76. Leandra
Isit in the back of the armoured Mercedes as our convoy makes its way through Rome’s busy streets.
Lazarus’s hand is resting on my thigh, and I feel the warmth of him through the thin fabric of my robe.
I changed into it after the ceremony, after everyone had hours of feasting, not only on the food in front of them, but on my nakedness too.
It had felt empowering to do it. To sit there, to show them my flesh, my scars, and everything my body had endured and know not one of them could touch me again, not one of them could ever hurt me.
Rome at night is a cathedral of shadows.
The streetlamps cast amber pools across cobblestones that have witnessed empires rise and crumble.
Churches and ruins blur together, monuments to gods and men who thought themselves immortal.
I understand that arrogance now. I understand the temptation to believe that power can outlast death, but Ezekiel is still out there.
Somewhere. Watching. Waiting. I feel him like a splinter I can’t dig out.
His fingers find mine. I don’t speak, but I don’t need to.
The ceremony has drained me, I can feel it in the slight droop of my shoulders, the way my eyelids flicker with the effort of staying alert.
The crucifix on my back is hidden now, but the scar tissue still aches beneath my dress.
Three days of flaying. Three days of starvation.
Three days of proving myself to men who wanted me to fail.
But I didn’t fail. I never fail, and now I wear his ring.
“You’re staring,” I murmur, not turning from the window.
“Am I?”
“You’re always staring.”
He squeezes my thigh. “Can you blame me?”
I do turn then, and I let the ghost of a smile touch my lips.
It’s a small thing, barely there, but he’ll take it.
Lazarus hoards my smiles like a miser hoards gold.
Each one is a victory, he thinks, a sign that I am healing, that I am becoming something more than the broken creature his brother tried to destroy.
He doesn’t understand that I’ll never stop looking over my shoulder.
The ceremony made me his wife. It didn’t make Ezekiel disappear.
“You should rest,” he tells me. “The residence is twenty minutes out.”
“Twenty minutes is a long time to let your guard down.”
“Let me worry about the guard.”
I don’t argue, I never argue about the practical things. Instead, I lean my head back against the seat and close my eyes, though I don’t let sleep come.
Ezra shifts in his seat, drawing my attention.
The boy is heir to everything Lazarus has built.
His son – someday I’m going to understand what happened, what the real story is.
He is watching me with those dark eyes that see too much, and I wonder what he sees when he looks at me.
A mother? A replacement? A stranger wearing his father’s ring? Perhaps all three.
“Are you tired?” Lazarus asks him.
He shakes his head. “I’m not tired.”
“You should try to sleep too.”
“I don’t want to.”
There’s something in his voice that makes me pause.
A tension. A watchfulness. He has been like this since the ceremony, alert, guarded, as if waiting for something to happen.
I tell myself it’s just the aftermath of everything he’s endured.
Watching his mother die. Watching his father spiral into madness.
Learning truths no eight-year-old should have to learn.
But a voice in the back of my mind whispers that I should pay attention. That I should listen to the part of me that knows Ezekiel, that remembers the way his mind works, the patience he has for revenge.
I don’t listen. That is my first mistake.
The convoy moves through the Piazza Venezia, past the white marble monstrosity of the Vittoriano, and turns onto the Via dei Fori Imperiali.
The Colosseum looms ahead, floodlit and hollow, a monument to blood and spectacle.
The Romans understood power, but they understood cruelty better.
They made entertainment out of suffering, something the Brethren learned to do but in crueller, more vindicative ways.
I turn my gaze away and watch Lazarus check his watch. Twelve minutes to the residence. The gates will open, the guards will sweep the perimeter. I will bathe and he will watch me, and we will not speak of the ceremony, the skull, or the weight of everything we have done to reach this moment.
That’s when the lead vehicle slows.
I feel it before I see it; the subtle shift in momentum, the way the engine’s purr drops half a tone. My eyes snap open instantly. He squeezes my thigh but I’m already awake, already scanning. I’ve been trained. By him. By what I survived. I don’t ask questions. I just wait.
“What is it?” Lazarus asks the driver.
“Roadblock, sir. Looks like an accident up ahead. Car flipped over.”
I lean forward, peering through the windshield. I can see it now, a car on its side, smoke rising from the engine, a tangle of metal and shattered glass blocking the narrow street. Blue lights flash in the distance. Police. Ambulance. A crowd of onlookers gathering. It’s convenient. Too convenient.
“Can we go around?” Lazarus asks.
“There’s an alley on the right,” the driver says. “It’s tight, but we can make it.”
“Take it.”
The alley is narrow, barely wide enough for the armoured vehicles, the walls so close I could reach out and touch them. Brick, graffiti and the smell of rotting garbage. The headlights cut through the darkness, illuminating dumpsters and fire escapes and the scurrying shapes of rats.
A trap.
It feels like a trap.
I reach for Ezra, pulling him closer. “Lazarus…”
“I know.”
I feel it now, the prickle at the base of my skull, the instinct that has kept me alive through everything. Something is wrong. Something is…
The world suddenly explodes. I don’t know if the ringing is just in my head or it’s me, screaming as it feels like a bomb goes off.