Chapter 2 Dante

T he blinding hangover hits me like a sledgehammer between the eyes the moment I regain consciousness. I groan, trying to pry my lids open against the hot lances of sunlight searing through the bedroom drapes.

What the hell did we get into last night?

Pushing past the throbbing ache pulverizing my skull, I reach out instinctively for the one balm that can soothe any hurt - the warm, tempting softness of Natalie's body cradled against mine. But my questing hand meets only tangled sheets and empty space where her lush curves should be.

Unease prickles along my nerve endings as I finally manage to blink past the obscuring glare. My surroundings come into fractured, gut-churning focus one detail at a time. The ruined bedsheets twisted around my legs like soiled bandages. Shards of what used to be a crystal decanter crunching beneath my shifting weight.

Over the ragged snarl of my pulse thundering in my skull, I gradually become aware of other sounds creeping in. The shrill birdsong outside, mocking me. The hum of the air conditioning unit struggling against the summer swelter.

But no soft breathing filling the silence. No reassuring feminine warmth to banish the growing wrongness coiling through my battered body and psyche.

"Natalie?"

She doesn't answer. Of course she wouldn't - she's not here. The thought brings everything into hard, brittle clarity.

Shoving my way free of the wrecked bedding, I do a frantic sweep of the room, baring my teeth against the wave of dark vertigo that crashes over me. Signs of our passion are everywhere - clothes discarded in a frenzied trail between the bed and bathroom. Her hairbrush and makeup scattered as if flung aside in the heat of the moment.

But no Natalie herself. No sign of the one person capable of anchoring me when the madness surges and swallows everything in its path.

Just the hollow, gnawing ache inside that warns me this is anything but simple carelessness on her part. That spidery tickle of foreboding slowly blooming into dread and disbelieving outrage.

Only then do I see it - the black scuff marks littering the plush carpet between the bed and bathroom door. Signs of some titanic struggle just out of sight, clues to a subtle violence I should've been alert for.

I move before considering the possible consequences, suddenly desperate to find her and untangle this new tapestry of nightmare she appears to have woven around us. But the bathroom is as empty as the bedroom, every surface shrouded in an eerie undisturbed calm.

All except for the tub and shower area. Still dripping condensation beads against the tiles, a silent testament to its recent use. And the ominous crimson-tinged accumulation left in its wake, splattered half-heartedly as if someone tried to conceal evidence of their hurried exit.

It's her blood - I'd know that dizzying coppery tang anywhere after burying my face in so many of our combined raptures. Sucking in harsh breaths through my nostrils, I bend to examine the offending smears, ignoring the throbbing in my head and the violent lurch of nausea from the sickly cloying aroma.

When my fingertips drift through the sticky drying remnants, they pass unencumbered. No thickness, no viscosity, nothing but a garish ruse of discoloration smeared intentionally across the inside of the tub's lip.

My gorge rises, burning the back of my throat as choking outrage eclipses the disorientation still plaguing me. Because this is no ruptured vein or accidental razor nick - she planned this. It's a taunting clue, a mocking path laid out for me to follow into whatever private derangement she's fled towards.

Staggering upright, I rake my arm across the vanity, sweeping away everything on its surface in a clattering ruin of glass and porcelain joining the faux blood streaks as if to reinforce how thoroughly she's scorched the earth for her exodus from our garden.

"What did you do, you faithless shrike?" I mutter past a sandpaper throat and tongue leaden with the coppery taint of...of what?

The realization that she must have drugged me, slipped some alchemical mickey into our shared indulgences to facilitate this desecration, hits me like a runaway freight train. I double over, nausea and disorientation redoubling despite the burst of adrenalized fury coursing through my veins.

Dimly, as if from the end of a vast echoing expanse, I hear the sounds of the outer chamber door being hammered at. Men shouting in panic, driven by the unholy choir of devastation rippling outwards from my sanctum. Natalie's screaming laugh seems to ring from every shadowed surface, the very air a mockery of our rapture and the boundless plans I had for us both.

