29. Lazarus
Two years. Two fucking years of planning, scheming, manipulating those around me and still it is not done, I am not avenged.
I know it’ll be worth it, I know my patience right now will pay dividends but some days, Christ, some days the temptation is so much it’s all I can do not to gut my brother and just be done with it.
He doesn’t suspect anything. Of course he doesn’t.
Stupid fuck is still so focused on hunting down his wife’s murderers that he can’t see anything else, can’t think of anything else.
He’s useless, inept, more inept than ever.
Of course, that has it’s advantages. That has helped me to no end.
I’ve ensured all the people who might see through my ruse, who might realise what is really happening have been removed from the equation, have been eliminated entirely.
It helps that the Esau have had another revival, that with the U.K.
Chapter having a shakeup there’s been a little drama to hide my own activities.
The only person I haven’t dealt with, the only man I don’t dare to is Antonio. Thankfully he’s too focused on fucking his best mate’s daughter to notice what is happening over here.
All this time I’ve been playacting, play pretending, being the man everyone needs, being the leader my brother should have been.
I had my body altered, had it marked with all the sacred symbols that enable me to pass perfectly as Grand Master.
It’s all part of the plan, all part of ensuring stability while Konstantine is incapacitated – at least that’s what everyone who knows believes.
I draw in a deep breath and wince at the wound down my chest. It matches my brother’s exactly, though his is needed, his was necessary for the transplant.
Mine on the other hand is pure aesthetics.
I needed it so that the Guardians wouldn’t realise I wasn’t him, I needed it so that if word gets out, they still cannot tell us apart.
I run my hand down, feeling the flash of pain and a wave of annoyance too.
My brother was meant to die. That was the plan, that was what was agreed. And yet still, still God favours him, still God cups his hands around my brother’s flame while I stand in the cold, waiting for my turn at the fire.
He’s been here ever since, recovering, brooding, becoming even more of a recluse while I tighten my grip around his throne. But what will happen when he recovers? When he takes it all back again and destroys everything I have worked so hard to fix?
The thought slithers through my mind like a serpent, cold-bellied and venomous. I don’t want to consider it. Not yet. Right now, I just need to focus on this, on fixing my father’s legacy, on rebuilding the corpse of a dynasty into something that can finally, finally belong to me.
But as I stalk through the halls, something shifts in the air. A wrongness. A disturbance in the familiar darkness. I glance at the guards. Even they look spooked, their faces pale in the corridor’s gloom.
“What is it?” I ask, the words sharp as flint.
Has my fucking brother done something heinous? Has he become a crying, broken wreck again, a ridiculous spectacle of grief for the entire household to witness?
“Magnus dropped off a present for Konstantine hours ago,” he says, his voice low, almost conspiratorial, a whisper that seems to crawl along the stone.
I raise an eyebrow, feigning disinterest, though something in my chest begins to tighten, like some sort of premonition coiling around my ribs. “A present?” From the U.K. Chapter Lord? What the fuck is this?
The guard nods. “Konstantine has already squirrelled the bitch away.”
The words sink into me like a stone dropped into still water, and I feel the ripples spread outward, disturbing everything they touch.
The bitch? What bitch? Konstantine has never showed any interest in any woman beyond Ines, beyond the corpse he keeps like a saint’s relic after they desecrated her grave.
Without a word, I stride toward the hidden chamber where Konstantine keeps his secrets, where he thinks I won’t look. Where he believes his shadows are deep enough to swallow whatever monstrosities he chooses to hide.
This part of the building is old, too old. It speaks of a legacy polite people don’t talk about, of chains and screams and that particular silence that follows violence.
God, has he laid her corpse out here? No, that cannot be it. Magnus wouldn’t be involved in such a thing as that. He’d have no need to traffic in the dead.
The door at the bottom is heavy, reinforced with iron. I push, and the scent of damp earth and decay hits me, the perfume of things buried and forgotten.
But it’s not a corpse that greets me.
She’s alive.
I freeze. The air leaves my body as if God Himself has reached into my chest and pulled it out, as a sacrifice, an offering, a holy violence done to my lungs.
My breath catches in my throat, sharp as glass, and I feel something inside me crack; something fundamental, some wall I have spent years constructing brick by careful brick.
The woman lies on a makeshift bed, her body bruised and battered, her breathing shallow. But her face, her face is almost identical to Ines’s. The resemblance is uncanny, impossible, a mirror held up to a ghost. My mind reels, stutters, tries to make sense of it and fails.
What trick is this? What cruel joke has God played on me now?
I step closer, my heart pounding in my chest in a way that feels biblical, apocalyptic, the kind of heartbeat that precedes revelation.
The floor seems to tilt beneath me. She stirs weakly, her eyelids flutter open and I brace myself for that piercing blue, for the accusatory stare of a dead woman made flesh.
But instead, I see brown. A beautiful, deep brown. The colour of earth after rain. The colour of something untouched, unspoiled, alive.
Her gaze meets mine, and for a moment the world stops its spinning, stops it’s screaming, stops everything. I see her; not Ines, not a reflection, not a cruel echo, but her.
