32. Chapter 32 #2
My stomach heaves, but something else follows.
A dark satisfaction that bubbles up from a place inside me I don’t really want to acknowledge right now.
The man who tortured me for years, who treated my body like it belonged to him, now exists as nothing more than a breathing specimen himself. A lab rat for twisted experiments.
“What did you do to him?” I ask, unable to tear my eyes away from the monster in front of me. No nose, no ears… no dick.
“Everything he deserved,” Ares steps closer to whatever is left of Ezekiel. “I played around with his face during Kharon. He was actually in the room where we fought.”
I try to search my memories, but nothing comes to mind except a disfigured corpse. He was so covered in his own blood that I didn’t even recognize him back then. But I guess it wasn’t a corpse after all.
“Then I continued with his extremities. One at a time. Slow, painful, with enough medicine going through him so he wouldn’t die on me, but not enough so he wouldn’t feel pain.
He felt everything. First the fingers, then the hands, then the forearms, upper arms, toes, feet, his balls, his cock, even his fucking eyelids.
Each part removed while he was fully conscious. ” Ares says with a twisted pride.
Anyone else on this planet would find him grotesque, a monster, but every horrible thing he’s done to him shows me one thing. His love.
Perhaps I’m a monster myself because I don’t want to scream. I want to thank him for it.
I am not some soft, scared little girl who, when confronted with the fact, turns to run away.
I’m strong. A warrior. I don’t believe in stories where revenge doesn’t feed your soul.
Avenging Elias fed mine. If that makes me a horrible human being, I accept it.
Because some human beings are horrible by definition.
My eyes dart to Ezekiel’s face, feeling nothing. His skin is drawn tight to the bones, his lips cracked and pale, but his eyes. The two cold orbs that haunt my dreams are alert. He hasn’t lost his mind, not that he was ever too sane to begin with.
“There’s more. But if you want, I’ll stop,” Ares says, indirectly asking me permission to continue telling me about what he’s done.
And if the God of War asks permission, what follows next should be devastating, but I want to hear it.
Hear how he tortured him. It’s not heaven I’m aiming for anyway. I’m in love with the devil’s son.
“Nothing will ever be enough for what he’s done to you,” he continues, carrying a sadness in his voice, along with a helplessness that he can’t go back and rewrite the past. “But I sure did try. I made him consume each piece.”
I turn to look at Ares, feeling the shaking in my limbs. I want to deny that I could be such a monster as to be happy about this. That I’m so detached hearing that Ares made the man fucking eat himself.
“The staff ground the flesh, mixed it with a solution, and fed it to him through a tube since he didn’t want to chew parts of himself. But he’s quite literally eaten himself piece by piece over the course of the last two months or so.”
He says again with a clinical detachment that should disturb me, but doesn’t. It’s just a balancing of scales, too long tilted against me.
“He is aware of everything,” Ares adds, “a cocktail of drugs keeps him conscious, prevents shock from shutting down his mind. He feels every second of his existence.”
I step closer, drawn by a compulsion I can’t name. Ezekiel’s eyes are fixed on me. The same eyes that used to study my agony.
“The human body is remarkably resilient,” a voice comes from nowhere, and I turn to see a man in a white lab coat emerging from the hallway. He’s middle-aged with thinning hair and glasses thick enough to start a fire.
“Dr. Mercer maintains Ezekiel’s condition,” Ares explains. “Ensures he remains in the state… indefinitely.”
The doctor approaches the monitoring equipment, checking the readings.
“We’ve developed a unique life support system,” he says, and his tone is eerily similar to Ezekiel’s.
It takes a psychopath to do this. “Medication prevents infection, regulates blood pressure, maintains consciousness, without allowing the brain to shut down from trauma. Well, the solutions are calibrated to sustain cellular function without providing comfort. Unfortunately, the only thing we can’t give him are emotions.
He seems to be a pure case of a sociopath who has none; therefore, we can’t enhance them with hormonal drugs.
We did try, though.” He goes on talking about his grotesque experiments, and I don’t pity Ezekiel.
I do feel sorry for the fact that he feels nothing emotionally.
I wish he could feel the pain, to feel my hate, my rage.
“Can he speak?” I ask because he hasn’t said a word since we got here.
But it’s not Dr. Mercer who gets to answer me. “Yes. He can speak,” it’s Ezekiel who answers. The voice is still the same, as smug as ever. “Hello, Brynn.”
