36. Lazarus
The engine of the car hums softly beneath me, a low, steady vibration that does nothing to calm the storm brewing in my chest. The private airstrip stretches out before me.
I landed barely an hour ago and have been sat here waiting ever since, my body a cathedral of old festering wounds, my mind a confessional I can never quite leave.
My breath fogs in front of me as I watch the door of the plane open.
The first to descend is Mateus, Antonio’s younger brother.
His face is grim, his usual stoicism replaced by a tension that makes my jaw tighten until my teeth creak.
He turns back toward the plane, extending a hand to guide someone down the steps and my pulse becomes a slow, dreadful drumbeat as he steps out.
Ezra.
My breath catches in my throat as I see him for the first time in so many years.
The boy is taller than I remember, but that is to be expected.
His frame is lean but strong, like a willow that has learned to bend so it will not break.
His dark hair is tousled, his eyes wide and cautious as he takes in his surroundings, and in them I see the ghost of my own terror reflected back at me, the terror of a child who learned too early what this world is capable of.
He looks so much like my father that it’s almost painful to look at him but there’s something else there too, her influence.
Ines’s darker skin, her sharp cheekbones, the architecture of her face rising beneath his like the ruins of a temple built over a place of sacrifice.
He’s a blend of both worlds, a living testament to the union that almost destroyed us all, a child made flesh from the particular hell she crafted with my body as her cursed altar.
The word ’union’ is a lie my mind offers to protect itself.
There was no union. There was only the hot press of her will, the invasion, the way she took what she wanted while I lay bound in the dark, my own desire twisted into something poison-sweet that still curdles at the back of my throat when I let myself remember.
She forged him inside me. No, inside the hollowed-out shell of the boy I used to be, using my body as a vessel for a future I never consented to carry.
And yet he is here, and the sight of him fills me not with the revulsion I should feel, but with something far more terrifying; a love so fierce it feels like possession, an awe so profound it borders on worship.
Mateus helps him down the steps, his hand resting lightly on his shoulder, and my fists clench at my sides.
I don’t trust Mateus. Not now, not ever.
He’s always been too eager to ingratiate himself, too quick to offer favours that stink of ambition.
He’s ridden the coattails of his brother for long enough that he thinks it makes him equal, but Mateus is not Antonio and he never will be. He is a pale imitation at best.
I shake my head, shake those thoughts away because I don’t have time to dwell on that now. My focus is on Ezra. On my… no, I don’t know it for sure. I don’t, no matter what I suspect the case to be.
One of my men opens the car door, and Mateus guides Ezra toward it. The boy hesitates for a moment, his eyes darting toward me, and I feel that look like a hand pressed to the back of my neck, intimate and threatening. I sit forward, my voice as calm as I can manage considering the circumstances.
“Ezra. Come here.”
He obeys, his movements tentative but steady, and something in the way he approaches chokes me. It’s the trust of the condemned, the muscle memory of a child who has learned to walk toward his fate without flinching, because flinching only ever made it worse.
Mateus helps him into the car and I do my best to ignore him entirely as he gets in after him, treating his presence like a foul smell I refuse to acknowledge.
“How are you, Ezra?” I ask, my voice softer now. “Are you tired? Hungry?”
He doesn’t answer. His eyes meet mine, but there’s no recognition there, no warmth, just a guarded stillness that makes my chest ache like a bruise pressed in confession.
In those eyes I see the echo of my own silence, the years I spent locked inside myself because of what she did, the words burned out of me by shame and pain until only the hollow chamber remained.
But Ezra’s silence is different; it isn’t absence, it’s a sealed vault, a sacred container for horrors too vast to be spoken.
Mateus clears his throat beside him. “He still doesn’t speak,” he says, his tone almost apologetic, as if he’s giving me weather news and not confirmation of the damage carved into my child’s soul.
A wave of anger crashes over me. I bite down on the inside of my cheek until I taste iron, the flavour a reminder of every moment I survived her. Ezra doesn’t speak.
The words echo in my mind, a reminder of everything he’s endured, everything he should never have had to witness.
And now, he’s been uprooted again, forced to flee, and no doubt has been petrified the entire time, his small body a reliquary of fear.
