I say it, cataloguing every micro-flinch, every twitch of the muscle in his jaw.
“I need you to hear me on this. Whatever you’re feeling right now, whatever you need to do with all of this, Ines, the Esau, all of it, that comes later.
Right now, the only thing that matters is that boy upstairs, and he is not safe in this villa.
He was not safe here tonight, and he will not be safe here tomorrow.
The Esau will come back to finish what they started, and if they find him here, they will not leave him breathing.
You know what they do to the children of their enemies. You’ve seen the photographs.”
Konstantine’s eyes drop back to his hands, to all the blood still drying in the creases of his knuckles. It’s hers. It’s all hers. He’s wearing her like a second skin.
“He needs to go to Antonio,” I say.
He doesn’t react, doesn’t show any signs that he’s even heard me. His breathing is shallow, arrhythmic, like his body has forgotten how to do it automatically.
“He’s the logical choice. The right choice.
” I pause. In truth, the only man I trust with such a task.
The only man who will guard that boy with his life, and never once think to use him as a pawn.
“Ezra will be safe there. Antonio’s estate is a fortress.
The Esau don’t have the reach to touch him there, and even if they did, Antonio would burn the world down before he let them through the gates. ”
“He’s a child.” Konstantine’s voice cracks on the word, a fissure opening in the bedrock of him. “He’s six years old, and his mother is…”
Dead. Finally, the bitch is dead.
God, I could sing. I could get up right now and dance in her blood if I didn’t need to keep up this bullshit game, if I didn’t need to manage my damned brother like a puppet with its strings cut.
She is gone. She is gone, and the relief is so vast it terrifies me.
It opens up beneath my ribs like a chasm, and I have to brace myself against the edge of it so I don’t fall in.
But wait. Six? Six years? Is that how long she has had me locked up?
Had me down there, in that room, as nothing more than a sex slave for her?
The horror hits me harder as I realise how much of my life has been stolen, how many mornings I spent staring at a ceiling I didn’t choose, how many nights I listened to her footsteps in the corridor and prayed to a God I stopped believing in that she would keep walking.
She did that. She took six years from me, she took my son from me.
She took everything, and now she’s dead on the floor, and I am supposed to sit here and comfort the man who sat by and let it happen? Fuck that.
I let out a barely repressed snarl because I cannot afford to fall apart right now.
I have a chance here, a real fucking chance.
My brother is next to useless, a hollowed-out shell leaking grief onto the marble, and I can take charge.
I can take all of this; the security, the decisions, the boy.
Then when the dust settles, I can begin the long, slow work of making everyone who hurt me pay.
No. I cannot think of revenge yet.
I cannot indulge in such a notion.
Revenge is a luxury for people who are safe, and I am not safe yet.
I need to act now, to secure the board, to move the pieces into position, and then work on those particular dreams later. When the house is quiet, when the boy is somewhere they can’t reach him. When my brother is too broken to notice the knife sliding between his ribs.
I let out a slow, calming breath. I am in control, I can do this. I am smarter than him, far fucking smarter. I have spent six years learning patience the way other men learn a trade, and that patience is a weapon now. I will wield it with precision.
“…which is exactly why he cannot be here.” I lean further forward, close enough that he has to look at me, close enough that I can smell the blood on his breath.
“Konstantine. Listen to what I’m telling you.
They came here for a reason. They sent a message tonight, yes, but messages are only the beginning with the Esau.
You know what comes next. The follow-up, the clean-up.
The little boy with his mother’s eyes who might grow up to want vengeance.
If Ezra is in this villa when they decide to come back… ”
“They won’t.” He replies, shaking his head, a child denying the monster under the bed. “They won’t…”
“They will.” I snarl, cutting across him.
He looks at me blankly, like he has no thoughts in his head. Like the man I knew has been scraped out and all that’s left is the wet, pulsing thing that used to live inside his skull.
“He’s my son.” He whispers. “My last link to her…”
He’s not your son. The words press against the back of my teeth, desperate and venomous.
He was never your son. He is mine. My flesh and blood.
My child. You let her bury me alive while you played house with my family.
I swallow them down. I swallow them down, I taste bile, and I smile with my mouth only.
“And that is why you have to do this. You have to protect him.” I state.
He closes his eyes. He palms his face with his hands, smearing her blood across his forehead like a benediction, and he crumbles. “I didn’t protect her. I didn’t…”
I shake my head, feeling not pity but disdain. A cold, clarifying disgust that cuts through the noise. He is pathetic. He is a monument to weakness, and I will use that weakness to get what I need.
“I’ll make the call to Antonio.” I reply, turning to leave.
I’m not giving him a choice in this matter. I’m not risking Ezra’s life. The boy is the only thing that matters now. The only clean thing left in this house of blood and ghosts.
I will get him out. I will get him safe.
And then, when the door closes behind him and the last guard looks the other way, I will come back for everything else.