Page 63 of Decimation

The intimacy of it makes my body respond in ways my mind is screaming against.

“You’re a whore if I say you are one.”

My knee comes up and I aim for where it’ll hurt most, where I’ve been taught to aim, where survival instincts override everything else, but he catches it. His fingers dig into my flesh, and the pain is sharp, is specific, is a message my body understands better than words.

I submit.

I hate that I submit, but my body knows when it’s beaten, knows when resistance means more pain, knows the mathematics of survival.

His hand moves to my waist and there’s something in the way he touches me, something that isn’t just possession, isn’t just violence, something that feels almost like recognition. A wave of heat spreads from where his palm rests, and I don’t understand it. I don’t want it. But my body leans into it anyway, because my body was trained long before he ever found me, trained to need touch even when touch means pain, trained to want even when wanting means my soul dying a little more inside.

“You have a better body than her.”

The words land like a slap. He’s comparing me to a dead woman. He’s inside her body while he’s touching mine. I try to twist out of his grasp, but I can’t move, I can only glare, only pour all my hatred into my eyes while the colours around him keep swirling, keep seducing, keep making my chest tight with something that feels like desire and tastes like self-destruction.

His hand moves up, skimming my side. Deliberately, deliberately not touching my breast, and the avoidance is more erotic than contact would be.

He traces my collarbone like he’s reading a map of my suffering.

He traces my jawline like he’s memorizing the architecture of my despair.

Then his thumb brushes against my lips, and I feel it everywhere; I feel it in places he hasn’t touched, feel it in the ache between my thighs that isn’t just from what he did to me while I was unconscious.

“Please…”

One more time. One more attempt.

But even as I say it, I don’t know what I’m asking for. Please stop? Please continue? Please let me go? Please hold me tighter? The colours around him are so beautiful. They’re so beautiful, and he’s a monster. I don’t know which part of me is responding anymore.

His eyes narrow. Something flickers across his face; an internal war, a battle I can almost see. Like he wants to do something, say something, be something other than what he is, but then the mask comes down. The expression hardens to stone and I watch the man disappear behind the monster, watch the colours dim just slightly. I watch my strange, unwanted attraction curdle into something closer to fear.

He steps back.

I crumple to the floor at his feet, and the position is familiar, is muscle memory, is every man who ever made me kneel. I hate how natural it feels. I hate how my body knows this posture, knows the angle of submission, knows the way to hold itself to minimize damage.

“Be Ines.”

“But I’m not her.” The words are a hiss, a defiance, the only thing I have left.

“If you want to survive,” he says, and his voice is final, absolute, the closing of a door I cannot open, “then you will be.”

I stay on the floor. The colours around him pulse one last time; beautiful, terrible, completely irresistible, and I feel the war inside me rage on.

My body wants. My mind rejects.

And somewhere in the space between those two truths, I am losing myself entirely.

The words echo, a splinter working deeper into my mind with every repetition. If you want to survive then you will be. The blue of his truth is still burned onto the back of my eyelids, a colour so pure it feels like an actual violation.

He means it. He means all of it.

And that certainty is more terrifying than any threat.

I press my back against the cold wall, the stone biting through the thin shift he’s dressed me in. Dressed me. Like a doll. Like her. My skin crawls at the memory of his hands, clinical and reverent all at once, adjusting the neckline, smoothing the fabric over my hips as if I am an altar and he is preparing a sacrifice. But the ghost of his touch lingers like a chill that has nothing to do with the temperature of the room.

My stomach cramps again, a sharp reminder that the food, the impossible, perfect food is real even if this nightmare can’t be. I look at the platter, the figs split open so temptingly, the prosciutto draped in delicate, obscene folds. I can practically taste the salt and cream of the goat cheese, and I hate myself for the moan that escapes me when I taste it. I hate the way my body betrays me with pleasure while my mind screams trap, trap, trap.

How does he know? The question circles, a vulture over carrion. Not just my favourites, but the specific ones. These aren’t just foods, they are memories. They are the architecture of a life he has no right to excavate.