34. Leandra
The words echo, a splinter working deeper into my mind with every repetition. If you want to survive then you will be. The blue of his truth is still burned onto the back of my eyelids, a colour so pure it feels like an actual violation.
He means it. He means all of it.
And that certainty is more terrifying than any threat.
I press my back against the cold wall, the stone biting through the thin shift he’s dressed me in.
Dressed me. Like a doll. Like her. My skin crawls at the memory of his hands, clinical and reverent all at once, adjusting the neckline, smoothing the fabric over my hips as if I am an altar and he is preparing a sacrifice.
But the ghost of his touch lingers like a chill that has nothing to do with the temperature of the room.
My stomach cramps again, a sharp reminder that the food, the impossible, perfect food is real even if this nightmare can’t be.
I look at the platter, the figs split open so temptingly, the prosciutto draped in delicate, obscene folds.
I can practically taste the salt and cream of the goat cheese, and I hate myself for the moan that escapes me when I taste it.
I hate the way my body betrays me with pleasure while my mind screams trap, trap, trap.
How does he know? The question circles, a vulture over carrion. Not just my favourites, but the specific ones. These aren’t just foods, they are memories. They are the architecture of a life he has no right to excavate.
A sob builds in my chest, but I swallow it down with the last crumb of cheese. Crying feels like giving him something else, and he’s already taken far too fucking much.
I force myself to look at the room again, really look. This is a holding cell. A temporary space. I don’t know how I know it, but I do. I am being kept here, held here, but for what? For me to become her enough to be permitted to leave.
A tremor that is half revulsion, half something darker and more shameful rolls through my belly.
I am trapped. The door is locked; I’ve already checked. The windows are barred, and somewhere in this house he is moving, breathing, planning the next act of this grotesque theatre. The man with the swirling colours and the voice that wraps around my will like silk.
If you want to survive then you will be.
I press my palms against my eyes until I see stars, and terror coils in my gut alongside the food I’ve devoured.
It whispers that I am already changing, that every bite of that meal is a communion, that the taste of home is just another chain.
And beneath the terror is a sick, twisting heat.
The way his gaze has lingered on my throat.
The way his truth-blue swirl has seemed to caress the air between us.
I am afraid of him. I am afraid of what he might do.
And I am terrified, utterly terrified of the part of me that doesn’t entirely hate being the centre of such absolute, annihilating attention.
He comes for me again a few hours later, and the air itself seems to thicken with his presence.
I can tell his mood has changed. Not just shifted, but shattered and reassembled into something unrecognizable. This is not the rational man I spoke to this morning. His colours swirl in those same manic yellows I first saw, and the shadows pooling in his eyes have grown deeper, hungrier.
A cold, quiet part of my mind whispers that it’s as though a different creature is wearing his skin.
But that’s impossible. This is Konstantine. It has to be Konstantine and yet every instinct screams that the person I bargained with earlier is gone, replaced by something that merely looks like him.
Could I have been drugged? The thought flickers desperately in my head. Is this some elaborate, sadistic trick to break me, to strip away every last certainty until I can’t tell sanity from nightmare?
The questions don’t soothe; no, they burrow deeper, wrapping around me like a snare.
My stomach twists so violently I taste bile as I force myself to stand, a lifetime of brainwashing coiling through my limbs while the old, poisonous litany whispers in my head that this man is my leader, my master, the holiest of holies. The words rise before I can stop them.
“Grand Master.”
I can’t keep the curtesy or the words in. It may have been years since my childhood lessons back in my father’s home, back when they still pretended to believe but old habits don’t die, they just wait in the marrow, ready to betray you.
The curtsy feels like a noose tightening, and the title burns my tongue like a curse considering what he has done to me.
His eyes are wild, his movements erratic, as if he is barely holding himself together under a cracking veneer of calm.
He smiles at me, and the smile doesn’t reach his eyes; it crawls across his face like a wound that’s learned to move.
