He took the bottle from my hand, and I folded them back at my hips.
I felt his gaze circle me, the bright lights behind my eyelids disappearing one after the other until there were none left. Until it was just the yellow light above us lighting the room.
He was quiet, his eyes taking me in, his thoughts working. I knew I could hear them. Hear the gentle whir of his mind. I knew he had a brilliant mind too. I could feel it in my bones. He was smarter than anyone else. He thought about things thoroughly. He considered everything. Even things people didn’t see, I knew that he did. That’s why it took him so long to get into the Back Hall. It’s why he was always watching and never talking. It’s whyhe spoke clearly and got to the point quickly when he chose to grace this world with his voice. He was smarter than all of them.
I wondered what he was thinking now.
Finally, his eyes found my face again and they stayed. “How long have you been awake?” he asked me. “One day?”
“No.”
“Two?” he asked.
“Almost three.”
“Three?”
I lifted my finger, but only a little, hoping that he understood. I didn’t know how else to communicate to him that I had gotten a couple of hours of sleep three nights ago, but it hadn’t been much.
“Almost three,” he decided quietly. “I assume Thomas does your makeup. He’s not very good,” he mused.
I didn’t know. I never looked, and even if I saw my own face, I hadn’t seen anyone else’s in so long that I didn’t know what ‘good makeup’ was supposed to look like anymore. I just knew that women wore it to make themselves look prettier. To look how men wanted them to look. Mother always wore a lot.
He inhaled deeply. “I like my women lively,” he explained. “I like when they fight and scream and try to break free. I like to chase them, drug them, drag them back, chain them up, watch them.”
Something in my pained stomach stirred, but I was too tired to pay it any mind.
“But you?” he pondered, his voice warm and chilling at the same time. “You would be such an obedient little pet, wouldn’t you? My own personal slave. I’ve never been able to break anyone like they’ve broken you, not without killing them, and you are…utterlyshattered, yet still strong. Therefore, you’re able to be built up again exactly how I want you to be.” He paused. “My perfect little sinning doll,” he half-whispered. He pausedagain, this time for three Mississippi’s. “Plots do change, don’t they,” he hummed to himself.
My mind locked onto that word. Slave. What did that mean?
He was quiet for a long time, so long that I started to feel my eyes close again. “Do you know what trust is?”
Trust? I had heard it mentioned when reading the Good Book. The Disciples trusting God to take care of them when they were in need, but I didn’t have a definition for it.
“Interesting,” he said, the sound of a chair being placed on the carpet meeting my ears. “What else I find interesting is the fact that you have not broken a single rule in all the years I’ve been here. Not one.”
I have. I had the lashings to prove it, and he could see them, I knew he could. The dress was low enough to bear the ones on my chest.
“So, I know that I can say anything I want in this room and know that you will not speak it to another soul, not even to yourself.”
It was part of my position in the church. I didn’t have a choice.
“Born into this religion, you should have basic knowledge of many things, that’s why I find it so interesting. Even if you did stop mentally growing at a young age, you should have clung to what you were taught.”
“I’ve looked into your father,” he went on. “He died on his way to service before you turned one. A drunk driver at 9am,” he went on, a chill running through my body. “Not completely unbelievable in this city, except for the fact that I saw the pictures. And a body without a scratch on it does not a crash victim make. The doctors were a part of this church too. You were the first to be born within these walls, did you know that? But he wasn’t the last to be mysteriously killed.
“They did somuchin their first decade of existence. Their name had barely spread before you were born,” he hummed.“It’s not a conspiracy, you being here. It wasn’t your birth right or destiny. It was just a case of reproduction gone wrong. It wasn’t even out of love.”
Because love didn’t exist.
“Perhaps an addiction,” Azrael explained in that uncanny way of his. “They get addicted to what goes on here, they want to do whatever they can to please the infamous Elders. Addiction,” he went on before I could even wonder what the word meant, “is when you would rather die a horrible, agonizing death than go without the thing you’ve become addicted to. Gambling, drugs, alcohol, porn, people. Although most these days have begun to forget the meaning of most words, like addiction, and use it far more commonly than they should, something you will learn eventually.”
I had never heard that word before. Porn.
“Porn is what you do for them,” he stated. And the way he said ‘them’ made my skin tingle, but I wondered how anyone could be addicted to something like that.
“Trust is something you cannot teach,” he explained evenly. “It’s something that must be learned. I have very little of it for anyone in this world, and I’m grateful for it. Betrayal is the worst thing to experience in my world. It’s not worth the effort to extend trust when you know that betrayal is so imminent.”