I imagine the dark of the plane, the rush of flight, the way the world keeps tearing him from any semblance of safety.
I take a deep breath, pushing my anger aside, folding it into the dark space behind my heart where I keep all the things that would destroy me if I let them breathe.
Now is not the time for it.
Now is the time to be strong, to be the protector Ezra needs, even if every cell in my body is screaming with the memory of how it felt to be powerless beneath someone who should have protected me.
I wrap my arm around his shoulders, pulling him close, and the heat of his small body against mine is a revelation and a wound.
He is so warm, so alive, and every beat of his heart is a pulse of defiance against the forces that shaped him.
His flesh against my flesh is a communion, the only kind I believe in now.
“You’re safe now,” I say, my voice steady as a blade. “You’re safe with me. No one will hurt you while I’m here.”
Ezra doesn’t respond, but I can feel his small frame trembling against my side.
I want to consume his pain, to swallow it whole and let it burn in the furnace of my own.
I want to peel back the silence and see the truth of what he carries, but I don’t.
I just hold him, and the trembling becomes a shared secret between us, a pulse of recognition passing from his body to mine.
“If there’s anything I can do…” Mateus begins, his tone ingratiating, a damp hand extended where no touch is wanted.
“There’s nothing,” I interrupt, my voice cold now. “You’ve done enough.”
He flinches, but I don’t care. I don’t have the patience for his games today, not when my son is trembling against me, not when every instinct I possess is screaming that I must become the sanctuary he was never given.
I wave my hand at the driver, signalling for him to go, and the car pulls away from the airstrip with a hush that feels like sealing a tomb.
The drive is silent, the only sound the hum of the tyres against the road, a low drone that vibrates up through the seat and into my spine where it joins the other vibrations; the memory of being held down, the ghost of her weight, the way my body learned to dissociate until I floated above the scene, watching a man who looked like me be unmade over and over and over again.
I let the memories flicker at the edges like candle flames in a crypt.
I do not push them away because I have learned that survival means making room for the dead inside you.
Ezra sits beside me, his hands folded in his lap, his gaze fixed on the passing scenery like he’s trying to pretend I don’t exist.
There’s a part of me that should hate him.
A part that whispers in Ines’s voice that he is a monument to my violation, a living scar that will never fade.
That voice says I should abhor everything he is because of what his mother did to me, what she made me do, the pleasure she wrenched from my unwilling flesh until my body betrayed me and I learned to hate myself more than I hated her.
But I don’t, I can’t. That voice is a relic.
The truth is something stranger and more terrible: he is the only pure thing to come out of that defilement, a sacred fire born from the profanest of acts.
To hate him would be to hate the only thing I have ever created.
And yet he is born of violence, the most intimate kind.
It is the paradox I will spend the rest of my life carrying, my own personal cross shaped like a child’s hand.
He’s just a boy.
A boy who’s seen too much, endured too much, his innocence stripped away before he could even name it. But he’s also the future of the Brethren. The weight of that responsibility rests heavily on my shoulders.
“Ezra,” I say after a while, my voice gentle. “Do you remember me?”
He doesn’t respond, but I see his fingers tighten slightly in his lap, a tiny convulsion of recognition. It’s a small movement, but it’s enough, it’s an opening. He remembers. He may not speak, but I know he remembers.
“It’s your Uncle Laz,” I whisper into his ear, the words so soft they barely stir the air, a confession meant for him alone.
I don’t want Mateus to hear it, to realise I am not in fact my brother.
His entire body language seems to change, like a thaw moving through him, and I can feel the subtle realignment of his small frame toward mine.
He turns, staring at me, and I swear I see the ghost of a smile on his face, the barest curve of his lips, like the first light before dawn, fragile and terrifying.
In that smile I feel the whole weight of what she did to me, what was taken, what was made.
The horror and the beauty crash together in my chest, a wave of dark rapture that leaves me breathless.
He is my pain made flesh, my shame transfigured into something sacred.
The pure are not made, they are forged, and he is the purest thing I have ever witnessed, a soul annealed in the same fire that almost consumed me.
“You’re safe now,” I repeat, my voice breaking just enough to be true. “No matter what happens, I’ll protect you. I promise.”