33. Leandra
Consciousness returns to me like a slow poison, seeping through the cracks of whatever oblivion I’ve been drowning in.
I become aware of my body piece by agonizing piece.
My throat, God, my throat, it’s as though I’ve swallowed broken glass.
And my head, there’s a woodpecker inside my skull, hammering against my temples with relentless, rhythmic cruelty.
Something is wrong. Something beyond the pain.
The scent reaches me before understanding does; soap, floral, overpowering.
A fragrance that doesn’t belong to me, that I cannot name, that speaks of hands I didn’t invite touching skin I couldn’t defend.
The fabric against my body is wrong too, something that clings like a second skin, something that whispers of being seen, being arranged, being prepared.
Then I feel it. That ache. That terrible, familiar ache between my thighs that my body knows even when my mind is still clawing its way back from the dark.
He fucked me. He raped me.
The words don’t land so much as they detonate, and I am left standing in the crater of what they mean.
Our Grand Master. Our dear leader. The man who looks at me and sees a ghost, who touches me and feels a dead woman’s flesh.
I want to scream but my throat is a wound, I want to cry but my eyes refuse, I want to understand but there is no understanding madness like this.
In what world, what shattered, broken world could he possibly believe I am her?
Yes, I look like her. I know I look like her.
But my eyes, my eyes are all wrong. The wrong is colour, the wrong soul is staring out from behind them.
Besides, didn’t he see? Didn’t he watch her body broken and mutilated in this very place?
He has to be mad. He has to be completely insane.
But madness doesn’t make his hands any softer. Insanity doesn’t make his cock any less real inside me while I was unconscious, while I was nothing. While I was a body to be used, washed, and dressed like a fucking doll.
The scream tears out of me before I can stop it, raw and animal, my nails digging into my palms until I feel the skin break, until the pain gives me something real to hold onto. I am here. I am alive. I am…
The door opens. Silent. Smooth. The way nightmares enter a room.
My eyes snap to the movement and the horror doesn’t just rise, it erupts, it floods, it drowns everything else until I am nothing but terror with a heartbeat. Oh god, he’s back. He’s back and I am still here, still trapped, still wearing this dead woman’s face like a target.
“Please…” The word escapes before I can cage it, but the expression that twists across his features kills the rest in my throat. I’ve seen cruelty before, I’ve worn its fingerprints like jewellery. But this, this is something else. This is the face of a man who has already decided what I am worth.
He sets down a tray. The gesture is almost gentle, almost human, and that makes it so much worse.
Then he approaches the bed and the way he moves, it’s not walking, it’s descending.
It’s the grim reaper coming to collect what he believes is his.
I can feel death in the space he occupies, can taste copper and endings on my tongue.
“I’m not her.” The words are a prayer now, a mantra, a shield I keep holding up even though it has not yet once protected me. “I’m not Ines.”
His lips quirk and there, there it is. The colours around him begin to swirl, to shift, to become something so majestic, so mesmerizing that a part of me, a treacherous, broken part of me wants to get lost in them.
My synaesthesia has always been a curse dressed as a gift, but never more than now, never more than when this monster wears a halo of beauty I can’t look away from.
The colours pulse, dance, and beckon. I hate myself for noticing, for feeling that pull in my chest, that warmth spreading through me that has nothing to do with reason and everything to do with the way my body has been trained to respond to power.
“No,” he says, and his voice is gravel and honey, a wound and a caress. “But I need you to be, just for a little while.”
My heart stops. My breath catches. The words don’t make sense, or they make a kind of sense I cannot afford to understand. What the fuck does that mean?
Something inside me breaks. The last thread of composure I’ve been clinging to snaps, and I am throwing myself off the bed. I’m launching my body at him with nothing but desperation, nails, and the animalistic need to fight, to hurt, to make him feel even a fraction of what I feel.
His hand catches my throat. One hand. As if he anticipated this, as if he wanted this, as if my rebellion is just another part of his plan.
