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"I adore you as much as the nocturnal vault,
O vase of sadness, most taciturn one,
I love you all the more because you flee from me,
And because you appear, ornament of my nights,
More ironically to multiply the leagues
That separate my arms from the blue infinite.I advance to attack, and I climb to assault,
Like a swarm of maggots after a cadaver,
And I cherish, implacbale and cruel beast,
Even the coldness which makes you more beautiful."
- Charles Baudelaire, 'Fleurs du mal'
“Bună seara, Mr. Winters.”
He hates his relief upon hearing her voice. At least her violence differs from that of her daughters. It seems bizarre to be thankful for having traded one tormentor for one he has experienced less, but at this point of his existence within her walls, even the tiniest change of pace helps him keep ahold of the flitting remains of his sanity, steadily trickling through his fingers.
“How are we feeling today? Is the new menu becoming you well?”
Ethan moves his cracked lips, trying to form pleading words but his dry throat can procure nothing but coarse moans. However, she takes the hint and courtly presses the water bottle (cruelly placed within his vision but out of his reach by the daughters) to his mouth so he may drink. As he fervently empties it, Ethan doesn’t notice the unnatural way with which her other hand is hidden behind her back.
The silken dress smoothly clinging to her form doesn’t only have the color of wine, but is as shiny and soft as if it were liquid. Wrapped around her shoulders is a mink stole, accentuating the palatial collar on her neck made of dozens of pearls and rubies. He never thought he’d ever see a woman like this other than in a magazine. The opulence makes her all the more intimidating.
She is ravishingly beautiful and Ethan hates her all the more for it. Such injustice, for the ugliness of her soul not to be readable on her face.
“I’ve sought you out to extend you a truly generous offer.” She flashes her ivory white teeth at him, a masterpiece of false kindness framed by devil red lips.
Ethan screams and rattles at the shackles of his bed when she places a large flask on the nightstand, Rose’s severed head floating, bobbing to the surface in it like a dead goldfish.
“Fear not,” she says pacifyingly. “Your daughter is alive.”
“I’ll kill you! I’m going to fucking kill you!” his threats are ridiculed by his bound state, as well as the tears in his eyes. He failed her. He should be dead, not her. Not his Rose.
Lady Dimitrescu rolls her eyes in minor annoyance, like a patient mother would, dealing with a petulant child throwing a tantrum. “Please, I have no time for your hysterics.”
“You’re dead! You’re fucking dead, you fucking monster! You witch! I’ll kill you all!”
That’s the moment her ever silencing palm hits his face. “Get ahold of yourself, you sorry little excuse for a man.”
He almost bites off his tongue at the impact. The perverse thought enters his mind that at least he would’ve had something to eat then.
“Like I said, your child is fine. She has merely been disassembled. Once I have collected her other parts and put her back together, she’ll be right as rain.”
“Go to hell!”
“Lovely. Here I come, telling you how I am going to save your daughter and yet you have nothing but contempt for me, as always.”
She sits down at the foot of his bed and between his forcibly spread legs, his limp cock touching her thinly clad backside. Revolting.
“Sadly, you are not the only person I know with a terrible attitude. As much as I am in her debt, I fear Mother Miranda is rather ungrateful of everything I have done for her,” she laments, fingers leisurely running up and down the goose bumps on his shin.
“Me and my daughters aren’t expendable. However, it is quite clear we have ceased being useful to her, and thus she has ceased being useful to me in turn. I have no intention of being her cannon fodder once the BSAA has sent reinforcements, nor do I intend to starve after she so carelessly turned a blind eye to Heisenberg’s lycans slaughtering my livestock. She is a woman mad, so I am going to save the village – or what’s left of it – and eliminate her, much to your benefit, Ethan.
I have already formed a pact with Heisenberg promising me his half of Rose once we have disposed of Mother Miranda. It should not prove to be much of a challenge to retrieve her other parts from the rest of my ‘siblings’; they can easily be persuaded or beaten into submission. So now you may rest assured – your plight is being taken care of by me.”
“Where’s the fucking catch.”
