“We leave the second you want to. But not before I show you this,” he says, then starts walking through the door without looking behind to see if I’m following or not. He’s only forcing me to follow so that I don’t run away.
I eventually do—follow him, not run away.
The chamber beyond is all white and steel, the air thick with disinfectant, masking, but not quite hiding the sense of blood and waste and human suffering.Medical equipment fills the walls. Monitors, IV stands, and parts of other machines, I have no idea what they do. But it’s what occupies the center of the room that stops me cold and makes my lungs forget how to draw breath.
What remains of Ezekiel hangs there, mounted vertically against a white wall, like a grotesque art installation, strapped, suspended, and undeniably alive.
My first thought, absurdly, is that they’ve gotten his proportions wrong. The thing before me can’t be human. He’s too small… too misshapen. Then my brain catches up with what my eyes are seeing and starts to process it.Ezekiel, but not whole. His limbs are gone, all four of them, leaving only the central trunk of his body. Where arms and legs should have extended, there are sealed surgical sites. His torso is a map of precise scars and puncture wounds, some fresh and pink, others old and faded to white. But each one is placed there on purpose.
Tubes enter and exit his body, electrodes attach to what remains of his flesh, feeding data to the surrounding monitors, which Ares seems to be checking, arching an eyebrow like he’s not satisfied with what he sees there.
“So you tell me, little curse. Do you consider him dead now or alive?”
My stomach heaves, but something else follows. A dark satisfaction that bubbles up from a place inside me I don’t really want to acknowledge right now. The man who tortured me for years, who treated my body like it belonged to him, now exists as nothing more than a breathing specimen himself. A lab rat for twisted experiments.
“What did you do to him?” I ask, unable to tear my eyes away from the monster in front of me. No nose, no ears… no dick.
“Everything he deserved,” Ares steps closer to whatever is left of Ezekiel. “I played around with his face during Kharon. He was actually in the room where we fought.”
I try to search my memories, but nothing comes to mind except a disfigured corpse. He was so covered in his own blood that I didn’t even recognize him back then.But I guess it wasn’t a corpse after all.
“Then I continued with his extremities. One at a time. Slow, painful, with enough medicine going through him so he wouldn’t die on me, but not enough so he wouldn’t feel pain. He felt everything. First the fingers, then the hands, then the forearms, upper arms, toes, feet, his balls, his cock, even his fucking eyelids. Each part removed while he was fully conscious.” Ares says with a twisted pride.
Anyone else on this planet would find him grotesque, a monster, but every horrible thing he’s done to him shows me one thing. His love.
Perhaps I’m a monster myself because I don’t want to scream. I want to thank him for it.
I am not some soft, scared little girl who, when confronted with the fact, turns to run away. I’m strong. A warrior. I don’t believe in stories where revenge doesn’t feed your soul. Avenging Elias fed mine. If that makes me a horrible human being, I accept it. Because some human beings are horrible by definition.
My eyes dart to Ezekiel’s face, feeling nothing. His skin is drawn tight to the bones, his lips cracked and pale, but his eyes. The two cold orbs that haunt my dreams are alert. He hasn’t lost his mind, not that he was ever too sane to begin with.
“There’s more. But if you want, I’ll stop,” Ares says, indirectly asking me permission to continue telling me about what he’s done. And if the God of War asks permission, what follows next should be devastating, but I want to hear it. Hear how he tortured him. It’s not heaven I’m aiming for anyway. I’m in love with the devil’s son.
“Nothing will ever be enough for what he’s done to you,” he continues, carrying a sadness in his voice, along with a helplessness that he can’t go back and rewrite the past. “But I sure did try. I made him consume each piece.”
I turn to look at Ares, feeling the shaking in my limbs. I want to deny that I could be such a monster as to be happy about this. That I’m so detached hearing that Ares made the man fucking eat himself.
“The staff ground the flesh, mixed it with a solution, and fed it to him through a tube since he didn’t want to chew parts of himself. But he’s quite literally eaten himself piece by piece over the course of the last two months or so.”
He says again with a clinical detachment that should disturb me, but doesn’t. It’s just a balancing of scales, too long tilted against me.
“He is aware of everything,” Ares adds, “a cocktail of drugs keeps him conscious, prevents shock from shutting down his mind. He feels every second of his existence.”
I step closer, drawn by a compulsion I can’t name. Ezekiel’s eyes are fixed on me. The same eyes that used to study my agony.
“The human body is remarkably resilient,” a voice comes from nowhere, and I turn to see a man in a white lab coat emerging from the hallway. He’s middle-aged with thinning hair and glasses thick enough to start a fire.
“Dr. Mercer maintains Ezekiel’s condition,” Ares explains. “Ensures he remains in the state… indefinitely.”
The doctor approaches the monitoring equipment, checking the readings. “We’ve developed a unique life support system,” he says, and his tone is eerily similar to Ezekiel’s. It takes a psychopath to do this. “Medication prevents infection, regulates blood pressure, maintains consciousness, without allowing the brain to shut down from trauma. Well, the solutions are calibrated to sustain cellular function without providing comfort. Unfortunately, the only thing we can’t give him are emotions. He seems to be a pure case of a sociopath who has none; therefore, we can’t enhance them with hormonal drugs. We did try, though.” He goes on talking about his grotesque experiments, and I don’t pity Ezekiel. I do feel sorry for the fact that he feels nothing emotionally. I wish he could feel the pain, to feel my hate, my rage.
“Can he speak?” I ask because he hasn’t said a word since we got here.
But it’s not Dr. Mercer who gets to answer me. “Yes. He can speak,” it’s Ezekiel who answers. The voice is still the same, as smug as ever. “Hello, Brynn.”
For a second, I freeze like I’m strapped to that chair again, and he has all the power over me. But then I look around me and realize the tables have turned. He is strapped this time, at least what’s left of him. AndIhave power over him.
I don’t back off. I just step closer until I’m standing directly before the man who haunts my dreams. His eyes arethe only part of him that seems unchanged. Even mutilated beyond recognition, trapped now in his personal living hell, his expression remains blank.