For a second, I freeze like I’m strapped to that chair again, and he has all the power over me. But then I look around me and realize the tables have turned. He is strapped this time, at least what’s left of him. And I have power over him.
I don’t back off. I just step closer until I’m standing directly before the man who haunts my dreams. His eyes are the only part of him that seems unchanged. Even mutilated beyond recognition, trapped now in his personal living hell, his expression remains blank.
“You remember me,” I say. I’m not sure victim-number-what I was. Judging by all the shit that went down at the asylum, I have no idea how many people he tortured.
He doesn’t answer, just assesses me from head to toe, trying to make me feel more insignificant than I am, even from this position.
Somehow, in a deep part of me, he manages.
The man has no fucking eyelids, no limbs, no nothing, and somehow he manages to inflict more damage on me than I indirectly just did on him.
Maybe the doctor is right, and he really is a sociopath. I just keep staring at him, waiting to see how it could be possible that I still suffered more than he does now.
At one point, Ares comes closer to me, the heat of his body emanating with comfort as he stops right when my back meets his chest. “Are you okay? Do you want us to go?” he asks, wrapping a protective arm around my waist.
“I’m fine,” I answer, looking at Ezekiel, who continues to defy all of us. But the steady beep of his heart monitor accelerates with each second, numbers flash red as his blood pressure spikes, and his eyes, previously empty, now burn with unstable emotion.
Hatred.
“Hmm,” I hear Ares behind me, humming almost a laugh. Then he draws me closer, and his lips find my neck.
The machines go crazy as Ezekiel’s jaw squares, grinding his teeth.
For the first time, I look at him with the same clinical detachment he applied to me for all those years.
I smile, amused, remembering how he kept telling me I’m his. How obsessed he was with me. How possessive and the things he did to me every time he thought someone touched me. He considers me his property. But I was never his. In my whole lifetime, I have truly belonged to only one man. One god.
“I was never his,” I repeat out loud, knowing that he marked me, that he changed me. He broke pieces of me that can never be put back together, but he never owned me.
“No.” Ares’ voice drops lower, “You weren’t his. You’re mine.” He whirls me around, capturing my lips in a hungry kiss, claiming me, taking everything he wants. I don’t fight him. I don’t battle him for dominance. I just let him. I let him take me completely.
The monitors continue their frantic beeping as Ezekiel’s heartbeat accelerates further. But I don’t even look at him anymore.
“How funny that the only emotion he still feels is hatred when I touch you. Everything else—fear, pain—has burned out of him. But this…” His tongue traces my lips like he’s tasting me.
“This is what really kills him,” he says with a sick satisfaction I know he wants to exploit.
Because I want that too. Because the greatest torture I could inflict on him isn’t physical pain or mutilation, but forcing him to watch me be touched by another man.
The woman he broke, willingly submitting to another monster’s touch.
The knowledge is a match struck in darkness, igniting something vengeful deep inside of me. I look at Ares, pressing my body against his in an insanity that overrides logic but feels like honey on a broken soul.
Ares looks at me, understanding what I’m asking, but not really believing I’m really asking it. That maybe I am as twisted as he is. The perfect match for the God of War.
The monitors spike again, they’re beeping frantically, in total opposition to the steady rhythm I’ve heard as we entered the room.
“Doctor,” Ares says, his voice too calm, “You’re dismissed.”
The doctor hesitates, looking at us. “Sir, the subject’s vitals are dangerously high. He must be monitored.”
“Out,” one word spoken so softly, yet carrying such a command that the doctor immediately grabs his things and almost runs out of the room.
“You’re just as fucked up as I am,” Ares whispers, his lips curving into a smile as he kisses me.
“Is this gonna be a problem between us?” I ask, tracing my hand against the bulge in his pants that’s already hard.
“Only if you plan on stopping,” he bites my lip hard enough to draw blood, and I bite him back. The taste so unique, so decadent, yet so perfect. Us.
His tongue sweeps into my mouth, demanding response, and I give it willingly, my fingers digging into his shoulders, asking. No—begging—for more.
Before I know it, we’re moving into the corner of the room where a silvery table seems to be waiting for us. A few medical utensils are there, but Ares clears the space with a swipe of his hand, and with the next move, I’m on top of it, his hips finding room between my thighs.