“How delightful, you are sharper than I assumed,” she beams at him. “Miranda might have overlooked them, but during your stay here you have exhibited some rather curious characteristics, which I intend to investigate. If you behave, if you consent to my experiments, I shall return your daughter to you.”
“Why the fuck would I trust you.”
You took everything from me. The thought still enters his mind, despite its utter wrongness. Chris and Mother Miranda took everything, yet the hate in his heart burns brighter for the Lady and her daughters.
“Because you don’t have a choice. I’m merely offering you a reward for your cooperation. I can take what I want by force.”
“You just want Rose for yourself!”
“And you can be a father to her,” she playfully pinches his thigh, draws blood. He’s too devastated to feel pain, looking at his daughter’s glassy eyes. “Or do you in all seriousness think the man who killed your wife has any better intentions than Mother Miranda? Would you rather have her taken away from you by the BSAA or be reunited as a family with her under my care?”
And then they blink. Rose blinks.
“Cooperate with me and you shall be recomposed. Alas, if you struggle, you will receive no reward and much pain. I don’t care either way.”
Her little mouth opens, perhaps calling out to him or simply trying to scream.
Ethan has no voice which would allow him to try the same. He’s choking on his own silence.
She’s alive, atrociously alive.
Lady Dimitrescu quickly snatches the flask away, long fingers closing around Rose’s tiny, blinking head.
The first test she ran consisted of nothing but taking a sample of his blood and interrogating him for his medical background. Neither sensing apparent danger nor a chance of escape, he played along.
In turn Lady Dimitrescu granted him some new freedoms.
The freedom not to be tied to the bed. The freedom to walk around his cell. The freedom to wear clothes.
In his mind Ethan knows they are not ‘freedoms’ and yet he catches himself in an obscure moment of thankfulness to her.
He is happy (not happy, but as happy as he’s ever been since everything went to shit) to be able to move his arms and legs again, to walk, to toss and turn in his sleep.
The same goes for wearing clothes again. It feels like a part of him has been restored, giving him an illusionary veil of security between him and these monsters.
There is still the collar, though.
Ethan has been confined to this room for an amount of time he can’t tell, and only today he’s seen the ornate golden mirror twice as big as him. It’s on the wall where the bed is, so of course he never could have seen it before.
For a moment he thinks ‘this must be broken’, for the Ethan he sees looks like a caricature of himself. As if he is gazing into a fun house mirror. Except his body isn’t contorted in any way. The sensation is more bizarre than that.
He had pretended not to notice how his clothes feel too big.
His eyes are bloodshot, his face sunken deeper than a wrecked ship. Ethan lifts his shirt and looks at his body with a morbid curiosity. At the bruises and scars, the little dents where they took a bite out of him, at his preeminent ribs. If he didn’t know better, he’d mistake himself for a fresh corpse.
Even though he got to occasionally eat during his captivity, he has lost a considerable amount of weight. Not just body fat but most importantly the muscles he needs to fight, to run, to survive.
This is bad.
Ethan spends the rest of the day (until the daughters come and serve him something that looks like it’s meant for dogs, then turn off the light and tell him to go to sleep) exploring his cell. It could almost pass for a room in a luxurious hotel, if it were not for the shackles on the bed, the heavy metal door and the complete absence of a window. After long and thorough examination, he’s disappointed to verify that there really is no other way out than through the door.
So he can only escape by getting past the daughters when they come to bring him food or torture him.
During his second examination, she injects him with something. For a day, he is bed-ridden with a terrible fever. The next, he feels much better and can resume with his preparations.
He doesn’t try to escape right away. First, Ethan exercises to the best of his abilities. Push-ups and stretching, running tiny laps around his cell. It’s not much he can do, but it is something.
He is well aware that logically speaking, the best course of action would be to let Lady Dimitrescu proceed with her plan. Her having created all these terrible creatures in the first place, he’d hardly stand a chance against Mother Miranda. But there’s no fucking way in hell he’s going to entrust Rose’s well-being to one of the other monsters either. He has to save her himself.
Rose.
Ethan can’t think about her for too long. If he allowed himself to consider what she must be going through right now because of him, he would go insane.
