80. Leandra
The first thing I feel is cold.
Not the cold of a winter morning or the chill of a draft through a window. This is deeper. Older. The kind of cold that has lived in stone for a thousand years, that has seeped into the marrow of the earth itself and made a home there.
I open my eyes and see nothing but darkness.
No. Not nothing. Shapes. Shadows that move and shift at the edges of my vision, forms that seem to breathe with the rock itself.
I blink, trying to clear the fog from my mind, trying to remember how I got here, where here even is.
The last thing I remember is Lazarus. The car crash, no not a crash, an explosion, and then… Nothing. A blank space where my memory should be.
Now I am here.
I try to move and feel resistance. Rope.
Thick and rough, biting into my wrists, my ankles, my waist. I am spread-eagled on what feels like a massive slab of stone, its surface worn smooth by centuries of use.
The cold of it seeps through my clothes, no, not clothes.
I am wearing something thin, something that feels like gossamer against my skin. A shift. A shroud.
I whimper before I can stop myself.
The sound echoes off walls I cannot see, bouncing back to me distorted and strange. And then, as if my whimper were a summons, the shadows begin to move with purpose.
They are women, I realise.
Five of them, emerging from the darkness like ghosts rising from a grave.
They wear dresses of sheer white fabric that clings to their bodies, revealing the curves beneath, the dark circles of their nipples, the shadows between their thighs.
Their faces are hidden behind veils of the same material, but I can see the gleam of their eyes, the wet shine of their mouths.
They move in perfect silence, their bare feet making no sound on the stone floor.
Behind them the darkness seems to pulse and breathe, and I realize with a start that the walls are not walls at all, they are carvings.
Medieval reliefs cut into the living rock; scenes of knights, crosses, and figures kneeling in supplication.
Tombs line the edges of the chamber, stone sarcophagi topped with the effigies of men in armour, their hands folded in eternal prayer.
Oh god, I know this place.
The knowledge hits me, stealing the very breath from my lungs. I have heard stories of this chamber since I was a child, whispered tales passed down through the Esau like forbidden scripture.
This is where it all began.
Where the Templars, broken and bleeding, dragged themselves after the Church turned on them. Where they buried their dead and swore their oaths of vengeance. Where the Brethren was born not as a holy order but as something else entirely, something twisted and secret and so very hungry.
The holiest of places. The most profane.
“Wakey wakey, Leandra.”
The voice comes from behind me, and I jerk against my bonds, craning my neck to see.
Ezekiel steps into my field of vision, and the sight of him sends ice water through my veins.
He wears golden robes, as if he’s dressed like some sort of king.
His dark hair is slicked back from his forehead, and his smile is the smile of a man who believes he has already won.
“What the fuck is this?” The words tear from my throat. I am proud of how steady my voice sounds, even as my heart hammers against my ribs.
Ezekiel’s smile widens. He moves closer, his robes whispering against the stone, and I can smell him now; sandalwood and something darker, something that reminds me of old churches and older blood.
“You know what this is,” he says, his voice almost gentle. “You’ve been prepared for this day. Isaac prepared you.”
Isaac.
The name hits me like a fist to the stomach.
His death felt like a liberation, like a chain finally breaking, but his lessons remain.
They are carved into my bones, written in the scars that map my skin.
And now, looking up at Ezekiel’s smiling face I realize that this, whatever this is, was always part of the plan.
“No,” I breathe. “No, I won’t…”
“You will.” Ezekiel’s voice hardens, the gentleness falling away like a mask. “You’ve been chosen, Leandra. You and these five women beside you. Tonight, you will become something greater than yourself. Tonight, you will ascend.”
He gestures, and the women move closer. They surround the stone slab, their veiled faces tilting down toward me, and I can see their eyes now; dark and glittering, pupils blown wide with something that might be devotion or more than likely are the results of drugs.
One of them reaches for me. I see the glint of metal in her hand, a needle, long and thin, filled with a liquid that glows faintly blue in the darkness.
“Don’t…” I start, but the word dies in my throat as the needle slides into my neck.
The pain is sharp and immediate, a bright point of fire that radiates outward through my veins. I gasp, my back arching off the stone, and then…then the world begins to change.
