47. Lazarus
We’ve been sitting here for hours, all playing our parts but the moment Zayn and Charles leave, all the pretence stops.
The mask doesn’t slip; it evaporates as if it never existed.
“Where is she?”
I’m standing by the window, my back to him, a dark silhouette against the bruised twilight sky. I don’t turn around. I just shake my head in a slow, infuriating pendulum of dismissal.
“Forget the bitch, Konstantine.” I say as bluntly as I can.
“For once in your pathetic existence, you’re doing what you were born to do.
For the first time in forever, you are actually performing your duties as Grand Master the way you should.
The way our father would have wanted. Don’t throw it all away for a nice cunt. ”
“Do not tell me what to do,” he snarls, getting to his feet. “I am Grand Master. Not you.”
I finally turn, and my own mask is gone, replaced by a sneer that could curdle milk.
“You wear the ring,” I say, my voice quiet and deadly. “You sit in the chair but we both know the truth, don’t we, brother? That most days your brain is so addled you can’t even wipe your own arse, let alone run the entire Brethren.”
I push myself off the windowsill and move towards the drinks cabinet, grabbing a bottle and pouring a drink because God knows I need one.
“You will listen to me,” he snaps, grabbing me by the scruff of my neck in show pretence at dominance. “You are on my council, by my grace. You live and breathe, by my grace. You will do as I command.”
I don’t struggle, I don’t try to break free. I just look at him, my head tilted back against the wall and a slow, predatory smile spreads across my lips.
There’s no fear in me in this moment. Only a deep, perverse amusement.
“And if I don’t?” I reply. My voice is a soft, silken taunt. I’m enjoying this. Every second. I’m prodding the beast, seeing if the chains will hold, seeing how close he is to truly tipping over the edge once and for all.
A sneer twists his own lips. “Then I will have you hauled back to your little cell,” he whispers, his voice a razor’s edge. “I will have you tied back up just as you were before.”
He pauses, leaning closer, letting his venom drip into my ear. “And you can watch as I fuck that bitch within an inch of her life. You can watch her forget your name, you can watch her scream mine.”
My smile vanishes. The amusement in my eyes doesn’t just die; it’s murdered, replaced by a flash of pure, unadulterated rage. For a single, triumphant heartbeat, he knows he’s won. He’s pierced my armour.
Then my fist connects with his jaw.
The crack isn’t loud, just a damp, sickening click of knuckle against bone, but it unhinges the room.
His head whips sideways, a rope of spittle spinning from his lips, and for a split second I feel the deep, savage satisfaction of impact singing all the way up my arm.
Then his weight crashes into me, a full-body lunge forged from a lifetime of hatred, and we go backwards.
The drinks cabinet meets our combined bulk with a shriek of splintering wood.
Glasses explode; a decanter rolls, gushing amber across the floorboards.
I can smell the whisky soaking into my shirt as he drives a knee into my gut, folding me over with a grunt that tastes of bile and fury.
I grab a fistful of his hair and wrench his head back hard enough to see the cords of his throat strain.
A wet sound tears from his mouth, more animal than man, and he answers by slamming his elbow into my ribs.
Pain bursts white and immediate, a star shell behind my eyes.
I don’t let go. I can’t. Somewhere in the tangled mess of our limbs I hear my own breathing, ragged as a saw, and underneath it the whisper of his last words still curdling in my blood; scream mine, scream mine.
We go to the floor in a scramble of broken glass.
The carpet bites my back, shards grind under our shoulders.
He’s on top now, all sinew and spite. His fist is a piston that catches my cheek, my brow, the bridge of my nose.
Each blow is a punctuation mark of rage, a full stop pressed into my flesh by the brother I was taught to love.
I can taste metal where my lip has split, feel the hot drip of something trailing into my ear, but I don’t fade; I twist, buck, and swing blindly.
My knuckles find his throat. He chokes, eyes bulging, and in that tiny window of air I see everything he is; nihilistic, desperate, a Grand Master mouldering from the inside out, and I know he sees the same in me.
Then he rears up, both hands fisting the front of my jacket, and smashes my skull against the floorboards.
My head rocks back, a spray of blood, his or mine I don’t know, arcing into the lamplight.
And then he sees it in my eyes. Not fear, not even anger anymore. It’s a calculation. A cold, chilling assessment. I see it in his, too. The abyss. The absolute, nihilistic void of a man who has nothing left to lose.
I push myself off the wall. I don’t speak, I just straighten the cuffs of my jacket, a gesture so profoundly me, so controlled in the face of this carnage that the rage almost surges back.
I wipe a smear of blood from my split lip with the back of my hand, look at it for a moment, then turn on my heel.
I walk to the door, I pull the heavy oak door open and for a second I pause, my profile a stark, bloody cameo against the dim light of the hallway.
I don’t look back, I can’t. I just step through and am gone, leaving the door ajar.