Chapter 24 Azrael
Azrael
Her mind was fractured in a way I had anticipated but didn’t think I would witness for quite some time.
She was more willing than I expected, especially at the mention of pretending.
Which was good because if she still had an imagination, she still felt things.
It was something I could work with. A little red flame I could fan, and perhaps that also meant that her mind was capable of creation, just like mine.
The little mouse had had her nepotism in her household with her twin holding all the glory until the mysterious death of she and her mother a year before she met my softest brother.
Her stepbrother beat the life out of her for years, and the rumors were he sexually assaulted her too, but those were not confirmed.
The rose, well, she was simply unloved. Burdened with being born simply to benefit her mother’s life, only for that mother to send her a man to pose as a half-brother to form a sexual relationship with her in an attempt to destroy her from the inside out.
But my slave? If contests for tragedy were a thing of this world, she would surely win it.
How was it that we all managed to find such broken tragedies? It was as if our own psychosis called to them in a way the universe couldn’t ignore as Greyson would say.
My lip curled. I didn’t believe in the things he did. I thought it was weak, the way he thought, but he did bring something important to our family.
I just hadn’t figured out what that important thing was yet.
I admired the little sinner as her head rested in the antlers of my cane almost perfectly, her fingers digging into her thighs ever so slightly. Just enough to turn the very tips white. She liked the talk of blood and that was very dangerous indeed.
Could I use her as something more than just a cache of information? Perhaps a weapon. If she still felt things, yet wasn’t allowed to show them, what could that do to a person?
Perhaps turn them into something just like me.
After another moment of study, I released her chin and stood, watching as she returned to her normal state of being, although the exhaustion was weighing on her motions.
Straight spine, relaxed arms, knees spread, hair falling over her shoulder softly, her chin down.
There were rats in her hair, tangles, Thomas couldn’t be bothered with brushing them all out. Perhaps I could make a complaint to his father that my property had been delivered less than perfect.
But would that get her another lashing?
My eyes lowered to the lashings on her chest. My teeth ground together, my hands tightening as the scars on my own back burned with a phantom pain.
2011
They had put me in a leather mask lined in bars across my mouth because they were afraid of my teeth.
They had put me in a straightjacket, pinning my arms to my ribs so tightly that I couldn’t feel my fingers.
They weren’t trying to change me, they were trying to shift my belief system. Force me to obey, to conform to their precious ideology. Two weeks here, and I already had them terrified.
She led me down a dark, concrete hall, the floors damp, my bare feet slapping with each step. When I tried to slow down, tried to force them to quiet, she shoved me forward, earning a snarl.
I would learn. I always learned.
We came up to the dark purple door, the paint old and chipping around the edges, and she pushed me inside.
I knew what this room was, I had already been here once before, and I knew I would come again. They couldn’t handle what I had to say. My tongue had always been a viper, but this time, those on the other hand couldn’t handle the truths I spat.
One of the orderly’s with her grabbed me by my neck and forced me to my knees in the center of the room.
It looked like a cave in here. Jagged walls, dirt floors.
Although they had modified it with different sized shackles hanging from the walls.
They wouldn’t chain me up though, for they had other ideas.
The orderly released my neck and walked over to the far side of the room, picking up a wood contraption and carrying it over.
He placed it in the bolts in the ground, locking it in just in front of me before grabbing the hair on my head and forcing me down.
My chin hit the smooth wood, my teeth grinding as he grabbed the other piece that was attached by hinges and swung it over, locking my head in place.
“I understand what you do here now,” I said through my teeth as they untethered the leather they had placed over the hole in the back of my straightjacket. It had been modified in such a way that kept my hands pinned tightly to my ribs but opened up the entire back when they needed it at will.
“Oh?” she asked, standing directly behind me.
I felt the cool air touch the still raw skin on my back. “You don’t fix people. You force them to see the world through your eyes. Live with your ideology, your beliefs.”
She laughed this cruel, deep laugh. “And I suppose your views are better.”
“My views have substance.”
