Page 76 of Decimation

Konstantine takes a slow sip of his drink, savouring it. “Her eyes were wrong.”

There it is. The words hang in the air, simple and monstrous. He says it like he’s commenting on a misplaced piece of furniture. Wrong. As if her eyes were a defect to be sanded away, a blemish to be excised.

“Ines had blue eyes,” he continues, his tone conversational, almost bored. “Hers were brown. I had them corrected.”

Corrected. I look at the bandages, clean and dry, and I know. I know with a sick, visceral certainty that there is nothing left beneath that gauze but empty sockets. He didn’t just damage her eyes, he removed them. He gouged them out with the same casual simplicity he applies to everything.

Leandra lets out another sob, a low, animal moan of pain. Her fingers scrabble at the bandages, and I see her nails are broken, the beds raw and bleeding.

“She’s in pain,” I say. My voice is still steady, but I can feel the cracks forming. “She needs something. Painkillers. Morphine. Now.”

Konstantine glances at her, then back at me. His lip curls. “Once she’s more herself, she can have some painkillers. But while she’s still being a little bitch about it all, she’ll get nothing.”

He pushes off the mantle, downs the rest of his drink, and sets the glass on the table with a sharp clink. Then he walks past me, close enough that I can smell the stench on his breath and the copper tang of blood beneath it.

He doesn’t look back. His footsteps echo down the corridor, fading into silence.

I am alone with her.

For a long moment, I don’t move. I stand there, staring at the space where my brother stood, and I let the fury wash over me. It’s a tidal wave, a flood of molten rage that burns away every carefully constructed wall I’ve built over the years. I think about following him. I think about wrapping my hands around his throat and squeezing and squeezing until the light leaves his eyes. I think about doing to him what he did to her, and worse. So much fucking worse.

But that’s not what she needs right now. My desperate need for violence won’t help her in this moment.

I turn back to Leandra. She’s still trembling, still whimpering, her body curled so tightly into itself that she looks like a child. A broken, bleeding child on a cold marble floor. I’ve seen violence. I’ve committed violence. But this, this is something else. This is the deliberate, methodical destruction of a human being for no reason other than that she didn’t fit his precious fucking mould. She wasn’t Ines enough.

I move slowly, deliberately, lowering myself to the floor beside her. The marble is cold under my knees. I sit down, my back against the overturned table, and I reach out. My hand hovers over her shoulder for a moment, and I can feel the heat radiating off her skin, the fine tremors that wrack her frame.

“Leandra,” I say, and my voice is different now. Softer. Something I didn’t know I still had in me.

She flinches. A violent, full-body recoil, and she lets out a choked sob. Her breath hitches, and she starts to scramble away, her hands slipping on the floor.

“No, no, no, please, don’t touch me, don’t…”

“I’m not going to hurt you.” I keep my voice low, steady. “It’s Lazarus. I’m not him. I’m not going to hurt you.”

She doesn’t believe me. Why would she? She’s been carved open by a monster, and I share his blood. I share his face, more or less. But I don’t move. I don’t grab her. I just sit there, my hand still extended, palm up, an offering.

Minutes pass. Her breathing slows, just a fraction. The trembling doesn’t stop but the wild, animal panic begins to ebb. She’s clearly exhausted. She’s in agony and somewhere beneath all that pain, she’s still fighting. I can feel it. A tiny, flickering ember of defiance that Konstantine hasn’t managed to snuff out.

That ember is what decides it for me.

I look at her, at the bandages, the way her fingers keep twitching toward her face as if she can’t quite believe her eyes are gone, and I know with a clarity that cuts through the fury like a blade that I am not leaving her here.

I am not leaving her to become another dead thing for him to pick over.

I’m not leaving her to become another ghost in this fucking mausoleum.

The world is a black, muffled thing, bandages tight over my eyes, a thick fog in my head.

There is vibration beneath me, a low hum that rattles my bones, and the smell of leather and something sharp, chemical.

A car. I am in a car.

Panic claws up my throat. I try to move my arms but they are heavy, uncoordinated. Drugged. The word slithers through the murk of my mind. He drugged me. Konstantine.

Where is he taking me? What new horror waits?

I try to speak, but my tongue is useless. A small, pathetic sound escapes me, and I hate it. I hate how weak I am now, how weak he made me.