During his third examination, she injects him with something. For a day, he is bed-ridden with a terrible fever. The next, he feels much better and can resume with his preparations.
Ethan can’t afford to waste time. But even after presumably a week of exercise and one meal per day, he can barely run, let alone defend himself. He can’t imagine his captivity to have been that long. How could his body deteriorate so fast?
Ethan contemplates what would be the greater risk: waiting until he has recovered or losing more time.
Lady Dimitrescu has the Flask (it’s easier to think of it as that. The Flask. Not Rose. Not the Head.) and if what she says is true, Mother Miranda can’t proceed with whatever terrible thing she intends to do to Rose until she has been ‘put back together’. But that also means the Flask will be under Dimitrescu’s care, who also cannot be trusted.
(Rose is alive. This very moment Rose is alive as a severed head. Is she in pain? Is she aware of her situation? The more time Ethan wastes training, the more she is suffering. )
At night, he dreams of Rose. Her resting on his chest, baby carrot fingers curled into his shirt. He sings her a lullaby, off-key and horrible. Mia was always better at that stuff. But Mia is dead. Still, Ethan sings her a song about the man in the moon, so she won’t realize they are both slowly choking to death, so she won’t feel the maggots digging tunnels in their flesh, so she won’t hear the creaking of the coffin.
The fourth time is different.
That she locks the door behind him isn’t out of the ordinary, it couldn’t have struck him as odd, couldn’t have warned him.
Ethan knows it’s too late, that he foolishly miscalculated the situation, the moment his eyes fall upon the large wooden chair with the leather straps fastened to the arm rests and back.
Despite his better judgement, he instinctively rushes forward towards the windows, only to be seized by his collar and dragged to the chair anyway. And like the doll he is in her powerful hands, his body grows slack with defeat. He was stupid. He missed his chance to escape and now he will be tortured again. Or killed.
“It should please you to know negotiations with Donna were successful. I am now in possession of your daughter’s legs,” Lady Dimitrescu utters jovially as she ties the straps around his elbows, ankles and chest.
“If I thank you will you stop?”
“I fear not, little man. Every favor has its price, and I am already doing you a tremendous one just letting you be alive.”
After making sure the straps are tight enough to cut off the blood flow in his wrists and ankles, she sits down at the titanic mahogany desk, jotting down notes amidst a hodgepodge of different scientific devices and flasks, some of which only have liquid, others which also have strange things pickling in them (like Rose).
“Ethan, I know you had some side effects from the serums I injected you with. But you feel much better now, no after-effects?”
“No, I feel fine.”
As fine as one can be in hell.
The first time she told him her true laboratory is in the cellar, but that she moved some of it up to the atelier for his tests. She said she didn’t want to unnecessarily increase the stress of this ordeal by forcing him to look at her ‘devices’. In retrospect, this was just a front so she could catch him off-guard once she’d actually use a ‘device’ on him. And he fell for it.
“Did you ever wonder what substances they were?”
Ethan grows cold, inside and outside. His whole body is paralyzed with her words.
“Well, the first was ricin – a toxin renowned for its deadliness. If you use a high dose like I did it should have killed you within a day.”
Stupid stupid stupid stuipidstupidstupid!
How could he be so stupid? Why didn’t he flee immediately after he was freed from the bed? Why did he think he could assess the danger of staying here? Why did he think he could guess if the moment these creatures decided to kill him had come or not?
“The second was neisseria meningitidis – the bacterium which causes meningitis. If you use a high dose like I did it should have killed you within a day.”
‘Don’t worry, Ethan, it’s just a little prick.’ That’s what his mother used to say when had to take a shot. She’d hold his hand and make him look at her and not the big scary needle.
He doesn’t know what’s more terrifying, that Lady Dimitrescu tried to kill him or that he is implausibly alive.
The fuck’s wrong with me?!
“It was an experiment to see if the tests I did on your blood apply to the real thing as well. You see, no matter what kind of diseases or toxins I exposed them to, your leucocytes nipped them in the bud. It was quite fascinating. However, as I continued running tests on them, their effectiveness gradually decreased until the samples became unusable.”
She puts her hands on his shoulders to still his shaking, presses a kiss to his cheek.
