Budapest » [Clintasha]

Chapter Twelve: Futile

When he'd told me Karpov was dead, I felt a victorious pulse of satisfaction. But my celebration was silent. We were all congregated to mourn his passing. So many of the proselytized youth bawled: gargling with sobs and sniffing back buckets of mucus. Snake tears, that's what I put on. It was a quiet cry, not desolated howls like those around me. The temptation to spit on his coffin was overwhelming as they carried it past. As we were requested to place a kiss on him as a mark of respect, I refrained. I leant in, my nostrils flaring at his rancid blanched complexion and falsified my respects. I wanted to parade on his body, tap dance on his casket, mutilate his shabby decaying body. He deserved nothing more than to be disembowelled, dismembered and decapitated.

We each took it in turns to plant a rose on his grave, I vandalised the petals. I ripped the edges of them, puncturing the velvety redness, plucking some off the stalk and laid it down. As his casket was lowered, I didn't shed a tear. He didn't deserve the moisture of my eyes, or even the strain of my muscles to frown. He didn't hold my attention; I lowered my head and picked at my cuticles.

But what really got my heckles up was the prayer. Delusional, that some of the people gathered really think there's a god. They can give me the omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent bullshit all they like. My parents were snatched from me when I was born, my adoptive-dad? Slaughtered. Me? Abused, demoralised, hypnotised. A god doesn't love me, he would've stopped this. He hasn't even looked in my direction, he doesn't know me. He isn't with me, he would've stepped in front of the flog of the cat of nine tales. They prayed for his soul, for safe deliverance to the other side; worshiping him for his "kindness" to us, for his "education" of us and his "love" of us. In the back of my mind I pictured him sipping a glass of vodka with Satan, not greeting Jesus at the pearly white gates.

The demon had been vanquished from the face of the earth, sharing the fate of so many he had sentenced before him. What I hadn't initially accounted for was what he was the predecessor to. They told us Karpov raised him like a son; saving him from the frontlines during the War I was sheltered from. He was for certain the only child in the world Karpov had saved. Out of the womb of his rage, his depravity and his poison was concocted a new scourge of the Earth. Someone raised to be foul, stripped bare of empathy, drained of humanity. Aleksander Lukin.

Younger. Stronger. Crueller.

A full head of hair, darker brown eyes, a slanting nose. Sharply dressed, like an overseer at a plantation, posture like a king, ready to command and a sharper tongue than a harpy.

"Natalia..." He'd crooned so sweetly the first time we'd met.

My step picked up, I pretended his siren song had fallen deaf on my ears.

"Natalia." He alternated to a new personality in an instant, his voice like the crack of the whip. He crushed his hand around my perforated wrist, but I didn't face him. So he crushed my jaw too with his hand, an echo of his forefather in his action. He wrenched my head towards him and stared me down. My eyelashes fluttered with panic, my breathing rustled and my pulse was flickering. "I was wondering when our fates would intertwine... Vasily, god rest his soul, told me you were very special..."

I felt my intestines knot at the notion. "Did he now?" I retorted, trying to twist my head away from him.

Aleksander leant in closer, his alcohol reeking breath sloshing across my face. "Yes, Tsarina... Do you know I've never seen a relic quite as valuable as you before?" Like an object, he spoke about me.

"That's not my name..." I hissed back, my fingers curling around his wrist to try and shake him off.

His eyes lit up with rage like a panther, and as his hand was wrenched from my squeezed jaw, it slipped to my neck. He pinned me back against the nearest wall, chest flush to mine.