39. Leandra
My eyes are open, but I cannot see.
Darkness presses against them, a soft, clinging weight that wraps around my skull. It’s fabric. A blindfold. The texture is smooth like silk, but it might as well be a second skin for how intimately it adheres to my face.
I try to blink, and my lashes brush against the material. Something beneath it shifts.
Something wet and cold.
The dead woman’s face. Ines’s face. It must still be pressed against my own, grafted to me in that nightmare ritual I cannot escape even in waking.
My hands fly to my face, fingers scrabbling at the blindfold, and I feel it then; not the slick, gelatinous give of something that should not be there but cotton, like a bandage.
A scream tears out of me, raw and animal.
“Hold still.”
Konstantine’s voice cuts through my panic like a blade through my skin. It is calm. Terribly, horribly calm. The kind of calm that lives on the other side of fury, in a place where reason has already been butchered and buried.
I freeze. Not because I want to, but because my body knows what my mind refuses to accept. Predator. Prey. The old arithmetic of survival.
“What, what is this? What’s on my face?” My voice is a stranger’s, high and thready. “Konstantine, please…”
“Shh.” His hand finds my shoulder, pressing me back down. I hadn’t realized I was trying to rise. I hadn’t realized I was lying on something hard and cold. A table. The altar.
Oh God, am I still on that altar?
“Everything is being fixed now. You need to be still.”
Fixed. That word. The same word he used before, in the hallway when he dragged me by my hair and screamed about wrongness. The same word that echoes in my skull like a death knell.
“Fixed how?” I whisper. “Konstantine, fixed how?”
He doesn’t answer but his hand strokes my hair, and the tenderness of it is worse than any blow. His fingers comb through the mats, catching on knots, pulling just enough to hurt, and I am transported backward in a sickening lurch of memory.
The altar, the cold stone biting into my back. The chanting, low and guttural, a language that felt like insects crawling inside my ears. And then his hands on my face, turning my head, and the dead weight of Ines’s face being pressed against my own. The wet sound of it settling. The smell…
And then his cock, forcing past her lips, past mine, choking me while I gagged and wept.
And that bone. Oh God, her femur.
The impossible pressure of it, slick with something I didn’t want to name, pushing inside me where nothing that size should ever go.
The way he worked it in, inch by agonizing inch while I screamed around his flesh and he murmured praise.
Telling me I was taking it so well. Telling me I was becoming her, telling me this was love.
The flashback releases me with a gasp, and I am thrashing before I can stop myself.
“No! No, no, no…” I buck against the table, against his hands, against the blindfold and whatever else is on me, whatever else is covering me. “Get it off me! Get her off me! I don’t want this, I never wanted this, please…”
“Stop fighting.” His voice is harder now, the calm cracking to reveal the furnace beneath. “You are Ines now. This is the final step. You should be grateful.”
Grateful. He wants me to be fucking grateful?
“Fuck you!” I scream, the words tearing out of me with a force that leaves my throat raw. “I am not Ines! I was never Ines!”
My fists swing blindly, connecting with something solid. His chest, maybe. His face. I don’t care. I claw and punch and twist, my heels skidding against the stone, my spine arching as I fight with every ounce of terror-fuelled strength I possess.
I will not lie still for this.
I will not be compliant while he carves me up into fucking pieces.
But he is stronger, he is always stronger.
His weight comes down on me, pinning my hips and one of his hands captures both my wrists, slamming them above my head. The other hand presses flat against my sternum, holding me down like a specimen for dissection. I can feel his breath on my throat, hot and uneven.
“You,” he says, and his voice is almost reverent, “are so beautiful when you fight.”
A sob wrenches out of me. “Please. Please, Konstantine. Whatever you’re going to do, please don’t. I’ll be her, I’ll be Ines. I’ll be whatever you want, just please…”
“It’s too late to bargain.” His lips brush my ear, and the intimacy of it makes my stomach heave. “The fixing has already started.”
I don’t understand what he means until I feel it.
A sharp, bright point of pressure at the side of my neck. Cold liquid fire blooming beneath my skin, spreading outward in a rush that makes my heart stutter.
A needle. He’s injected me with something.
“No…” The word comes out slurred already, my tongue turning thick and useless in my mouth. “No, what did you…what…”
“Shh.” His hand strokes my hair again, and I can hear the smile in his voice. “It’s just something to help you relax. You’ll sleep soon, and when you wake up, everything will be fixed. Everything will be perfect.”
The drug moves through my veins like honey, slow and inexorable. My limbs are turning to stone, my struggles fading to twitches, then to nothing at all. I try to scream, but my jaw won’t cooperate. I try to move, but my body is too heavy to do anything.
No. No, no, no, please, no.
I am fading. The darkness behind the blindfold is deepening, swallowing me whole. Pulling me down into a place where there is no fight, no flight, no anything but the slow creep of oblivion.
I am defenceless now.
Whatever he wants to do to me, he will do it. Whatever violation he has planned, whatever ritual, whatever desecration of my flesh and myself, I cannot stop him. I cannot even try.
His hands are already moving, sliding down my body with the possessive certainty of someone who knows there will be no consequences.
I am helpless.