A traitor.
An unworthy.
An apostate.
I’m not sure I’m really any of those things.
I didn’t ever believe in this god to begin with.
The one sat opposite me now. Lounging back leisurely on a throne made of bones. Human bones from what I can tell.
But I’m here.
“Again, Balor,” Milus calls out, his words slow and casual, as though he takes no pleasure in what he watches. “The stomach this time,” he orders.
Balor towers over me, easily six-foot-seven, maybe two-hundred-fifty pounds of pure muscle, his head is bald, his eyes are dead, but his hands are the steadiest I’ve ever seen. When he cuts me, slow and shallow, his eyes watch the blood letting like a magnet. His gaze is solely focused on the claret, his attention never on me, like I’m not even here. To him, I’m nothing more than a body. A task set for him by a higher being.
Pain hums through me like a low, relentless current, stitching itself through bone and breath until it becomes part of me.
And I think of Billy's repetitive phrase.
‘Physical pain is only temporary.’
Something to embrace, not flinch away from. Every laceration, every break of skin, I fall into it all, let the pain swallow me whole. I lean into it, despite the air feeling too heavy to swallow, thick with dust and damp, and something that tastes like depravity on the back of my tongue. Let it consume me.
“You should count yourself lucky,” Milus says, drawing my eyes open like a summoning I can’t resist, something calling me forth like the promise of light to a moth already burning.
Balor steps back from me, his head bowed, hands at his back, waiting as Milus speaks again.
“If the trials had not already deemed you,” pausing, he sits forward in his chair, adjusting his position, his attention on his hands, elbows resting on his knees, he finally looks up at me from beneath a shade of heavy dark lashes. “Worthy,” he says it with distaste, despite his facial expression not showing it, his wrinkle-free face making him look no older than his youngest son, “then I would be having my most brutal men rape and mutilate you right now.”
It sends a tremor of pure terror through me, a kindling flaring to life in my otherwise burnt out body, nothing but embers and ash.
I say nothing, panting for breath, feeling every molecule of oxygen torture my throat on its way down. And I wait. Staring at him. Waiting for something more, but nothing comes, instead, he looks to Balor, nods, and sinks back into his chair, his legs crossed, as Balor begins to cut once more.
It’s uncountable, the number of cuts on my body, the length of time I hang here, how often I pass out and come to, all of it numbing now, the longer it goes on. This punishment being better than the alternative.
Each second stretches thin, trembling beneath its own weight, refusing to die quietly. The clock doesn’t tick, instead, the walls drip, slow and cruel. Every moment folds back on itself,trapping me in an ache I can’t escape. My thoughts circle the same wound over and over, guilt, until I can’t tell if it’s healing or rotting. Somewhere beyond this stillness, the world goes on, people laugh, breathe, live, but in here, time is nothing but a mirror, reflecting my pain until I almost start to recognise it as a companion.
In the haze behind my eyelids, I see him, Billy. The curve of his mouth when he promises to keep me safe, the look in his eyes when he almost believes it himself. I wonder, in this moment, if he can feel this too, if somewhere his chest aches the way mine does now. The thought steadies me. It hurts, but it’s proof. Proof that what we are isn’t gone yet, even if the world is trying to unmake us one cut at a time.
“You are a delicate little creature,Little Lamb.” I instantly want to vomit, the contents of my stomach jerking at the way Milus’s voice breaks through my torment. A smile in his eyes that now reflects in one corner of his mouth, the subtlest of lifts to his lips as I look over at him. “It would be such a pity if we had to take this further and ruin that pretty little face of yours.”
He’s not smiling now, a heavy deep-set scowl replacing it. He stands, coming around the other chairs beside him, taking the three very steep steps down, bringing him lower into the sunken bowl style platform I’m strung up in.
Milus’s hands slide effortlessly into the pockets of his perfectly tailored slacks, his head canting to one side, a strand of his shiny, smooth wave of dark hair falling across his forehead, something that could make him look almost playful in any other circumstance. He studies me as he gets even closer, his eyes working their way up from my bloodied toes to the top of my sweaty head, before finally meeting my own.
He sighs through his nose; his clean shaven face chiselled like he’s cut from expensive marble. Dark brows a perfect match, his plump lips a kissable pout, his nose straight and strong, highcheekbones, and large bright eyes. He looks so much like Billy that it makes me feel sick.
Removing a hand from his pocket, he reaches over to the table where Balor stands in waiting behind it and takes a small surgical scalpel. He looks at it pinched between his finger and thumb, the thumb of his other hand pressing just hard enough against the blade that it beads with a single drop of blood.
“My son is more important than Imogen,” he states without looking up at me, the pad of his thumb turning white from the pressure where he continues to press against the blade. “Is more important than Thomas Avery,” he states factually, lifting a brow in knowing, making me feel like this is it, the end, he knows all of my sins, all of my secrets, and now he’s going to deliver my final blow. “But you,” he half-laughs, this smooth, deep chuckle, his eyes come sharply to mine, stripping the breath from my lungs. “You mean more.”
He turns away from me, dropping the scalpel back to the old wooden table, his hands tucking back inside his pockets, he takes the steps back up, moving past the bone chairs, pausing at the darkened archway entry point, his back to me.
“You will hang there until you are cleansed,” he tells me without looking.
Balor sees this as a sign to quickly follow after his master, taking the same path as Milus. When he reaches him, the two of them leave, only the echo of their footsteps any real proof they were ever here.
