42. Lazarus #2
“And Jacob? I’ll consider your concerns, but don’t mistake my willingness to listen for weakness. The Brethren has been subtle for centuries, and look where it’s gotten us. Maybe it’s time for a different approach.”
“Maybe it is, but different doesn’t have to mean suicidal.”
I hear movement. Chairs scraping against marble. Footsteps approaching the door.
I push off the wall and arrange my face into something neutral. By the time the door opens and the three of them step into the hallway, I look like I’ve just arrived. Like I haven’t been standing here listening to them plan the deaths of millions.
“Lazarus.” Jacob spots me first, and his smile is as warm and welcoming as it always is. “I haven’t seen you at the club in a while. We’ve missed you.”
“Jacob.” I nod, keeping my voice even. “I’ve been somewhat distracted of late.”
“So I’ve heard.” His eyes flicker over me, and I have the uncomfortable sensation that he’s seeing more than I want him to. My shirt covers most of my tattoos, but I wonder how much he has noticed anyway. “I hope you’re not working too hard. All work and no play makes for a very dull life.”
Konstantine laughs at that, a sharp, barking sound that echoes off the marble walls. “My brother doesn’t know how to play. He never has. All duty, sacrifice, and noble suffering. It’s exhausting just looking at him.”
I don’t rise to the bait. I’ve learned over the years that the only way to win my brother’s games is to refuse to play them.
“Jacob,” I say instead. “I didn’t realize you were so intimately connected with the Brethren’s inner workings.”
“There’s a lot you don’t realize, little brother.” Konstantine steps forward, and Victor and Jacob melt away behind him like shadows retreating from a flame. “But that’s always been your problem, hasn’t it? You see what’s right in front of you and miss everything that matters.”
The corridor empties. Jacob gives me one last look, something unreadable in his eyes before disappearing around the corner. Victor follows without a word, his robes whispering against the floor.
And then it’s just the two of us.
Konstantine and Lazarus. The sun and the shadow. The chosen one and the spare.
“Where is she?”
His voice is different now. The lazy amusement is gone, replaced by something sharper. Something hungrier.
“Who?”
“You know very well who.” He steps closer, and I can smell the cologne on his skin, the wine on his breath. “Ines.”
“She’s not Ines.”
“She is.” His voice cracks on the word, and I see it then, the madness lurking behind his eyes. The obsession that’s been eating him alive since the moment his wife’s heart stopped beating. “She fucking is.”
I shake my head, disgusted. Not just at him, but at myself. At the part of me that still wants to save him. The part that remembers us as children, before the Brethren. Before the ceremonies, the blood, and the weight of expectation crushed everything soft between us.
“She’s gone,” I tell him. “She’s somewhere you can’t find her.”
Konstantine laughs, and the sound is wrong.
Too high. Too wild. “You think you can hide her from me? You think there’s anywhere on this earth she can go that I won’t follow?
Our souls are bonded, Lazarus. Bonded in ways you could never understand.
I will always know where she is. I will always find her. ”
I turn to walk away. I can’t do this. I can’t stand here and listen to him talk about Leandra like she’s a possession, like she’s a replacement part for the monster he married.
His hand closes around my arm.
“We can fuck her together.”
I freeze at that. “What?”
“We can share her.” His grip tightens, fingers digging into my bicep. “The way we shared her before. You remember, don’t you? The three of us? She liked it. She’ll like it again. She’ll be made to like it.”
The rage that floods through me is so sudden, so complete that for a moment I can’t see, can’t breathe, can’t think. All I can do is feel; the memory of that night, the first night, the drugs in my system. Ines’s hands on my body while I lay there helpless, raging, and unable to stop her.
“She’s my wife,” Konstantine continues, and his voice has dropped to a whisper, intimate and obscene. “Mine. Not yours. You don’t get to keep her for yourself. You don’t get to take what belongs to me.”
I wrench my arm free.
“She doesn’t belong to you,” I snarl. “She’s not Ines. Ines is dead. She’s rotting in whatever hole you’ve hidden her corpse in, and no amount of surgery, coercion or madness is going to bring her back.”
Konstantine’s face contorts. For a moment, I see the boy he used to be beneath the monster he’s become; the brother who used to share his sweets with me when our father wasn’t looking, who used to promise that we’d always protect each other no matter what.
Then the moment passes, and all that’s left is that same hollow shell of a person.
“You can’t keep her from me,” he says. “I will find her. I will have her. And when I do, you’ll watch. I’ll tie you to a fucking chair and make you watch, and you’ll remember your place, little brother. You’ll remember who you are. That you are second, that you are beneath me.”
I walk away.
His laughter follows me down the corridor, bouncing off the marble, the gold and the centuries of blood that built this place.