He leaned down, sneering in my face. “I think once he sees what I do to you, what I turn you into, he’ll have no choice. Men like Ezra don’t care about boys like you. They appreciate the art, and if I could just get him toseeme…”
He moved behind my chair, hands settling on my shoulders. The touch made my skin crawl because it was claiming without understanding, ownership without earning. My amputation site throbbed, a phantom pain radiating from the missing joint that marked me as Ezra's.
“I’m not a monster,” he said. “I won’t let you slip away in pain. This is pharmaceutical-grade MDMA mixed with a mild dissociative." Julian tested a syringe in my peripheral vision.
The needle slipped into my arm before I could protest, cold liquid flooding my bloodstream. The compound moved through me not as warm honey but as liquid fire, burning as it spread. My vision sharpened to painful clarity while my equilibrium tilted sideways.
Colors began over-saturating until they hurt to look at. Julian's face seemed to shift and blur at the edges, features melting and reforming. The fluorescent lights above pulsed in rhythm with my heartbeat, growing brighter until they felt like tiny suns boring into my skull.
"Tell me about the first time he made you kill," Julian said, his voice echoing strangely, as if he was speaking from the bottom of a well. "Not the careful disposal work he's shown you, but real creation. Real artistry."
Through the pharmaceutical haze, memory became liquid, flowing and reshaping itself. Suddenly I was standing in Ezra's studio, scalpel in my hand, Reverend Morris spread before me. But Julian's face kept replacing Ezra's, his voice guiding each cut.
My mouth watered with the desperate need to suckle at Ezra's chest, to feel his heartbeat against my cheek, his fingers in my hair, his voice calling me his good boy.
"Focus, Micah." Julian's voice seemed to come from inside my own head now. "I need to understand what he saw in you."
The dissociation was profound, reality fracturing into kaleidoscope fragments. For a moment, I couldn't remember if Ezra had guided my first kill or if Julian had been there, whispering encouragement as I opened the reverend's throat.
"He... he showed me how to see them," I whispered, the truth spilling out because lying felt impossible through the chemical fog. "Not as people but as materials. Components." My stump gave just enough space. I kept working on the restraints.
"Go on." Julian's hands worked knots from my neck and shoulders, finding tension points with disturbing skill.
"Ezra teaches me to see potential in life," I said.
“For what?”
“Death.”
His hands withdrew. “How…mundane.”
“There’s nothing mundane about life,” I spat, sounding as bitter as I felt. “Life is a fucking miracle, Julian. Think about it. There are billions and billions of solar systems out there with hundreds of billions of planets, and you and I just happened to be on this one where life just happened to evolve in just the right way to produce two blind idiots like us. I mean, what are the chances that you and I should exist in the same fucking town, at the same fucking time as a god like Ezra? And even if all that held true, what are the chances that you and I and all ofour ancestors would make the same fucking decisions that led to this moment, today, here and now?” I let out a dark chuckle and shook my head. “Life is a random accident. A beautiful, terrible, temporary accident. But death? Death is inevitable. It is the one undeniable truth in the universe. No matter your color, creed, or conscience, death comes for everyone. In a universe where random chance reigns supreme, Ezra has taken certainty and elevated it to becomeart.”
I was rambling now, dipping into a shallow pool of philosophical drivel to keep him busy while I worked myself free of his restraints. I didn’t even know where the words came from, or if I even believed them.
"Life is boring," Julian corrected, moving back to his instruments. "Death is pedestrian. But terror? Now terror is interesting. Desperation creates honesty. Pain reveals truth." He prepared a second syringe, this one containing something darker, more viscous.
The room tilted sideways as Julian approached with the second injection. The walls breathed, expanding and contracting in rhythm with my racing heartbeat.
"No," I whispered, but my voice sounded distant, uncertain. The pharmaceutical chaos made everything feel negotiable, every certainty suddenly fragile.
"It's okay to be ordinary," Julian soothed, preparing to inject the second dose. "That's your lot in life. Men such as yourself aren’t meant for the type of greatness you aspire to."
He raised the syringe toward my arm, and for one terrifying moment I almost let him. Almost believed that liberation lay in Julian's crude brutality, in rejecting the careful beauty Ezra and I had built together.
After all, who was I to believe I was special? That Ezra would choose me? If life was a random mistake of the universe, why couldn’t Ezra’s choice to mentor me be one as well? Perhaps thatwas the distance I’d felt last night as we lay together in his bed. It was the distance between ordinary and extraordinary, between pupil and master, and I couldn’t even fathom bridging that gap.
Not without help.
Not without Daddy.
He’d made it possible. Not because I was worthy, or special. Because I believed. Because I wanted. Because I was willing to let it hurt. I was willing to accept I was no one and nothing so that I could be remade in his image.
Then, through the pharmaceutical haze, I heard something that cut through every layer of chemical confusion.
Footsteps on stairs.
Not the hurried clatter of someone rushing, but the measured tread of controlled violence approaching. Even drugged, even questioning everything I thought I knew, my body recognized that sound.