“Hmm,” she hummed, “so do mine.”
I snarled but didn’t move. I wasn’t going to fight. Fighting against the torture was something we learned not to do. You wait, you watch, you endure, you study. Fighting only worsened the torture and got you no information in return. “Your god does not have substance.”
“My god? You say that as if he’s not the God.”
I stared at that jagged wall, forcing my body not to tense preemptively.
“I’ve heard the speeches before, Elise. I’ve read the books, all of them.
You cannot pick and choose which parts of which religion you want to follow.
The way you puzzle together your own religion and tell me to believe is telling me that you should be the one in this position. ”
“You don’t believe in anything, Azrael, that’s what got you here. Thou shalt not murder.”
So we were choosing the Christian god today. “‘He said unto them, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.’’’ If you want to punish me for my sins, shouldn’t we first punish you.”
“Oh,” she laughed, “preachers don’t get punished, sweetie. We are of godly descent. Now, are you ready to obey?”
Here we go. “Never.”
“Very well,” she hummed.
I heard her right foot slide back. I heard the air shift when she lifted her right hand, and that’s when I braced my back for the whip as it came down, slicing my skin cleanly and with each strike, she yelled louder and louder. “Obey! Obey! OBEY!”
Present Day
I felt that familiar dark rage burn in my soul. I closed my eyes and shook my head before opening them again, letting the rage simmer as it had for just over a decade now.
Perhaps next week I would teach her how to brush her own hair.
I sat in my chair and leaned back, studying the way her dark lashes touched her cheekbones. Porcelain skin. She was kept inside her entire life. The sun had barely gotten the chance to see her in that house laced in black-out curtains and padlocks.
A queen that had been locked away by the evil of a world labeled Wonderland, filled with promises of fairytales and hope.
I wondered how far she would have to be pushed in order to realize how false the ‘Good Book’ truly was.
I wondered how much I would have to teach her in order to make her see my world.
I angled my chin. A game wasn’t a game if we didn’t shift the story from time to time.
“The pirates of the Jolly Roger have locked you away,” I ho-hummed, watching her still at the sound of a new tale.
New to her. “If it’s a game you wish to play, then we must play it right.
Wendy doesn’t just fight, does she? No, she bides her time and so must we all.
The world is madness, little sinner, and we must find the ticking clock lost deep within the crocodile before the Jabberwock with a hook for a hand comes to steal you away.
” It was easy. I had lived within the madness of my own mind my entire life.
Seeing things they never could. Hearing things they were too perfect to hear.
I wasn’t sure how long this girl would last in my world, but perhaps, just for a breath, I wouldn’t be so alone within it.
She tapped a finger, her excitement clear in the way she did it.
Yes, she was strong. She had a darkness deep within her just waiting to bloom, but all this time the spades had been painting the roses white when they should have been painted red.
I had no problem fixing what they had shattered. No problem revealing to this world the bloodlust hidden within the silence they tried to drown her in.
I crossed one leg over the other. “We’ll need to get you your very own staff,” I told her. “A crown too. One made of silver and rubies.”
Her thighs shifted, drawing my attention down. She quickly adjusted herself and smoothed out her dress before dropping her chin to her chest and waiting.
A rule engrained into her soul. Don’t move unless told to move.
But while I wanted that rule to be my own, I liked seeing the way she couldn’t control herself.
The way her body shook with excitement at the same things mine did.
Perhaps it was the exhaustion causing her well-trained body to betray her, or perhaps nobody had ever suggested to her the things that truly made her dead heart scream.
“Move if you have to move, little sinner. You’re allowed to pull your own strings in this room.” I was curious to see what drove her. What made her shift. What was her favorite part of the game? What scratched that itch in her head she didn’t know she had?
She went still. Very still. Impossibly still. A kind of still that could only be beat and groomed into a child long before they reached the age of 19.
I allowed it. I allowed her to think through it, to process this information. Years of training wouldn’t break in a day, but years of her feeling my eyes on her might aide in the fracture too.