The impact against the wall sends lightning through the bruise where he’s already bashed my head, and the pain is so bright, so white-hot that for a moment I can see nothing but stars behind my own eyes.
He presses his body into mine and I feel it, God help me, I feel all of it.
The sheer, impossible strength of him, the heat radiating through his clothes.
The way his body fits against mine like a key in a lock I never agreed to open.
I realise now that I never stood a chance against this man.
I never stood a fucking chance, and some broken part of me, some part that was trained on her knees, trained to survive by surrendering feels something dangerously close to relief at that knowledge.
“Be a good whore.” His voice is gruff, too fucking husky, and it does something to me. It does something I don’t want it to do.
“I am not a whore.” The words come out as a gasp but there’s steel in them, there’s years of being seen as only that, being used as only that, being reduced to nothing but a body to be fucked and discarded.
I am sick of it. I am sick of being that in all their eyes when I never chose to be anything but a survivor.
His lips curl. He buries his face in my hair, my frizzy, out-of-control hair that Ines would never have allowed and I swear he is smelling me, inhaling me, consuming me through scent alone.
The intimacy of it is worse than violence.
The intimacy of it makes my body respond in ways my mind is screaming against.
“You’re a whore if I say you are one.”
My knee comes up and I aim for where it’ll hurt most, where I’ve been taught to aim, where survival instincts override everything else, but he catches it. His fingers dig into my flesh, and the pain is sharp, is specific, is a message my body understands better than words.
I submit.
I hate that I submit, but my body knows when it’s beaten, knows when resistance means more pain, knows the mathematics of survival.
His hand moves to my waist and there’s something in the way he touches me, something that isn’t just possession, isn’t just violence, something that feels almost like recognition.
A wave of heat spreads from where his palm rests, and I don’t understand it.
I don’t want it. But my body leans into it anyway, because my body was trained long before he ever found me, trained to need touch even when touch means pain, trained to want even when wanting means my soul dying a little more inside.
“You have a better body than her.”
The words land like a slap. He’s comparing me to a dead woman.
He’s inside her body while he’s touching mine.
I try to twist out of his grasp, but I can’t move, I can only glare, only pour all my hatred into my eyes while the colours around him keep swirling, keep seducing, keep making my chest tight with something that feels like desire and tastes like self-destruction.
His hand moves up, skimming my side. Deliberately, deliberately not touching my breast, and the avoidance is more erotic than contact would be.
He traces my collarbone like he’s reading a map of my suffering.
He traces my jawline like he’s memorizing the architecture of my despair.
Then his thumb brushes against my lips, and I feel it everywhere; I feel it in places he hasn’t touched, feel it in the ache between my thighs that isn’t just from what he did to me while I was unconscious.
“Please…”
One more time. One more attempt.
But even as I say it, I don’t know what I’m asking for. Please stop? Please continue? Please let me go? Please hold me tighter? The colours around him are so beautiful. They’re so beautiful, and he’s a monster. I don’t know which part of me is responding anymore.
His eyes narrow. Something flickers across his face; an internal war, a battle I can almost see.
Like he wants to do something, say something, be something other than what he is, but then the mask comes down.
The expression hardens to stone and I watch the man disappear behind the monster, watch the colours dim just slightly.
I watch my strange, unwanted attraction curdle into something closer to fear.
He steps back.
I crumple to the floor at his feet, and the position is familiar, is muscle memory, is every man who ever made me kneel. I hate how natural it feels. I hate how my body knows this posture, knows the angle of submission, knows the way to hold itself to minimize damage.
“Be Ines.”
“But I’m not her.” The words are a hiss, a defiance, the only thing I have left.
“If you want to survive,” he says, and his voice is final, absolute, the closing of a door I cannot open, “then you will be.”
I stay on the floor. The colours around him pulse one last time; beautiful, terrible, completely irresistible, and I feel the war inside me rage on.
My body wants. My mind rejects.
And somewhere in the space between those two truths, I am losing myself entirely.