“The only blood I’ve ever seen with traits like these is mine. Strange, truly strange, given how you were infected in America and not here, the heart of the Cadou. I never thought I would ever meet someone similar to me. Isn’t that lovely, Ethan?”
“I’m not like you at all!” he shouts in her face, “I’M NOT A MONSTER!”
She chuckles.
“What a feisty one you are. You remind me of Heisenberg when he was just a boy. Oh, how I detested raising him, that labă was nothing but a waste of time! But you, you have potential. You won’t break, Ethan, you will be molded.”
He blinks and suddenly he is in a world of pain.
Then there are her claws, shimmering with blood in the warm light of the chandelier.
A terrible pain. A familiar pain.
Something is missing.
“Forgive me, but this is just to ensure what happened to your wrist and foot wasn’t just a tall tale. Preventing something from breaking is easier than mending something broken.”
Her hand closes around his dead one and that is when Ethan starts to scream. Scream out his soul as she slowly pulls apart the mucous strings of blood still connecting the two halves of his severed wrist. It’s a perfect cut, her claws went through his flesh like it was butter.
She sniffs at the stump as if it were fine wine, then lusciously licks around the circle of white bone in the center. Ethan is watching himself being violated, reduced to an ice cream cone.
“I am getting around to the taste of you. So bitter.”
She brushes back a lock of silky, pitch hair. She smells of roses and cedar wood. Her nipples protrude from underneath her thin dress, erected by his fear and blood. Her eyes sparkle like diamonds with intelligence and madness. Is she really a monster or a goddess of death?
“Now let’s fix you again.”
There is no anesthetic, only the needle penetrating then reemerging from his flesh over and over again. Twenty-six fucking times.
Ethan is lying on his bed.
After she was done, after she had harvested all his pain, she was merciful enough to inject him with him something she claimed to be a painkiller. He thinks and feels precious little now; he hasn’t even touched his food.
They cooked him a real proper meal this time. Borscht. His reward. But its red color makes him nauseous.
Feeling is slowly returning to his right hand, he can even move his fingers a little. Just like how it was at the Baker’s, except back then he didn’t have the luxury of having his wound properly disinfected and stitched.
(Something is terribly wrong with me.)
At least now he’ll have a scar to match the one on his left.
Tomorrow he’s leaving.
It’s not a good plan, but the only one available to him.
It’s downright cliché, Ethan thinks as he’s crouched in the closet with baited breath, waiting for one of the daughters to open the door with his food.
There was nothing remotely dangerous in his cell to serve him as a weapon. For a brief moment Ethan considered breaking a leg off the chair, but that would be like charging at someone with a tooth pick. These creatures cannot be wounded like humans. The only thing remotely effective against them is bullets, and even those never did anything but slow them down, no matter how many magazines he fired in their faces. He’s going to have to run and hide if he wants to get out of here.
Through the crack in the closet doors he can observe Daniela entering his cell, carrying a plate of dumplings.
She sets the plate on the table then languidly looks around until her eyes meet Ethan’s, freezing him on the spot.
“Looks who’s playing hide-and-seek,” she chuckles. “What a naughty girl I am not to take my dog out for a walk once in a while.”
Daniela lasciviously spreads herself out on the bed, licks her lips.
“Go on, man-thing,” she pokes a blood sprinkled tongue out at him, “I love a good chase. I’ll even give you five minutes ahead.”
Ethan stumbles, almost falls on his way out, his limbs stiff and shaky with panic, much to her amusement.
The last thing he sees on her face before the metal door shuts behind her is surprise. She didn’t expect him to be this smart.
First things first – he has to find the Flasks. Most likely they are somewhere in Lady Dimitrescu’s personal chambers. There is probably no place more dangerous in this castle than the lioness’ very own den, but it can’t be helped. He’d rather die trying than leave without his Rose.
He flinches at the echo each of his steps makes on the marble floor. No matter how silent he tries to be, he’s still leaving an audible trail behind. It doesn’t matter really matter though, because if they won’t find him by sound then surely by scent. Ethan smells like a disgusting cocktail of piss, semen, blood and fear-sweat.
