45. Lazarus
I’ve been awake for an hour, maybe more.
Time moves strangely in this room, in this bed, with her body curved against mine like she was carved to fit there.
The light creeps across the floor in slow increments, painting the marble in shades of rose and gold, and I watch it because if I look at her too long, I’ll lose myself entirely.
The clock is ticking.
I can feel it in my bones, that relentless countdown.
Somewhere beyond these walls my brother is edging closer and closer to insanity, and the whole charade is balanced on a knife’s edge.
One wrong move. One moment of inattention and everything I’ve built, everything I’ve sacrificed comes crashing down.
But I can’t make myself leave this bed.
Leandra sleeps with her face half-buried in the pillow, her dark hair spread across the linen like spilled ink.
The sheet has slipped to her waist, leaving her back exposed to the morning light, and I let myself look.
Really look. The way I haven’t allowed myself to before because looking meant acknowledging, acknowledging meant feeling, and feeling is a luxury I’ve never been able to afford.
Her skin is a map of suffering.
The scars start at her shoulders, thin, precise lines that speak of blades wielded with surgical intent. They cascade down her spine in patterns I recognize. Runes. Prophecies. The mad scrawling of a man who believes himself to be the mouthpiece of God.
Ezekiel.
The name curdles in my gut like spoiled meat.
I trace one of the scars with my fingertip, barely touching, not enough to wake her. It’s a spiral, intricate and deliberate, carved into the meat of her shoulder blade. The tissue is old but not ancient, years, not decades. She would have been young when this was done. Young, terrified, and alone.
I know what it is to be violated, to have your body turned into a canvas for someone else’s desires.
Even now, I can still feel the ghost of Ines’s hands on me while the drugs turned my limbs to lead, her mouth on my neck while I screamed inside my skull.
The way she laughed when she climbed off me, wiping her lips, telling me that now we shared something special.
I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do anything but lie there while my brother’s wife used my body like a toy, and my brother watched from the doorway with that fucking smile on his face.
The memory rises like bile, and I force it back down.
This isn’t about me.
This is about the woman beside me whose body tells a story I’m only beginning to read.
There are more scars on her lower back, these ones different, less precise.
Punishment marks. The kind left by belts, switches, anything else that came to hand.
They crosshatch her skin in pale silver lines, and I count them without meaning to.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
Seven major ones. Dozens of smaller ones.
My jaw clenches so hard my teeth ache.
She stirs in her sleep, a small sound escaping her lips, and I go still.
The sheet shifts lower, revealing the curve of her hip, and there, more marks.
These ones aren’t scars. They’re tattoos, inked into her skin with the same ritual precision as the carvings.
A serpent eating its own tail. A crown of thorns.
A chalice overflowing with what might be blood or might be wine.
Ezekiel marked her like property, like livestock. Like a page from his fucking prophecy.
I should be disgusted, I should be horrified. I should look at this woman and see only the tragedy of what was done to her. Instead, I see a survivor.
She endured, she survived. She crawled out of whatever hell they built for her and kept breathing, kept fighting, kept existing in a world that had done nothing but hurt her.
I’ve done terrible things, survived terrible things, but I was born into this world of blood and shadow.
I was raised for it – my father ensured that.
She was thrown into it with no preparation, no protection, no one to catch her when she fell.
And she’s still here.
Still soft enough to moan when I touch her. Still brave enough to meet my eyes, still human enough to love, despite everything.
The realization hits me; we are the same.
Two broken things, shattered by the people who should have protected us.
Pieced back together with spite, rage, and a stubborn refusal to die.
I looked at her and thought God had sent me a gift, a balm for my wounds, a woman to heal me.
But that’s not it at all; God sent me a mirror.
Someone who understands the darkness because she’s lived in it, someone who won’t flinch when she sees the monster I’ve become.
Someone who might, impossibly, love me anyway.
I lean down and press my lips to the spiral scar on her shoulder blade.
She murmurs something in her sleep. Her name, maybe.
Or mine. The sound goes straight to my cock, which is already half-hard from the simple fact of her proximity.
I’ve been ignoring it for an hour, focusing on her scars, her story while the rage built in my chest. But now she shifts again, her legs parting slightly beneath the sheet, and I can smell her, the salt of her skin and something sweeter beneath that I’ve come to recognize as purely Leandra.
The clock is ticking, but the clock can fucking wait.
I move down her body with the patience of a man who has spent decades learning to control his impulses. My lips trace the path of her spine, pausing to press kisses to each scar I find. The runes. The lash marks. The places where Ezekiel carved his madness into her very flesh.
I’ll overwrite them. I’ll mark her with pleasure instead of pain, I’ll make her forget every hand that ever touched her except mine.
When I reach the small of her back, she stirs again. Her breathing changes, catching on an inhale. Her fingers curl into the sheets.
“Lazarus?”
“Shh.” I press my mouth to the dimple just above the swell of her ass. “Don’t wake up. Not yet. Let me do this.”
She makes a sound that might be a question, but it dissolves into a gasp when I pull the sheet away completely.
She’s naked beneath, still flushed from last night, still bearing the faint marks of my mouth on her inner thighs.
The sight of those bruises, purple and tender, evidence of my devotion sends a surge of possessive satisfaction through me.
I spread her legs gently, positioning myself between them. She’s already wet. I can see it, the way her labia glisten in the morning light, the way her body responds to me even in sleep. I lower my head and breathe her in.
“Lazarus, what…”
My tongue answers for me.
I lick into her with one long, slow stroke, parting her, tasting the essence of her.
She cries out, her hips bucking against my face, and I grip her thighs to hold her steady.