It makes my skin crawl in a way that’s almost sensual in its horror, a terrible, unwanted shiver that heats the base of my spine even as revulsion coils in my belly.
What is wrong with him? How can he be almost rational one moment, and completely deranged the next…
does he have a fractured mind, or am I the one fracturing here?
The idea that he might be performing this, testing my limits deliberately wriggles beneath my skull like a parasite.
I try to anchor myself but the world feels waterlogged, unreal.
His stare bores into me, but I don’t dare do a thing to break it.
“Let us try again,” he says, his voice soft, almost gentle but I hear the thing slithering underneath, the promise of pain wrapped in velvet. His tone licks at my ears and a dark, involuntary part of me shudders at the intimacy of it even as my heart hammers against my ribs like a caged animal.
I want to laugh. I want to scream.
He holds out his hand, and I hesitate. My instincts shriek at me to refuse, to fight, to run but I tried that before, and it only brought more pain.
Reluctantly, I take his hand. His grip is firm, his skin corpse-cold against mine, and a fresh wave of dread crests through me at how intimate that chill feels.
He leads me out of the room, his steps confident, as if he doesn’t just own the villa but the very air I breathe, and maybe my lungs along with it.
“I’ve had your room prepared,” he says as we walk down the hallway. “It’s exactly as you like it.”
How could he know what I like when I don’t even know myself anymore?
The question tastes like poison. I try to keep my expression neutral, to hide the fear coursing through me like ice water but my body betrays me; a tremor in my hands, legs that threaten to buckle as if they’ve already decided surrender is the only option.
I focus on breathing, on putting one foot in front of the other; if I can just make it through this, if I can just survive…
We reach the room and he opens the door, stepping aside to let me enter.
I pause in the doorway, my eyes scanning the space.
The ornate furniture, the heavy drapes that swallow the light, the large bathtub in the corner gleaming like an altar.
It’s a room fit for a queen, or a prisoner kept in velvet chains.
My chest tightens as I realize the air is faintly perfumed, and the thought slithers back; Am I breathing something in?
Has this whole day been laced with something meant to make me pliant?
Konstantine steps inside and closes the door.
The soft click of the lock echoes through my bones.
He moves to the bathtub, turning on the tap.
The sound of running water fills the room, and with it a knot of dread tightens in my stomach, low and visceral, sickeningly close to a darker kind of anticipation that I refuse to name.
His eyes never leave me, unblinking as the water slowly rises and rises.
“Get in,” he says, his voice calm, almost soothing, a lullaby sung by the thing under the bed.
I want to point out that I’ve clearly already been bathed today, but I know what happens when I resist. My body moves on its own, a puppet whose strings he’s been patiently threading all my life.
Reluctantly I shrug off my dress, feeling my cheeks burn not just with shame but with a horrifying, reluctant awareness of my nakedness before him; before our Grand Master, no matter how coerced this scene is.
The air kisses my skin and his gaze drags across it, it lingers, hungers in a way that makes my stomach turn.
The water is hot, almost too hot as I lower myself into it.
The heat seeps into my muscles, forcing them to loosen against my will, and the contrast with the cold terror in my chest makes my head swim.
I sit stiffly, every nerve screaming. Bubbles cluster around my breasts, my thighs, hiding nothing from him.
He kneels beside the tub, and the proximity of his body radiates a wrongness I can feel in my teeth.
His hands dip between the bubbles and when they find my skin, I have to bite the inside of my cheek to stop a sound, half gasp, half whimper.
He begins to wash me, his movements slow, deliberate, each stroke a question he’s not asking aloud. How far can I push before you break?
Some traitorous part of my flesh responds to the gentleness in his fingertips even as my mind recoils.
I feel sick, violated in layers, body, mind, the deep core of self that is supposed to be mine alone.
His touch is an invasion, a slow mapping of territory he already thinks he owns, and the fact that my pulse quickens with anything other than pure fear makes me want to claw my own skin off.