On his way he comes across a suit of armor holding a polished, sharp halberd. The halberd is heavy and significantly slows him down, but since he can strike with it from a distance, he might stand a chance with it in a fight.
Ethan tries to focus the weight of the halberd on his left. His right hand is still too fragile and numb to properly hold onto something. The strings in his flesh move along with every step he takes, bringing forth shock waves of pain. The tender nerve ends have barely reconnected.
You shouldn’t have waited, you stupid fucking idiot.
Things go well for Ethan, at first. He narrowly manages to escape the other two daughters with nothing more than a few scratches and bruises. His body is tired but never ceases obeying him, faithfully carrying him through the castle.
It is just before he could have reached his goal that he runs out of luck and his path crosses Lady Dimitrescu’s, halfway up the staircase to her chambers. Unlike the others, she doesn’t look pleased to see him.
“Give me back my daughter!” he yells, trying to prove her and himself that he is not afraid (like how he was at the beginning, before they carved fear into him with their claws and teeth).
“That’s what I’ve been working on, you imbecile!” she yells back. The force of her voice makes him, for only a tiny, tiny moment, lose his footing.
(I’m not afraid of you. I’m not afraid. I’m not.)
“Shut up!” his hands shake around the halberd’s shaft. “Give her to me or––”
“Or what? You’re going to attack me with that toy? I’ve had enough of your antics.”
She takes a step forward and he three back.
“Just when I thought you finally saw reason… go back to your room, Ethan, or I am going to have to discipline you.” Something in her eyes tells him she wants him to resist.
“Fuck you!”
Without further ado, he plunges the blade down into the space between her shoulder and neck, unearthing a spewing fountain of blood. It reminds him of the hot Texas summers he spent playing in water sprinklers as a child.
So much blood.
The spray of it is so powerful it hits his face.
He tastes her.
Of all the blood they made him taste, mostly his own, hers is the best. There is a sweetness to it that makes Ethan doubt his sanity.
Later, he is going to blame himself for what happened to him, because he didn’t use this moment to run. Instead, he is confederate in this minute of silence and inertia, shares her disbelief at his silly attempt at rebellion.
There is the overcoming realization he just committed a crime. He violated a law much higher and holier than those made by man. He spat in the face of natural order. A lamb biting the paw of the wolf sinking teeth into its soft, vulnerable belly.
The halberd has become an extension of himself. Maybe he has already become delusional, for Ethan thinks he can feel her flesh twitch against the blade.
And then the silken thread of her temper rips; and he falls with it, his lifeline.
“Fool! Worthless human scum!” Lady Dimitrescu bares her teeth at him like a rabid animal, the porcelain mask of her humanity shattering and revealing the fierce, slaughterous eyes of an apex predator. “PAY! PAY FOR YOUR SINS!”
Removing the halberd seems to cause her no pain, even as more and more red cascades from her neck, and she laughs heartily as she pulls him toward her with it.
“You vermin! You rotten cur, bastard son of the bitch of mankind, biting the hand that feeds you! Abusing my kindness! If it wasn’t for my mercy, you’d be wasting away in my dungeon, praying for death to release you from your suffering.”
(You think I’m not already?)
Blood keeps on sputtering out of the wound, but she could hardly care less.
“I will show you hell! I will open gates and windows in your body to welcome it, to extract your pitiful soul and sweeten the wine of your blood with it! You think you know pain? Ha! You have never known true pain, but you shall learn,” She grabs his arm, lifting him up by his patched-up wrist so they’re at eye level with each other. “You shall learn what true pain feels like, little one, for I am its herald and its mistress! I will be the haruspex of your agony and decipher the divine secret hidden in your flesh!”
These are not the eyes of a woman or an animal. Not even those of a maniac or a zealot. They are that of evil itself. Everything she said is true, will become true.
“Let me go!” he shouts hopelessly in the face of evil, squirming and writhing in her grasp like a worm.
(A worm can survive being cut in half. A worm has no limbs and arms to defend itself. A worm exists to be eaten by superior animals. A worm exists to endure pain and live.)
