30. Leandra
My head hurts. It’s a dull, splintering ache that pulses behind my eyes, a fog that makes the world tilt even though I’m lying still.
It feels fuzzy too, like cotton packed into my skull.
Like I have something in my system, something keeping me docile, keeping me compliant.
The thought is distant, muffled, as if it belongs to someone else.
I roll over, and the grit beneath me scrapes my bare skin.
Dirt. Cold, packed dirt that smells of damp and old rot.
The realisation comes slowly, a sickening crawl up my spine.
I am still here. In this dirt. Where he fucked me last night.
The memory crashes back; his weight, his breath, the purples and blues of his aura swirling like a bruise, and my stomach heaves.
I press my forehead into the ground, feel the grit bite and let a shiver of revulsion run through me, let myself feel that disgust before I fold that particular feeling away.
Shame is a luxury I can’t afford. I am not going to give into it, I am not.
I am stronger than that, stronger than them.
All these men think they can break me, think they can mould me, fuck me and use me, and I am not going to let them.
They look at me and see weakness, they look at me and see something they can use.
Well, I won’t be that. I won’t fucking be that.
The words are a chant inside my head but they feel thin, like a sheet of ice over a black, bottomless lake but I cling to them anyway because right now, they’re all I have.
The door opens. The sound is a knife through the quiet, and despite myself, despite every promise I just made, I flinch.
My body betrays me, curling inward, making itself small.
He steps inside with all the arrogance, all the air of someone used to doing whatever they please.
The air changes, thickens, and I can feel him even before I lift my head.
His colours are different this morning, and I don’t know whether I should be reassured by it or not.
Last night, he was all purples and blues, a mixture that was almost mesmerizingly beautiful; a deep, swirling galaxy that made my fear feel distant and unreal.
But now, now he is more yellow. Yellow and grey, like there’s a shadow, like he’s hiding something.
I gulp, deciding it is better to face this head on, that being a coward has gotten me nothing so far.
The thought is a lie I tell myself. Bravery isn’t a choice; it’s the only thing left when every other door has slammed shut in my face.
I push up onto my hands, and the world spins.
My legs threaten to give way as I force myself to stand.
Every muscle screams, and between my thighs there’s a raw, humiliating ache that makes me want to crawl out of my own skin.
But I stand. I stand because if I don’t, I’ll shatter.
He stares at me, stares at my body like I’m some sort of mirage.
His eyes trace the lines of my face, the fall of my hair, and I can see him falling into a memory, drowning in it.
I guess I can’t blame him for that. Ines’s mother and my mother were twins, even with different fathers, I know I look like her.
I look close enough to remind people of her, but I am not her.
I am not. The thought is a scream inside my skull, desperate and raw.
I am Leandra, I am my own person. I am not a replacement for a fucking dead woman.
“Grand Master,” I whisper, needing to break the silence, needing to cut through whatever this tension is. My voice is a ragged thing, barely a breath. It sounds like a plea, and I hate it.
He stiffens, taking one step, then another, crossing the room like a man possessed. His movements are jerky, unseeing, and the yellow in his colours spike with something frantic. I want to back away but my body won’t obey, so I’m frozen like a rabbit in the shadow of a hawk.
His hands wrap around me, and his fingers mingle in my loose hair. The touch is almost gentle, and that gentleness is the most terrifying thing of all. It’s a lie. I know what those hands can do. I can still feel the ghost of them on my hips, my throat.
“You have changed so much.” He murmurs, his voice thick with a grief that isn’t for me. “But you are still mine, are you not?”
The question hangs in the air, a trap baited with tenderness.
I meet that penetrating gaze and a voice in my head hisses at me to be smart, to pretend.
Lie, it says. Tell him yes. Say what you have to to survive.
The voice is cold and practical, and it sounds like my mother.
But beneath it, another voice, smaller and fiercer, screams no. I won’t disappear into her.
I won’t let him erase me.
I won’t do it. I can’t do it. Not again.
