Page 156 of Decimation

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.

I come with a scream that tears itself from somewhere deep in my chest. My body arches off the stone, my wrists straining against the ropes, my vision going white. Not the white of the drug, but the white of my own synaesthesia, the colour of pure, unfiltered ecstasy.

The orgasm rolls through me in waves, each one stronger than the last, and I feel the women around me reaching their own peaks, their cries joining mine in a chorus of abandon.

For a long moment, there is nothing but pleasure.

Nothing but the pulse of blood in my ears, the shudder of my own body, and the colours that swirl and dance behind my closed eyes.

And then, slowly, the world begins to return.

The women withdraw, their hands and mouths leaving my body, and I feel the absence like a wound. I am trembling, my skin slick with sweat, my breaths coming in ragged gasps. The ropes have left marks on my wrists, red and angry, and I can feel the ache between my thighs, the tender soreness of overstimulation.

Ezekiel steps closer. He looks down at me, and his smile is the smile of a man who has seen everything he wanted to see.

“The first rite is complete,” he says, and his voice is thick with satisfaction. “You have been anointed, Leandra. You have been opened. Now you are ready for what comes next.”

I want to ask him what he means. I want to demand answers, to scream at him. To tell him that Lazarus will kill him for this, that I will kill him myself, but the drug is still in my veins, and the words will not come. All I can do is lie there, bound and trembling as the women gather around me once more.

One of them leans down, her veiled face inches from mine. Through the sheer fabric, I can see her eyes, dark and glittering, pupils still blown wide. She reaches up and pulls the veil away, and I find myself staring at a face I almost recognize. Young. Beautiful. Features that remind me of someone I used to know, someone I used to be.

“You are one of us now,” she whispers, and her voice is like honey, sweet and cloying. “The Prophet has chosen you. The Prophet has blessed you. Soon, you will understand. Soon, you will be grateful.”

Grateful.

The word echoes in my mind, bouncing off the walls of my skull like a stone dropped into a well. Grateful for what? For being drugged, stripped, and violated while a madman watched? For being turned into a puppet, a plaything, a sacrifice?

But even as the rage builds inside me, I feel something else stirring beneath it. Something darker. Something that the drug has awakened and that will not be put back to sleep.