40. Lazarus
Ezra is half-asleep by the time we pull up to the villa.
His small body is a dead weight against my chest, his breath shallow and uneven, still reeking of fear and adrenaline.
I don’t blame him. He’s obviously been running on fumes since Portugal.
I cradle him carefully as the car rolls to a stop on the gravel, the crunch of stones under the tyres loud in the oppressive silence of the mountains.
The driver cuts the engine. Mateus, seated beside me in the back starts to say something. Some inane observation about the drive, the weather, I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m already pushing the door open with my shoulder, stepping out into the cold night air with Ezra bundled against me.
The villa looms ahead, a sprawling, palace-like silhouette of ancient stone and rotting timber, every window a dead eye.
God, I hate this place. It festers. It seeps into your bones like damp, like decay.
We should have let it burn, we should destroyed it the night Ines died.
But no, he wanted to rot here, to sit in his grief and let it consume him, and now the whole world has to suffer for it.
I’m halfway to the front door when I hear it.
A scream.
It cuts through the night like a blade, raw and guttural, a sound that doesn’t belong to any human throat but to something wounded beyond reason.
It claws its way out of the house, through the thick oak door, and buries itself in my spine.
I freeze. Ezra stirs in my arms, a whimper escaping his lips and I feel his body tense, ready to bolt.
“Mateus,” I snap, turning back to the car. “Take him. Now.”
No, I don’t trust him, but right now I have few options and I’d rather he be with Mateus than he witness whatever the fuck this is. Ezra’s eyes flutter open, glassy and confused as I hand him over and I press a hand to his cheek for just a moment.
“Stay with Mateus,” I tell him, low and firm. “Get back in the car. It’s armoured, you’ll be safe. Lock the doors. Do not come inside, no matter what you hear. Understand?”
Mateus nods, already retreating with Ezra clutched to his chest. I don’t wait to see them comply. Instead, I turn and run.
The front door groans as I shove it open, the sound swallowed by another scream. It’s closer now, reverberating off the marble floors, bouncing down the corridors like a trapped animal. My boots slam against the stone as I follow the sound.
I know this house. I know its every shadow, every cursed secret.
The screams are coming from the east wing, their wing, their sitting room with the frescoed ceiling and the fireplace that never quite draws properly. I move without thought, my body a vessel for pure, cold fury.
The door to the sitting room is ajar. Light spills through the crack, dim and flickering, candlelight maybe. I push it open and step inside.
The first thing I see is Leandra.
She’s trembling so violently that her bones seem to rattle against the floor.
Her hands are pressed to her face, fingers clawing at something, bandages.
Thick white gauze wrapped around her head, covering her eyes.
She’s sobbing, her voice a shattered, keening wail that rises and falls with each ragged breath.
“I can’t see! Oh God, I can’t see, please, please, I can’t…”
And then I see him.
Konstantine stands by the fireplace, one elbow propped on the mantle, a glass of whiskey in his hand.
He’s watching her with an expression of mild, detached interest, the way one might observe a particularly tedious insect.
His shirt sleeves are rolled up. There’s blood on his cuffs. Blood under his fingernails.
The world narrows to a pinprick, and a roaring fills my ears.
I don’t move, I don’t speak. I stand in the doorway, my hands curling into fists at my sides, and I force myself to breathe.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
I cannot react. I cannot let him see. If he sees, if he knows how much this undoes me, he will use it. He will twist it.
But God, the fury. I have never felt rage like this. This is a white-hot, obliterating inferno that threatens to consume every rational thought.
He hurt her. Did he take her eyes?
I look at Leandra, at the ruin of her face, and I feel something crack open in my chest. I didn’t expect this.
I knew Konstantine was capable of cruelty, I’ve been on the receiving end of it for long enough, but this?
This is a desecration. She was supposed to be a pawn, a distraction in his endless, twisted mourning for his wife.
I thought he’d dress her up, parade her around.
I didn’t think he’d take a blade to her.
