I lean over her, driving into her harder, faster, making the entire stage shudder. Her body rocks, a magnificent, terrible spectacle. The flesh of her belly, her hips, her thighs ripples and jiggles with the force of my movements.
And, Christ, is it hypnotic. Each roll, each undulation is a testament to my power. I have sculpted this. I have reduced a vibrant human to this primal, responsive mass of flesh.
“This is the wife I want. My perfect, mindless fuckhole.”
For a few precious moments, there is only this; the sound of our bodies meeting, her slurred moans, the oppressive attention of the men watching. This is my world, ordered to my exact specifications.
I am her God, and Grace is my living, breathing opus of submission.
A shift in the room’s atmosphere steals my attention. The collective intake of breath, the subtle rustle of dozens of men turning their heads in unison. The energy pivots, pulling away from my stage, drawn toward the main entrance like iron filings to a magnet.
Annoyed, I follow their gaze, my rhythm faltering for a single, crucial second.
And I freeze.
Konstantine is here.
Our Grand Master.
He has become more and more visible of late, and I can’t quite figure out why. I had assumed it was because the threat of the Esau is over, but it doesn’t feel enough, it doesn’t silence the nagging in my gut.
He stands there commanding the very air in the room. But it is what, who, is beside him that steals the breath from my lungs.
Held by a thin, delicate silver chain attached to a cuff around her wrist, is a woman. Tall, lithe, with an unmistakable afro. She looks exactly like Ines.
Her face, her eyes, it’s her. A ghost given flesh.
My blood runs cold.This is impossible.
I saw her body, I saw her blood, her mangled, mutilated flesh, I saw it all.
Konstantine’s lips curve into a smirk, his eyes scanning the room before landing, with deliberate weight, on me. On my stage. On my wife. He pulls the woman into his lap, his hand possessively on her waist. He leans in, nuzzling her neck, and she tilts her head back in a move that is half obedience, half something else entirely.
It’s a grotesque pantomime. A resurrection play for a dead love.
As he shifts, the collar of his jacket gapes slightly and the light catches the ink on his neck, and I know that tattoo. Every member of the inner circle knows it. The Phoenix of Konstantine, rising from the ashes of his past, a symbol of his unkillable power.
But the light is wrong. Or the tattoo is.
Instead of the elegant, flaming wings of a phoenix I see the stark, sharp lines of a raven.
I blink, then blink again, as the pieces of an impossible puzzle click together in my mind.
This is not Konstantine.
The man I murdered in that cathedral, the man whose death I orchestrated to save my ungrateful bitch of a wife, that was Konstantine. The real Grand Master.
And the man now sitting in the shadows, holding a woman made to look like a dead wife, watching me with cold, knowing eyes is Lazarus. Konstantine’s twin brother. The quiet one. The angry one.
As I stare, someone else sits beside him, a man with a scar above his eyebrow, a man whose name is all but branded into my melted, mangled skin. Ezekial Sewell.
No. No fucking way. How the fuck is this possible?
Ezekial leans in, whispering into Lazarus’s ear and Lazarus nods back in some form of agreement and it hits me then, the reality of all of it.
He played me. He was playing us all. Lazarus. He used me. He used me to kill his own brother and seize power.
Lazarus raises his glass to me, a crystal tumbler of amber liquid. He doesn’t smile. He simply tilts it in my direction, an infinitesimal gesture. Like a toast. An acknowledgment.
