Page 72 of Decimation

I will not,

I will not.

Konstantine sighs. It’s a disappointed sound, like the sound of a teacher whose favourite student has let him down. He sets the bowl aside, and for a moment I think I’ve won, he’s going to give up, he’s going to realize this is madness, he’s going to…

His hand clamps down on my jaw, fingers pressing into the hinges until pain blooms white-hot and my mouth is forced open by the sheer brutal pressure.

I choke, I gag, I try to bite him but his grip is implacable. Then his other hand is there, fingers coated in bone paste, and he’s pushing the gritty mixture into my mouth, onto my tongue, against the back of my throat.

The taste is indescribable.

It’s like licking a tombstone, like swallowing centuries of death.

The powder is gritty and dry, and it sucks all the moisture from my mouth. I’m choking, I’m gagging but he’s holding my jaw shut now, clamping my lips together, forcing me to swallow.

I convulse, my body trying to reject what he’s forced into me, but somehow the paste slides down my throat. It’s inside me now, it’s part of me, and I am sobbing. I am weeping beneath the mask of Ines’s dead face.

He releases my jaw and steps back, surveying his work with the critical eye of an artist. The bowl is still there, still half-full of ground bone, and I know with a sick certainty that he’s going to make me swallow more, that this ritual is only beginning.

He picks up the femur, holding it in both hands like a sacred object, like a relic. Like something precious, holy, and terrible beyond words.

“The final part is the most important,” he says, and his voice has gone soft, gentle, has become the voice of a lover. “The union of flesh, the joining of bodies. The sacred marriage that will bind your soul to hers forever. This is how it was meant to be, my love. This is how I bring you back.”

I understand what he’s going to do a split second before he does it.

“No,” I whisper. “No, no, no, please. God, no, Konstantine, please. I’ll be her, I promise. I’ll be anyone you want, just please don’t, please…”

I can feel the cold stone against my bare skin, the cold terror flooding through my veins and the tears streaming down my cheeks, pooling beneath the mask of dead flesh that covers my face.

I thrash against the bindings. I twist, buck and scream but the straps hold tight, and the drugs are still in my system, turning my muscles to water, turning my resistance to nothing.

His hand presses down on my stomach, holding me in place, and I feel the jagged end of the bone press against my inner thigh.

“This will fix you,” he murmurs. “This will make you whole. This will bring her back to me.”

He forces the thing into me, forces it in with such brutality I feel myself rip.

I scream as it enters me. I can feel every ridge, every splinter, every irregular surface of the broken bone as he pushes it deeper and deeper.

It’s too big, too rough, too wrong, and my body clenches against the invasion, trying to force it out but he only pushes harder. He only drives it deeper, and I am being split open, I am being hollowed out, I am being destroyed.

“Konstantine,” I sob, “please, please, it hurts, please stop, I’m begging you, please…”

“Shh,” he says, and his voice is so gentle, so full of love. The colours around him are black now, completely black, an absence of light that consumes everything it touches. “Shh, my darling. The pain is sacred. The pain is the doorway. Let it open you, let it prepare you. Let it make you ready for her.”

He’s fucking me with her bone. Oh god.

I want to die. I want to die now and just end this.

The thought cuts through the haze of pain and horror with terrible clarity. He is fucking me with the femur of his dead wife, and he is chanting. He is weeping with joy, and I am being unmade. I am being erased, I am being turned into a vessel for a ghost.

And the worst part, the part that makes me want to vomit, the part that makes me want to tear off my own skin and escape this body that has never truly been my own, the worst part is what my body does in response.

I have spent so long being moulded into something that responds to sexual touch whether I want it to or not. Ezekiel and Isaac saw to that. They broke me and rebuilt me and broke me again, and now my body doesn’t know the difference between violation and pleasure, doesn’t know how to distinguish between pain and ecstasy, doesn’t belong to me anymore.

I feel myself getting wet, can feel my body heating in a way that is horrific, shameful, and disgusting.

The horror of it is almost worse than the bone inside me. I am being violated with the remains of a dead woman, and my traitorous body is responding, lubricating . Preparing itself for more, more, more.