Her eyes were wrong - that’s what he’s going to say. I already know it. Ines had blue eyes. Leandra’s are brown.
Bile rises in my throat and I swallow it down, forcing my tongue to work. “What the hell happened to her?” My voice comes out flat, controlled despite the rage inside me.
Konstantine takes a slow sip of his drink, savouring it. “Her eyes were wrong.”
There it is. The words hang in the air, simple and monstrous. He says it like he’s commenting on a misplaced piece of furniture. Wrong. As if her eyes were a defect to be sanded away, a blemish to be excised.
“Ines had blue eyes,” he continues, his tone conversational, almost bored. “Hers were brown. I had them corrected.”
Corrected. I look at the bandages, clean and dry, and I know. I know with a sick, visceral certainty that there is nothing left beneath that gauze but empty sockets. He didn’t just damage her eyes, he removed them. He gouged them out with the same casual simplicity he applies to everything.
Leandra lets out another sob, a low, animal moan of pain. Her fingers scrabble at the bandages, and I see her nails are broken, the beds raw and bleeding.
“She’s in pain,” I say. My voice is still steady, but I can feel the cracks forming. “She needs something. Painkillers. Morphine. Now.”
Konstantine glances at her, then back at me. His lip curls. “Once she’s more herself, she can have some painkillers. But while she’s still being a little bitch about it all, she’ll get nothing.”
He pushes off the mantle, downs the rest of his drink, and sets the glass on the table with a sharp clink. Then he walks past me, close enough that I can smell the stench on his breath and the copper tang of blood beneath it.
He doesn’t look back. His footsteps echo down the corridor, fading into silence.
I am alone with her.
For a long moment, I don’t move. I stand there, staring at the space where my brother stood, and I let the fury wash over me.
It’s a tidal wave, a flood of molten rage that burns away every carefully constructed wall I’ve built over the years.
I think about following him. I think about wrapping my hands around his throat and squeezing and squeezing until the light leaves his eyes.
I think about doing to him what he did to her, and worse. So much fucking worse.
But that’s not what she needs right now. My desperate need for violence won’t help her in this moment.
I turn back to Leandra. She’s still trembling, still whimpering, her body curled so tightly into itself that she looks like a child.
A broken, bleeding child on a cold marble floor.
I’ve seen violence. I’ve committed violence.
But this, this is something else. This is the deliberate, methodical destruction of a human being for no reason other than that she didn’t fit his precious fucking mould. She wasn’t Ines enough.
I move slowly, deliberately, lowering myself to the floor beside her.
The marble is cold under my knees. I sit down, my back against the overturned table, and I reach out.
My hand hovers over her shoulder for a moment, and I can feel the heat radiating off her skin, the fine tremors that wrack her frame.
“Leandra,” I say, and my voice is different now. Softer. Something I didn’t know I still had in me.
She flinches. A violent, full-body recoil, and she lets out a choked sob. Her breath hitches, and she starts to scramble away, her hands slipping on the floor.
“No, no, no, please, don’t touch me, don’t…”
“I’m not going to hurt you.” I keep my voice low, steady. “It’s Lazarus. I’m not him. I’m not going to hurt you.”
She doesn’t believe me. Why would she? She’s been carved open by a monster, and I share his blood. I share his face, more or less. But I don’t move. I don’t grab her. I just sit there, my hand still extended, palm up, an offering.
Minutes pass. Her breathing slows, just a fraction.
The trembling doesn’t stop but the wild, animal panic begins to ebb.
She’s clearly exhausted. She’s in agony and somewhere beneath all that pain, she’s still fighting.
I can feel it. A tiny, flickering ember of defiance that Konstantine hasn’t managed to snuff out.
That ember is what decides it for me.
I look at her, at the bandages, the way her fingers keep twitching toward her face as if she can’t quite believe her eyes are gone, and I know with a clarity that cuts through the fury like a blade that I am not leaving her here.
I am not leaving her to become another dead thing for him to pick over.
I’m not leaving her to become another ghost in this fucking mausoleum.