Page 35 of Decimation

I hurry away, feeling like my mind is reeling. The corridor stretches and warps, and my footsteps are too loud, the slaps of wet skin on stone that sound like a death march. I press my hand over my mouth, and it comes away red from my bitten tongue. I stare at the blood as if it might spell out a truth I can still reject. Only, it doesn’t.

I’ve been so naive, so fucking blind.

Ezekiel doesn’t love me. He doesn’t even see me as special.

I’m just a pawn in his game, a disposable piece to surrender and discard, just like every other person on this earth. Fourth attempt. Cass was a bitch. I will die for him, just like my sister did before me, and he will not even remember the colour of my eyes.

As I reach my room, the realization crashes over me like a wave. My mind doesn’t just fracture, it severs into so many pieces I can’t hold back the rage that explodes there. The room is a shrine of my obedience; the perfectly made bed where I let him do unspeakable things, the dresser where I laid out the clothing he chose, the mirror where I practised the smile he liked. I want all of it to fucking bleed.

A scream, more primal than anything I’ve felt before erupts from inside and suddenly I’m lashing out, smashing everything in sight with my bare hands.

My body moves without permission, a marionette whose strings have finally snapped and I am both the violence and the victim, watching myself destroy the only world I have left.

The mirror shatters.

The furniture splinters, and I don’t stop.

I can’t fucking stop.

This rage inside me is all consuming.

I slam my fists into the wall until the plaster cracks and my knuckles bloom open, white bone glistening through the gore. I rake my nails down the wooden door and feel splinters bury themselves in deep, hot delicious slivers of agony that I welcome because at least this pain is mine, at least this hurt is something I chose for me.

I can feel my skin tearing, I can feel as my flesh literally rips apart and my blood starts to stream out, pooling on the floor in dark, obscene slicks. A shard of the mirror catches the light and I see my own reflection in fragments, my mouth stretched wide in a silent howl, my eyes two wet voids, my frizzy out of control hair half-matted now with sweat and blood.

I look like a thing already dead, a ghost that doesn’t know it’s been buried.

My fingers tighten around the broken shard as I pick it up and before I can think not to I’m slashing, cutting, slicing my skin up, carving myself anew. Carving the pieces of him out of me, cutting out where he branded my skin with his runes, his sweet nothings, and his fucking lies.

My blood streams down my arms, down my chest, and it feels like a baptism, that all my sins are here, pouring out of me and when it is done I will be reborn, I will be free.

I don’t understand why I’m not enough.

I’ve done everything he’s ever asked of me. I let him carve runes into my inner flesh with a razor while he whispered that pain was prayer, let him press my face into the mattress while he told me I was beloved, I was chosen, I was his.

I let him use my body as an altar, and I mistook his desecration for worship.

I’ve been obedient, submissive, perfect. I let him fuck me, let him use my body in whatever depraved ways he can think of, all under the guise that it is ‘what our Prophet enjoys’. I swallowed his seed and called it communion, I arched my back for his friends and called it duty. I smiled when he bruised me and called it favour. I am the hollowed-out cathedral of his appetites, and I called it a heaven when really it was the very pits of hell.

What more can he want from me?

What more do I have to give, do I have to sacrifice?

My sister’s body is probably rotting in some unmarked grave, and he talks about her like she was a faulty instrument. I know I will be next. I will be a name he says with casual disdain to the next girl he breaks. The thought detonates behind my eyes, white-hot and total and my scream pitches higher, a frequency that feels like it is stripping the lining from my throat.

The door bursts open and a servant rushes in, trying to calm me, a girl with terrified eyes and hands that flutter like wounded birds. She says something, maybe my name but it doesn’t reach me, nothing can reach me in the state I am in.

I scream out, I curse, snarling at her as if she is suddenly the focus of all my rage, this girl who has seen me kneel and suck more cocks than I can count. My bloody fingers close on her wrist, and she shrieks as I dig in, and the part of me that would have recoiled from causing pain is buried so far beneath the ruin I can’t find it.

Ezekiel and Isaac appear in the doorway, their faces clearly confused by my sudden change in behaviour. That confusion is the final wound. He doesn’t even understand what he has done, that his words could unmake me, because he never thought of me as someone who could be unmade.

Afterall I was a tool, and tools don’t fucking feel, do they?

When I see Ezekiel, his aura is that same swirling mass of red and gold, frightening me but also enraging me more. I used to think those colours meant passion, meant destiny. Now I see them for what they are; fire and slaughter, a butcher’s glow. That feeling consumes me, a hate so pure it is almost sexual, a heat that coats my thighs and makes me want to tear the whole world open.

I throw myself at him, screaming, clawing, wanting to rip his face off, wanting to hurt him as much as he has hurt me. My body is a weapon I finally understand, every wound he ever gave me converted into fuel.

“Why aren’t I enough? Why don’t you love me?”