It starts as a warmth spreading through my chest, a heat that has nothing to do with the cold of the chamber. It moves through me like honey, slow and thick, loosening my muscles, softening the edges of my fear.
I feel my jaw go slack, feel my eyelids growing heavy. Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice is screaming that this is wrong, that I need to fight, that I need to…
But the voice is so far away now.
So small.
So unimportant.
The women begin to undress me. Their hands are cool against my heated skin, their fingers deft and practiced as they work at the ties of my shift. The fabric falls away in pieces, and I feel the cold air kiss my breasts, my stomach, the tender flesh of my inner thighs.
I should be ashamed.
I should be afraid.
But the drug has wrapped me in a cocoon of detachment, and I watch their hands move over my body as if from a great distance, as if the body they are touching belongs to someone else entirely.
And then the colours come.
My synaesthesia has always been a part of me, as natural to me as breathing. But this, this is different. This is overwhelming.
The chamber explodes into a riot of colour.
The women glow like stained glass windows come to life. One burns with a deep, pulsing violet. Devotion, I realize, or something close to it. Another shimmers with pale green, the colour of envy, of wanting. A third blazes with orange, bright and hungry, the colour of lust barely contained.
And Ezekiel, Ezekiel is darkness. Not black, not the absence of colour, but something deeper.
Something that swallows light whole and gives nothing back.
He stands at the edge of my vision, and around him the colours of the other women bend and warp, drawn toward him like planets orbiting a dying star.
I try to speak, but my tongue is thick and useless in my mouth. The sounds that escape me are not words but moans, low and animal, and I feel my hips shift against the stone, my body responding to the drug in ways my mind cannot control.
“That’s it,” Ezekiel murmurs, his voice sliding through the darkness like oil on water. “Let it take you. Let it open you.”
The women begin to touch me.
Their hands are everywhere at once; on my breasts, my stomach, my thighs.
Fingers trace the scars that map my skin, following the silver lines like roads on a map.
A mouth closes over my nipple, and I cry out, the sensation shooting through me like lightning.
Another mouth presses against my inner thigh, teeth grazing the sensitive flesh, and my hips buck involuntarily.
I am drowning in sensation. Lost in it. The drug has stripped away every barrier, every defence. Leaving me raw, exposed, and achingly sensitive.
Every touch is magnified a thousandfold.
Every breath against my skin feels like a caress.
The colours swirl and merge, violet bleeding into green, bleeding into orange, until the world is a kaleidoscope of light and heat and pleasure.
The women are touching each other now too.
I see them through half-closed eyes, their bodies intertwining like serpents, their sheer dresses rucked up around their waists.
One of them has her head between another’s thighs, and the sounds she makes, wet and hungry and obscene, send fresh waves of heat through my core.
A finger slides inside me, and I scream.
The sound echoes off the ancient walls, bouncing back to me distorted and strange. The finger curls, finding a spot that makes stars burst behind my eyes, and I feel my body clench around it. Desperate for more, more, more.
Another finger joins the first, stretching me, filling me and I am babbling now. Words that might be pleas, or might be curses, or might be prayers to a god I stopped believing in long ago.
“Please,” I hear myself say. “Please, please, please…”
I don’t know what I’m begging for. For them to stop. For them to continue. For this burning, aching need that has taken root in my belly to finally be satisfied.
The colours are blinding now. They pulse and throb in time with my heartbeat, with the rhythm of the fingers moving inside me, with the wet sounds of the women pleasuring each other around me.
I can feel them all; their desire, their devotion, their desperate, hungry need.
It feeds into me like a river, and I am drowning in it, drowning in them, drowning in the overwhelming too-muchness of it all.
And all the while, Ezekiel watches.
I can feel his gaze on me and even through the haze of the drug, even through the pleasure that is building and building toward some inevitable peak, I feel a flicker of the old hatred.
He did this to me.
He took a girl, young and naive and desperate for love, and he broke her into pieces. He made me believe that he loved me, that he cared for me, when really all he saw was something to use.
And now he is using me again.
But even that thought cannot hold against the tide of sensation. The fingers inside me move faster as a mouth closes over my clit, and the world dissolves into pure, blinding white.