Something entirely new.
Her lips part slightly, a tremble, a question she is too weak to voice.
And something primal stirs within me, something I haven’t felt, haven’t ever dared to uncage.
That part of me that I locked away, that I barricaded up while Ines had me in her clutches, seems to break free.
The chains I forged around my heart snap like thread, and I feel it all at once; a deluge, a drowning, a salvation and a destruction wrapped in this same fevered moment.
She is not Ines. She is something else entirely.
And I am instantly, irrevocably, catastrophically obsessed.
I can’t help myself.
I can’t control myself.
The feeling is too vast, too sudden, a tidal wave crashing against the hollow architecture of my chest. My hands tremble as I reach for her, and when my fingers brush against her cheek I feel it in my teeth, in my bones, in the deepest and most secret chambers of my being.
She flinches, her breath hitching as her body starts to recoil.
But I don’t stop. I can’t fucking stop.
I have been starved for something I didn’t even know existed, and now it is here, warm and breathing and mine. All fucking mine.
“Who are you?” I whisper, my voice rough, desperate, a prayer torn from the throat of a nonbeliever. The words scrape out of me like confession.
She doesn’t answer. Her eyes are wide with fear, dark pools of terror that should reach something human in me, should stay my hand, should remind me of mercy. But I don’t have that. Any mercy I had left was torn out of me years ago.
And anyway, I don’t need her to speak. Words are meaningless right now.
I need her to be mine with a ferocity that terrifies me, that undoes every pretence of civilization I have ever worn.
I’m on her before I can think, a creature of pure, ravenous instinct. My hands are rough, desperate, the hands of a drowning man clawing at his very salvation. My movements frantic, uncoordinated, stripped of all the careful control I have cultivated these last few years.
She is so fragile beneath me, like a little bird with broken wings, and some distant part of my mind registers this, registers the wrongness of it but it is drowned out by the roaring in my blood. The need that cannot go unanswered.
She cries out, her voice weak but desperate, a thread of sound that pierces the darkness.
I silence her with my mouth, claiming her lips with a hunger I can’t contain, a starvation that has lived in me for years without a name.
Her struggles are feeble, her body is too weak to fight back, too broken to resist the tempest I have become.
Mine, the word beats in my blood like a drum, like a heart, like the only truth I have ever known.
Mine. Mine. Mine.
I growl it against her skin, though it comes out more sob than sound, a sound of breaking. My hands tear at what little clothes cover her, desperate to feel flesh, to feel warmth, to feel the proof that she is real, she is alive, she is not another ghost come to haunt me in my brother’s house.
My body presses into hers, and I feel that heat, that warmth, that miracle of a living heart beating beneath the cage of her ribs.
She moans, a sound that sends a jolt of electricity through me, and I convince myself, God help me, I need to believe that she wants this. That she feels it too, this cosmic recognition, this terrible and beautiful gravity that has pulled us together in the dark.
She wants me. She must. The alternative is unthinkable.
Her body is soft, yielding, a landscape I will spend the rest of my life mapping and I devour her like the devil I am. My hands and mouth are everywhere, claiming every inch of her with a fervour that borders on violence, that crosses the border and keeps going.
She trembles beneath me, her breath coming in shallow gasps, and I am a monster. I am a sinner, I am a man who has found his religion between the thighs of a stranger.
“You’re mine,” I whisper against her throat, my voice low, possessive, unhinged. “You belong to me.” The words are not a statement but a covenant, a law I am writing into the universe with my body. “God made you for me. He made you for me.”
She moans again, her body arching into mine and I take it as confirmation, as absolution, as the only permission I will ever need.
She wants this. She wants me.
I pour myself into the belief like a man pouring water onto parched earth.
I’m a monster, I know that. The knowledge sits beside the hunger, two truths that cannot be reconciled, but I don’t care.
I can’t care. The capacity for caring has been burned out of me, replaced by this single, searing imperative.
She is mine, and I will never let her go.
Not to Konstantine, not to death. Not to God Himself.
When it’s over I hold her close, my chest heaving, my mind a whirlwind of conflicting emotions.
She lies there, trembling, her eyes wide with terror still, but I see only the future.
Only salvation. I stare at her, my breathing ragged and a cruel satisfaction settles over me, heavy as a coronation mantle.
This is what I’ve been searching for.
Every dark corridor, every bloody room, every sleepless night of scheming and hating, it has all led to this moment; to this woman, to this revelation.
Finally, everything makes sense. Every awful experience, every horrific moment I have endured, it is all worth it. It was all a pilgrimage to her.
She is my prize.
She is my gift from God himself, proof that he has not abandoned me, that his favour has merely been delayed, building in pressure like a storm.
And I understand now, with a clarity that cuts through every moral objection, that Konstantine cannot have her.
Will not. I will kill him not just for the power, not just for the legacy, but for her.
For the way he would look at her and see a ghost. For the way he would cage her as he has caged everything beautiful in his life.
And I will never let her go.
Never.
Never.
Never.