32. Lazarus
Istand at the top of the stairs for a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness below. The torches flicker against the walls, casting shadows that dance like spectres across the ancient brickwork.
This place.
I know this place.
Not this exact room, no, but one so similar that my body remembers before my mind does. The dimensions are the same. The weight of the air, the particular quality of silence that exists only underground, where screams go to die and no one above can hear them.
My fingers trace the wall as I descend. The stone is cold. Alive with memory.
You’re stronger now.
The thought comes unbidden, and I let it settle over me like a mantle. I am stronger now, I have walked through the desert of my own suffering and emerged on the other side. I have faced the demons that wore my brother’s face and my brother’s wife’s hands. I have been bound, broken, and remade.
This room cannot hurt me anymore, but it can hurt someone else.
The woman is chained to the wall at the far end of the cell. Her arms are stretched above her head, the manacles cutting into her wrists where she’s struggled against them.
She doesn’t look up when I enter, doesn’t react.
I take my time crossing the room. My footsteps echo against the stone, deliberate and measured. I want her to hear me coming. I want her to feel the weight of each step, the inevitability of my approach.
There’s a chair in the corner. I drag it across the floor, letting the legs scrape against the stone, and position it directly in front of her. When I sit, I’m close enough to smell her; sweat, fear, and something else, something floral that clings to her skin despite everything.
Perfume, perhaps. A remnant of the life she lived before we found her.
“Magdalena,” I say.
Her name feels strange in my mouth. I’ve known it for years, of course. I’ve known everything about Ines’s family; the cousins, the aunts, the distant relations who scattered across Europe like seeds from a dying plant, but I know nothing about her daughter. Not a damned fucking thing.
She doesn’t respond.
I lean back in the chair, crossing one leg over the other. The posture is casual, almost bored. I learned this from watching my father interrogate men who thought they were brave. The ones who broke fastest were always the ones who couldn’t stand the waiting.
“I’m not going to ask you about the Esau,” I tell her. “I’m not going to ask you about Ezekiel Sewell, or any of the plans they might have had. I don’t care about any of that.”
A lie, but a small one. I care about everything. I have made it my business to know every thread that weaves through the tapestry of power, every hand that pulls those threads, every mouth that whispers in the dark. But right now, in this moment, there is only one thing I want.
“I want to know about the girl. Your daughter. The one who wears Ines’s face.”
At the mention of her daughter, Magdalena’s head lifts. Her eyes find mine through the tangled curtain of her hair, and I see something flicker there; not fear, not yet. It’s defiance.
“You already have her,” she says. Her voice is hoarse from disuse. “What more could you possibly want?”
“Everything.”
I let the word hang in the air between us.
“I want to know her name,” I state “I want to know what she was like as a child. I want to know her favourite foods, her favourite colours, the songs she sang when she thought no one was listening. I want to know what made her laugh, and what made her cry. I want to know the name of her first pet. I want to know every secret she’s ever told you, every fear she’s ever confessed, every dream she’s ever whispered in the dark. ”
Magdalena stares at me, and the defiance in her eyes has shifted into something else now; confusion, perhaps. Or the beginning of understanding.
“You don’t even know her name,” she says, and there is something like wonder in her voice, something like horror. “You have her, and you don’t even know her name.”
“Then tell me.”
“No.”
She says it simply. Quietly. As if it’s the easiest word in the world, as if she has a right to deny me.
“No,” she repeats. “I won’t help you. I won’t give you anything you can use against my daughter. I’ve spent years protecting her from men like you. I’m not going to stop now.”
I expected this. I would have been disappointed if she’d broken immediately. There’s no satisfaction in breaking something that’s already shattered.
I stand up from the chair and walk to the small table I had placed against the wall before I came down. On it, arranged with the precision of a surgeon’s instruments, are father’s tools. Mine now.
I didn’t bring many. I don’t need many.
The first one I pick up is simple; a thin blade, curved slightly at the tip. I hold it up to the torchlight, letting her see it.
“Do you know what this is used for?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer.
“It’s called a flensing knife. Traditionally used by whalers to strip blubber from the carcass, but it has other applications.
” I turn it over in my hand, watching the light play across the metal.