Ethan grasps at the air as he is violently hurled onto the stairs. He doesn’t hear the pulpous sound his body makes when the marble breaks his ribs and cleaves a dent into his head, only static.
His blood feels like a warm blanket under him, spreading out and relieving him from the cold of the marble.
(Ethan wants to close his eyes and go to heaven.)
“A downside of my ascendance is that relations have become mostly unsatisfying. And why should I grant you the honor of being carnal with me when you’ve been an insufferable little pest?” the weight of her heel sinks into his stomach, nearly rupturing it and sending his guts flying like a party popper. He moans in anguish.
The blood of her wound has soaked her clothes, contouring the shape of her breasts almost opaque.
“You’re undeserving of pleasure. But there are other parts of you, Ethan Winters, that will repent.”
She takes his hand, the mouse trap of her heel keeping him pinned to the ground, and starts pulling apart the strings.
First goes the thin foam of scab, the ill omen of an ugly scar to come. The nerve ends, fragile as violin strings, rip before the thread she wove into his skin. The blood only comes after a few seconds, after Ethan already had a good, long look at the fresh stump. The sight of his own mutilated limbs is one he has become well acquainted with, it can’t scare him anymore. It just hurts. Hurts like a bitch.
Lady Dimitrescu laughs all throughout his screams, his cries, his pleas.
“The study I have prescribed myself to more than that of the Cadou is that of pain. In your feeble mind, you cannot even imagine the many ways one can hurt. I have conducted the erratic dance of writhing flesh. I have peeled apart human forms to uncover their true beauty. Pain is divine. There is no soul that can’t be broken by pain.”
Her claws rip a gap into the skirt of her ruined dress. She isn’t wearing anything underneath. Perhaps she expected all this to happen.
She repositions her foot on a step above him, her spread out sex looking down at him, fluid dripping on his cheek like saliva from the maw of a hungry beast, ready to devour.
His dead hand slides into her with ease. Child’s play for a creature of her height. Ethan is thankful sex with her seems out of the question. His cock is smaller than her pinky – it could never been satisfying for a titan like her. At least there’s one kind of torture he will never have to suffer under her.
(There is the irrational fear that if she forced his cock inside her, her cunt would grow teeth and eat it.)
“You are so lacking, in everything but resolve. The tragedy of you is that such a persistent spirit was born into such a weak body.”
Perhaps by courtesy of his leaking head wound, Ethan rather detachedly watches as her body ingests then spits out his wrist over and over again. Thank god he doesn’t have to feel it.
Despite her words, she seems to be enjoying herself. Although she remains incredibly composed, cold eyes fixating him in place, she is breathing heavily.
At times the only thing sticking out from between her folds are two little white horns – his wrist bones. Ethan has no idea what they’re called again. He never really wasted much thought on the bones in his body. Just like an ungrateful spouse – now that they have been taken from him by another, he realizes how much he should have cherished them.
He is trying to muster up the strength to turn around onto his stomach, to crawl up the stairs. This is nothing. He can’t just lie there and yield up to his fate. His legs still work. He can’t let Rose down.
(Ethan knows the wound on his head should be fatal. If not kill him right away, then the amount of blood he is losing should have made him lose consciousness. But he has a reason to be alive. He is alive for a reason.)
Lady Dimitrescu reads his intentions from the little twitches in his arm and legs as he is conjuring his body to move.
“Not so fast, Ethan. We are just getting started.”
She pulls out his hand from within her in one swift motion, then slaps him across the cheek with it. Worse than the pain, it also leaves behind a wet stain on his face.
“Did you really think it would be this easy? Have you forgotten this is punishment? Your body could never give me as much pleasure as your pain – and that is how you will atone, not with your body but with your pain. I won’t forgive your selfishness until you’ve sung me a beautiful aria of pain.”
She picks him up the collar of his jacket, chuckling at his poor attempt at wriggling himself out of it before draping him over the marble balustrade of the staircase like a rug that needs beating. Ethan manages grab hold of the rail with his one hand just before he could have fallen over and to his death.
Her claws scissor through his pants and underwear, exposing him. He was a fool to feel like being allowed to wear clothes again gave him some kind of protection.
