Page 41 of Decimation

“They will look,” she says, and her colours hold, truth, resolve, and a thin vein of terror like a crack in a dam. “That’s why we’ll be careful. No contact. No real names. No…” She pauses, and her aura flickers silver, caution, the glint of a knife in the dark. “There are rules. I’ll teach you. But the first rule, the only rule that matters; trust no one but each other. Ever. Do you understand?”

I doubt I could trust anyone else; trust is a muscle that has atrophied in me, along with hope, along with the belief that touch can be anything but a prelude to pain.

“Leandra.” Her voice is quiet, a hand reaching through the dark. Her aura softens into warm, protective yellows, the colour of a candle in a tomb. “I need you to trust me only. Can you do that?”

I lift my head from the cold glass, the imprint of my forehead a ghost on the window.

She does not look at me, her eyes are on the road, on the future we are hurtling toward but her hand leaves the gearshift and comes to rest on my knee. The touch is light, brief, a butterfly landing on a bruise. It is not a gesture I know from her; it is a new language, one she has learned in the same secret school where she learned to drive, to lie, to plan an escape from the man she married. Her fingers are warm, and I flinch. Not from her, but from the memory of other hands, other weights, other intimacies that were violations dressed in love.

“Yes,” I say, and the word is a surrender and a vow. “I trust you.”

It feels like the most terrifying thing I have ever said.

Two Years Later

Ilie here, staring at the same ceiling, the cracks in the plaster like veins, the shadows pooling thick as bruises under the damned flickering lightbulb.

My wrists have grown used to their bindings, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still weep where the fibres burrow in.

My body aches from what must be an eternity of stillness, every joint a rusted hinge, every muscle atrophied into something soft and utterly useless.

Between my thighs, the memory of her lingers like a disease. A dull, humid throb where she last touched me, where she always touches me, coaxing reactions my mind refuses but my traitor nerves surrender anyway.

Ines hasn’t been here in a while. She’s been busy, I suppose. Busy ruling the world, busy ruining my brother, busy ruining me. She would come with her cold hands and her clinical murmur, telling me how beautiful I looked when I broke, how sweet my humiliation tasted on her tongue. She’d press her mouth to my ear and whisper what Konstantine was doing behind the glass, how he was watching, how he was touching himself, how my degradation was the only thing that still made him hard. The drugs make everything hazy, turn my limbs to lead and my thoughts to syrup, but they never dull the shame.

That has stayed sharp.

That has stayed bright as a razor.

I can’t move, can’t fight, can’t even think clearly, but I can feel the rage simmering beneath the surface like a fire that refuses to be extinguished. It lives in the hollow of my chest, feeding on the slick sounds of her visits, the ghost of her fingers inside me, the way my body would arch and weep for her even as my mind screamed.

I hate her.

I hate the way she makes me need her, the way she turns my own flesh into a traitor.

And I hate him. I hate my brother for watching, for letting her, for loving my ruin more than he ever loved me.

I hate this room, this bed, this cursed existence they’ve made of me, a living doll leaking on soiled sheets with a wound that never gets to close.

Shouting suddenly echoes beyond the door. Voices raised and frantic, a jagged music that cuts through the fog. I strain to listen but the words are muffled, distorted, or perhaps that’s just the drugs lingering in my system, wrapping everything in cotton and dread.

Something’s wrong. Something’s happening.

My pulse quickens in a sick, hopeful rhythm.

The door bursts open, and Konstantine stumbles in. I haven’t seen him in months, not like this, not in the flesh. He likes to watch now, likes to stand behind the glass where I cannot see him while his wife uses me. He likes to hear the wet, helpless noises she pulls from my throat, likes to witness the exact moment my eyes go empty. I know this because Ines told me, because she’d narrate his pleasure into my skin like a bedtime story.

I stare at him, unsure which of us is the ghost in this situation. He’s a mess; blood splattered across his face in a fine, arterial mist, his clothes torn, his eyes wild and wet. He looks like a man possessed, like a beast cornered and ready to lash out. He smells of copper and terror, and something else, something acrid and intimate, the sweat of a man who has just watched his world end.

“She’s dead,” he screams, his voice cracking like a boy’s. “She’s fucking dead!”

My mind is sluggish, trying to process his words.

Who’s dead? Does it matter? Do I even care? The question drifts through me like smoke, and for a long, suspended moment, I feel nothing. Just a hollow emptiness, a void where my emotions should be. And then it hits me; relief. Sweet, intoxicating relief, rising from my gut like a prayer.

It has to be her. It has to be. She’s gone. The woman who turned my body into a crime scene, who made my brother a voyeur to my unmaking, who licked the tears from my cheeks and called them gratitude, she’s finally gone.

I imagine her cooling on some floor, her clever hands still, her mouth forever shut, and the thought is almost orgasmic.