She’s so responsive, so very alive. Every flick of my tongue draws a new sound from her lips; a gasp, a moan, a broken version of my name that makes me harder than stone.
“Please,” she whimpers. “Please, I…”
I circle her clit with the tip of my tongue.
Once. Twice. Three times. She’s writhing now, her hands fisting in my hair, her thighs clamping around my ears.
I don’t stop, I don’t slow down. I lick, suck, and tease until she’s grinding against my face, taking her pleasure from me with an abandon that makes my chest ache.
“That’s it,” I murmur against her flesh. “Take what you need. Use me.”
She comes with a scream that echoes off the marble walls.
I feel every pulse of it against my tongue, every spasm of her inner muscles, every shudder that wracks her body. I keep licking her through it, gentler now, drawing out the aftershocks until she’s trembling, oversensitive, and pushing weakly at my head.
“Too much,” she gasps. “I can’t…”
I lift my head and look up at her. She’s propped on her elbows, her hair a wild tangle, her cheeks flushed, her eyes glazed with pleasure.
“Good morning,” I say.
She laughs. It’s breathless, surprised, and utterly beautiful. “Is that how you wake up all your guests?”
“Only the ones I’m in love with.”
The word hangs between us. I said it last night in the heat of passion, but this is different. This is morning light, clear eyes, and nowhere to hide. She looks at me for a long moment, her expression unreadable.
Then she reaches down and pulls me up to her.
Her mouth finds mine. She kisses me deeply, tasting herself on my lips, and I groan into her mouth. Her hand slides down my chest, over my stomach, wrapping around my cock with a confidence that makes my hips jerk.
“Fair is fair,” she murmurs against my lips. “You made me come. Now I want to taste you.”
“Leandra…”
“Lie back.”
I obey. I would obey any command she gave me right now.
I stretch out on the bed, my head on the pillows, and she moves over me with the grace of a predator.
Her hair curtains her face as she kisses her way down my chest, tracing the lines of my tattoos and scar with her tongue.
The same tattoos my brother wears, the same symbols carved into my skin to complete the illusion.
But she’s not thinking about him. I can tell by the way she touches me, like I’m the only man who’s ever existed. Like my body is a temple and she’s come to worship.
She reaches my cock and pauses.
“You’re beautiful,” she says, and the words sound like a revelation. “All of you. Every scar, every mark. Every terrible thing you’ve done written on your skin.”
“Leandra…”
She takes me into her mouth before I can say anything else.
The sensation is overwhelming. Her lips stretch around my thickness, her tongue pressing flat against the underside of my shaft.
She takes me deep, deeper than I expected, and I feel the head of my cock hit the back of her throat.
She doesn’t gag, doesn’t pull away. Just breathes through her nose and takes me deeper still.
“Fuck.” The word tears out of me. “Fuck, Leandra, your mouth…”
She hums in response, and the vibration nearly undoes me.
I watch her as she works. I watch the way her lips slide up and down my length, the way her hand pumps what her mouth can’t reach, the way her eyes flutter closed in concentration.
She’s not just doing this for me. She’s doing it for herself.
I can see it in the way she moans around my cock, the way her hips rock against the mattress, the way she’s getting off on giving me pleasure.
“Come here,” I growl. “I want to be inside you when I come.”
She releases me with a wet pop and crawls up my body. Her thighs bracket my hips, and her hand guides me to her entrance. She sinks down onto me in one slow, exquisite motion, and we both moan at the feeling of being joined.
“Look at me,” she says, echoing my words from last night.
God, she’s magnificent. Her head thrown back, her breasts swaying as she rides me, her lips parted on a gasp. The scars on her body catch the light, and they don’t look like wounds anymore. They look like war paint, like proof of everything she’s survived.
“You’re so strong,” I hear myself say as I grip her hips, thrusting up into her.
She smiles. It’s sad, sweet, and knowing. “You said that last night.”
“Because it’s true.”
I flip us over, pinning her beneath me. She gasps, her legs wrapping around my waist, her nails digging into my shoulders. I drive into her with slow, deep strokes. Watching her face, watching the way her mouth forms my name like a prayer.
“I’m going to kill him,” I tell her. “My brother. Everyone who ever hurt you. I’m going to tear their world apart and build a new one from the ashes.”
“Lazarus…”
“I’m going to make you a queen. I’m going to give you everything they tried to take.
Your freedom. Your power. Your body. Your pleasure.
” I thrust harder, deeper, hitting that spot inside her that makes her eyes roll back.
“Every night, I’m going to worship you like this.
Every morning, I’m going to wake you with my mouth devouring your cunt.
Every moment of every day, I’m going to make sure you know that you are loved. ”
Tears spill from her eyes, but she’s smiling all the same.
I kiss her, and swallow whatever words she tries to say. I pour everything I can’t say into the press of my lips, the thrust of my hips. The way my hand finds her clit and circles it in time with my strokes.
She comes apart beneath me.
I feel it; the clench of her inner walls, the arch of her spine, the way she cries out my name like it’s the only word she remembers. The sensation pushes me over the edge, and I follow her into the abyss, spilling inside her with a groan that feels like it’s being torn from my soul.
For a long moment, there is nothing but breathing.
Our bodies tangled. Our hearts pounding. The morning light growing brighter beyond the curtains.
I turn my head, and press a kiss to her palm. “We’re the same, you and I. Two monsters, pieced together from the ruins of what was done to us.”
“Maybe.”
But even as she says it, the clock starts ticking again.
Somewhere close, my brother is waiting. Somewhere beyond these walls, Ezekiel is plotting. Somewhere in the shadows, the Brethren are watching, waiting for me to make a mistake.
I have a brother to destroy. A cult to steal. And a prophet to flay alive.