“I am not her.” I say, and it comes out too fast, like a jumble of syllables, a prayer thrown against a storm. The words are a defiance, but they taste like terror. I feel the shift in him before I see it, a tightening in the air, a darkening at the edges of his colours.
His hands tighten enough to make me wince. Pain flares across my scalp, sharp and bright. It’s a warning, I know, but one I cannot heed. My heart beats manically against my ribs. I am so tired of warnings, so tired of being afraid.
“Ines.” He groans, a sound half ecstasy, half torture.
“I am not Ines.” I state, forcing the words out even as my voice shakes. “I look like her, but she is not me.”
Please, I beg him silently, please see me. Just once. See Leandra. But his eyes are glassy, like they’re fixed on a ghost.
His face twists, and it changes from despair to fury. The shift is a physical blow. His colours morph from yellow to black, a sudden, violent eclipse that swallows all the light in the room. Terror, pure and cold, floods my veins.
I open my mouth, maybe to take it back, maybe to scream, but suddenly I am no longer standing. I am airborne, I am flying and then I am slammed backwards onto the hard, stone floor.
The impact is a universe of pain. My head takes the brunt of it, a crack that I feel in my teeth, in the roots of my hair.
Stars explode behind my eyes, a supernova of white-hot agony, and I cry out at the pain that feels like my skull has just cracked.
For a moment, there is nothing but the ringing in my ears and the taste of copper.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t think.
The world is a smear of light and shadow.
“Ines.” He says, gripping my throat.
He is on me. His body weight is holding me down as he straddles me, a crushing, suffocating pressure. His hands wrap around my neck, and he lifts my head enough that it’s a couple of inches from the floor.
The room tilts, and I see his face swimming above me, twisted with a madness that has nothing to do with me. I am not a person to him. I am a symbol, a punishment, a ghost he’s trying to resurrect or kill, I don’t know which.
The confusion is a fog, but the despair is crystal clear. I am going to die for a woman I’ve never been.
“Please…” I don’t know if I can actually speak the words, if I’m able to get anything out. My throat is a column of fire, my voice a thin, reedy whisper. Please what? Please stop? Please see me? Please let me live? The plea is formless, a child’s pathetic cry in the dark.
He slams my head back, smashing it back into the floor. The world fractures. Pain, white and obliterating, blots out everything. I feel something wet at the back of my skull, warm and spreading. My thoughts scatter like frightened birds.
“Ines.” He growls. “Ines.” The name is a hammer, and my head is the anvil.
“I’m not…” I mouth the words, but no sound comes out.
I kick out, I try to throw him off, my heels scrabbling uselessly against the floor, but in his mania he is far too strong to even stand a chance. My struggles are pathetic, the last twitches of a dying thing. Despair wraps around me, heavy and cold.
This is it. This is how it ends.
Not with a grand defiance, but with a broken head and a stolen name.
“You left me. You left me. Why?” His voice cracks, and for a heartbeat he sounds lost, a man drowning in his own grief, but the hands don’t loosen. They tighten.
I shake my head as pin pricks start to obscure my vision. The edges of the world go dark, closing in like a tunnel.
I’m going to die here.
I know it with a certainty that settles into my bones.
I’m going to die in this non-descript room, and that’ll be the end to it all.
The thought is almost peaceful, a quiet surrender beneath the terror.
There’ll be no more pain, no more fighting.
But then another thought, fiercer and more desperate, claws its way up; I don’t want to die, I don’t want to be forgotten.
I don’t want my last moments to be about her.
He slams my head down again and again. Each impact is a detonation, a burst of light and darkness.
I lose count.
I lose time.
The world is just rhythm, pain, and the distant, animal sound of his screaming.
“Why?” He screams. “Why?”
But I cannot answer him, I cannot do anything but simply wait until my lungs empty and my body gives out. The darkness creeps in, soft and seductive and I feel myself slipping, my thoughts unspooling into silence.
My last conscious feeling isn’t anger or defiance. It’s a deep, hollow sorrow.
For the girl I was.
For the woman I’ll never become.
For the name he’ll never say.
Leandra. My name is Leandra, and no one will ever know.