Is this real? Am I really here, being bathed like a doll by a man whose sanity has curdled? Or is this another of his games, a hallucination induced by something in my food, in the wine, in the very air?
I have to make this stop, I have to.
I think I’m going to scream if I sit here any longer and play this docile fucking creature.
“Where’s my mother?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper, the words scraping past the lump in my throat. I need to claw back something real, some anchor to the world outside this fever dream.
He pauses, his hands stilling in the water. The sudden absence of movement is worse than the touching. He looks at me, his eyes narrowing and for a moment I see something flicker behind the yellow, a shadow of the old contempt.
“That woman isn’t your mother,” he says, his voice cold, so cold it burns.
I want to argue, to tell him he’s wrong, but I know better than to contradict him directly.
Still, I can’t just abandon her. I can’t let him erase her from my life, and I know what her fate will be if I say nothing, if I let this slide into silence.
They’ve already murdered half my family. I know they will do the same to her.
“Where is she?” I ask again, my voice trembling, the words shivering out of me like a prayer to a god that only answers with pain.
His reaction is instantaneous. The shift from false calm to violence is a rupture, a tearing of the thin veil he’s been holding over the abyss.
His hand lashes out, striking me across the face with a sound like wet silk tearing.
The force of the blow sends me reeling, my head slamming against the porcelain edge of the tub, and white light explodes behind my eyes.
Before I can even gasp his hands are on me, pressing, pushing me under the water.
Panic detonates in my chest. The water closes over my face like a liquid shroud, and I thrash, but the heat makes everything slippery, dreamlike. The water fills my nose, my mouth, my lungs; a burning, intimate invasion, like his breath forced inside me.
I can’t breathe. I can’t fucking breathe.
The words are a primal scream in my skull. I can’t think, I cant do anything but fight. My arms flail, my legs kick as bubbles and water churn in a grotesque parody of passion.
But he’s too strong. His grip is unrelenting, his weight a terrible, steady pressure, like a lover who will not be denied.
My vision begins to blur, the world above the waterline smearing into dancing light and shadow. My struggles grow weaker, my body betraying me even in rebellion, softening into his hold.
I’m drowning.
I’m going to die here. In this villa, in this bathtub, at the hands of a man who thinks I’m someone I’m not and the worst, most secret horror is the way the surrender almost feels like release.
I wake up coughing, water spilling from my mouth in a warm, humiliating gush.
My body aches with a deep, intimate soreness, my lungs burning as if I’ve swallowed liquid fire.
I’m lying naked on the cold floor, every inch of my skin exposed and goose-bumped, the air licking at my wet flesh like an unwelcome tongue.
Konstantine is standing over me, his expression completely, irrationally calm despite the colours swirling like a hurricane around him; bruise-purples and fever-reds bleeding into the air, a visible madness that makes his serenity a knife’s edge against my throat.
“You shouldn’t have asked about her,” he says, and the words fall like stones dropped into the hollow of my chest. “She’s not your mother. Your mother is gone. I am your family now.”
I want to scream, to cry, to claw my way out of my own skin but I can only lie here, half-dazed, half-drowned.
My body a wet, trembling thing pinned beneath the weight of his attention.
The terror is a living creature coiling in my belly, slick and cold while somewhere deeper, a shameful heat stirs at being so utterly seen, so completely unmade.
He kneels beside me, and the nearness of him is a pressure, a gravity that pulls at my bones. His hand brushes my cheek, and the touch is feather-soft, almost reverent yet it sears like a brand.
“You’re safe now,” he says, his voice a silken murmur that coils around my throat and squeezes. “You’re home.”
I close my eyes, tears slipping down my cheeks.
Home. The word feels like a mockery, a caress that hides the sting of a leash.
This isn’t home, this is a prison. Another prison, its bars forged from his tenderness, its locks clicking shut with every gentle word.
I’m the one always trapped in a role I never wanted to play; the beloved captive, the cherished doll, my horror and my unwanted arousal tangled together like the colours still swirling behind my closed lids.