“Tell me, do you have an inkling of what I am about to do? Or have I read in your eyes correctly and you are truly as innocent as a young maiden?”
No response. She flicks her fingers against his sac and cackles at his wincing.
“Ever so shy.”
He freezes when something presses against him in a place he never would have expected.
It’s warm and slick, so it takes a moment for him to pick up the coldness underneath, or how the size is off.
It’s his own fingers.
It’s his own fucking hand.
“Oh god. Oh god, plea––” the words die in his throat as she violently thrusts his hand into him, his vision blurring with tears and his mouth forming into a silent scream.
Lady Dimitrescu grabs his hair, leaning down until she’s close enough that her warm breath tickles his ear.
“Don’t you want to tell me to go to hell? How you are going to kill me?” she sneers, pushing deeper. Ethan whimpers.
She pulls out a little, then rams it back in again. His chest feels too small to hold his heart, throbbing in his ears like an earthquake.
“Tell me, my dearest Ethan, how does it feel, letting yourself be sodomized by your own hand? Do you see now why you are nothing without me? You will never save that little girl. You can’t even escape the one person in this village who does not intend to kill you.”
The force of her movements is pushing him to the edge of the balustrade, so he has to thrust back into them to avoid falling, despising himself for it.
“You little miscreant. A better man would graciously accept death,” she is getting euphoric, “And then there is you, letting yourself be profaned over and over, never learning. You have a commendably strong will to live, but you don’t value your life or yourself. I’ve never had a toy quite like you!”
His grip on the rail is slipping, quivery. Their bodies clash and rub against each other, seemingly endlessly. Her bare skin on his. The blood of her wounds mixing with his.
Ethan cries and screams but that doesn’t change anything about his powerlessness. He is powerless to stop it, powerless to retreat into his mind until it’s over. Endure is the only thing he can.
“Oh yes, howl for me, sweetling!”
(This is something far removed from sex. It’s a primal thing, a claiming. A mating ritual.)
“Make your lungs bleed with rue!”
She is hollowing him, draining his personhood and his will, turning him into a vessel of pain.
“Let the entire world feast on your misery!”
There is a rhyme and a reason behind all this – that is the horror of the Lady Dimitrescu.
Her intentions are palpable in her gaze, boring into the back of his head as if it were a raw egg she wants to crack.
(He can picture his brain fluid leaking out of his skull like yolk, dripping onto her greedy tongue.)
‘There is no soul that can’t be broken by pain.’
Ethan can tell how deep she is from the little bumps of his knuckles. One, two, three on each finger save for the thumb.
By the time all of them are buried inside him, he is less than human.
By the time he has reached the wrist, he is nothing but a screaming, crying, mad creature of pain, an animal in its death throes.
I really can’t do it.
He cannot bear it.
I can’t escape.
He cannot bear the pain. Not for Rose. Not for Mia.
I can’t save her.
He just wants everything to end.
I’m useless.
Finally, his suffering seems to have appeased Lady Dimitrescu. There is a low groan behind him and then his hand is yanked out of him, making him cry out in agony one last time.
Ethan sinks to his knees, a little snake of blood slithering down his thigh.
Why did I live? Why did I live through Dulvey only to end up like this?
I should have died there. I shouldn’t have lived, only to be dragged into an even crueler hell.
Right now, Rose is hidden somewhere in this castle, suffering. How must she feel, being quartered and conscious and alive? Did she hear his screams?
I’m pathetic. Her pain must be so much worse than mine, and yet I can’t move. I can’t save her. I’m too weak. My body can’t compete with those of monsters.
“Have you learnt your lesson?”
“Yes,” he rasps, hugging his bleeding stump close to his chest.
“Good, then I shall repair you.”
Ethan is picked up gently, carried back to his cell in her arms like an infant.
Away from Rose.
With no strength left in him, he rests his cheek against her chest, surprised to hear a beating heart much larger than his own.
(It’s over. Ethan just wants to sink into the soft sheets of his bed and sleep.)
He is clutching his dead hand like a rosary. There are bumps on his upper body where his ribs are broken. The air is chilly against the open wound on his head.
He is alive.
Oh God, why am I alive?