“The curve allows for precision. You can separate skin from muscle with almost surgical accuracy. If you’re careful. If you’re patient.”
I am both.
I walk back to her, the knife held loosely at my side. She’s watching me now, her eyes tracking my movements with the desperate attention of prey.
“I’m going to ask you again,” I say. “Tell me her name.”
“Go to hell.”
I smile. It’s not a kind smile. It’s not meant to be.
“I’ve already been there,” I tell her. “I spent years in a room just like this one, chained to a wall just like that one, while my brother’s wife did things to me that would make you vomit if I described them.
I’ve been drugged, violated, and broken in ways you cannot possibly imagine.
And I survived. I crawled out of that hell, and I made myself into something that cannot be hurt anymore. ”
I reach out and take a handful of her hair, pulling her head back until her throat is exposed.
“So when I tell you that I will do whatever is necessary to get what I want, I need you to understand that I mean it. I need you to understand that there is no line I will not cross, no depth I will not sink to, no horror I will not inflict. Because I have already endured worse than anything I could do to you.”
I release her hair and step back.
“Now. Tell me her name.”
She spits at me.
The saliva lands on my cheek, warm and wet. I wipe it away with the back of my hand, and for a moment, just a moment, I feel something that might be anger.
But anger is useless. Anger is a weakness, a loss of control. I learned that in the metaphysical desert of this place, in the days and nights I spent alone with nothing but my rage for company. I learned to set it aside, to transform it into something colder and more useful.
I learned to become a weapon.
“All right,” I say. “We’ll do this the hard way.”
The first cut is always the most important.
It sets the tone, it establishes the parameters of what is to come. It tells the subject, in no uncertain terms, that you are absolutely fucking serious.
I make the first cut along her forearm, a thin, precise line that opens her skin like the seam of a garment. Blood wells up immediately, dark and rich in the torchlight. She gasps, more from surprise than pain, and I watch her face as the sensation registers.
Pain is a strange thing. It’s not just physical. It’s psychological, emotional, spiritual. The body can endure far more than the mind believes possible. The trick is to find the threshold where the mind begins to crack.
“You know,” I say, making another cut parallel to the first, “I’ve always found it fascinating how much the human body can withstand.
The skin is the largest organ, did you know that?
It contains millions of nerve endings, all designed to send signals to the brain.
Pain signals. Pleasure signals. The line between them is thinner than most people realize. ”
I make a third cut, this one deeper. She cries out this time, a sharp sound that echoes off the stone walls.
“Tell me her name.”
“No.”
I work in silence after that.
The flensing knife does exactly what it was designed to do. I separate a strip of skin from her forearm, peeling it back with careful, deliberate movements. The flesh beneath is pink and glistening, dotted with small points of blood where the capillaries have ruptured.
She’s screaming now, her voice raw and desperate, but I don’t stop. I don’t stop until the strip of skin is completely free, hanging from my fingers like a ribbon.
“There,” I say, holding it up for her to see. “That wasn’t so difficult, was it?”
She’s crying. Tears stream down her face, cutting tracks through the grime on her cheeks. Her breaths come in ragged gasps, and her whole body trembles with shock.
But she still doesn’t talk.
I set the skin aside on the table and select my next tool; a small hammer, the kind used for fine metalwork. I weigh it in my hand, feeling the balance of it.
“I’m going to break your fingers now,” I tell her. “One at a time. Starting with the left hand.”
“Please…”
“Tell me her name.”
“I can’t…”
The first finger breaks with a sound like a dry twig snapping. She screams, her body convulsing against the chains, and I wait for the scream to die down before I move to the next one.
“I can do this all night,” I say. “I have nowhere else to be. No one is coming to save you. No one even knows you’re here except for the men who brought you, and they answer to me. This only ends when you give me what I want.”
“Please,” she sobs. “Please, I’m begging you…”
“Then talk.”
The second finger breaks. The third.
“Leeeeandra”
The name bursts out of her, torn from her throat like a confession, like a prayer forced from the lips of a heretic. “Her name is Leandra.”
I stop.
The hammer hovers in the air, suspended above her fourth finger. The word echoes through the stone chamber, reverberating off the walls, sinking into my skin.
Leandra.