I know she's slithered off into the night by now, driven by some deluded compulsion to set herself at cross-purposes to the future being forged for us. But the raging denial beating like a second heart beneath my ribcage refuses to accept her betrayal. Refuses to yield to the insanity it will entail to drag her back and do penance for this blasphemy she's enacted.

The battering at the door intensifies until it crashes inward, and Alonzo and his squad of numbskull enforcers come flooding in like a scurrying throng of ants drawn to some unseen massacre. The sight of me standing there, bloody-nosed and knuckles split, sweeps them up short. Makes them quail like sheep before the barely bottled storm of my regard.

But I can barely even register their damp, ovine stench. The world has narrowed to a single, maddening point of focus burning away everything except the certainty of what I must do next. What I've always had to do where Natalie was concerned—break her thoroughly asunder so her essence can be remade into the shape I've always envisioned.

"Boss?" Alonzo eventually risks. The tremor in his voice sickly and thick with dreadful premonition. "We heard the commotion, and were worried that..."

He stops as I pivot slowly towards the ingress, allowing my devouring concentration to fall upon his sniveling presence at last. Something in my soulless stare, my haggard dishevelment, must convey the atrocities I'm already hatching in my soul's abattoir. I see the way he shrinks back fractionally from the full gravitational sway of my regard—a barely conscious yielding to the deluge of darkness yet to come. He's afraid, as a hyena playing lapdog always is when the lion finally rolls over to fix them with unblinking hunger.

"My wife is gone," I murmur at last, relishing the way the words freeze the very breath in Alonzo's lungs. My tongue curls around every syllable, savoring the black promise of devastation yet to unfurl like a rapacious bloom hungering for the sun's warmth. "She believed her act of defiance, this petulant little tantrum against the destiny I'd crafted for her, would be tolerated."

A snort of bitter mirth escapes past my shattered composure, jagged crystal in the silence roaring like surf against Natalie's ethereal laughter. I turn back to the remnants of our sanctuary, allowing a wolfish grin to slice across my face at the ripe heart of this fresh massacre.

"Well we simply can't have that, boys. I'm afraid Lady Natalie has forced my hand...and for her defiance there will now be consequences so heinous they'll echo down through the ages to come. We're going to wage nothing less than all-out war upon the whole of this rotten corpse-city and its deluded parasites. Every soul, every edifice, every last faltering heartbeat still clinging to the lie of their sad little paper empires will be crushed and fed into the mulch of my resolve. I'll tear the metastatic tumor down to the roots before permitting it to harbor my wife's treacherous soul for a single day further."

By the time I'm whirling back to face them, the words fracturing like slugs against Alonzo's bovine skull, my men have found their spines anew. Though there are still traces of uncertainty there—nagging doubts that one day soon they'll all be swept away like gnats through the singularity of my ambition.

Let them sweat the possibilities. Let them quake and cringe from the monolithic shadow I intend to cast over this entire misbegotten empire of ignorance and sin, at least until their roles are played out. I'll not permit so much as a whisper to slip free until I'm ready to unmake existence's tarnished whole cloth and reformulate it in our twisted image, Natalie and I.

There can be no compromise, no clemency to be found for any wanting soul too weak to accept the fires that must rage before our rebirth can be consecrated. I'll unleash every horror upon the masses, crack the skies open with sorcerous calamities until all lies trembling and supine beneath my rapacious hunger.

Only then, with every lofty spire and marble hall laid to smoldering waste around us, will I finally summon Natalie back to me with the song of finality woven into the bones of this dead dominion. Just so she might behold the true glory of all she almost shirked to satisfy some petty delusion of liberation. Just so she can finally see the wanton paradise awaiting us upon the graves of this rotting age.

Only then will I claim her anew. Cleave her remaining defiance away and leave her hollow for the ritual defilement of our designs to begin afresh. Let her final rapture swell in the belly of our shared havoc as the dark fertility to spawn our new Eden.

I stalk from the defiled sanctuary without a backwards glance. My next steps will take me out into the ashen day, onto a stage I've only dreamed of until now. A holocaust just beginning its overtures while my traitorous dark queen dances towards some foolish salvation far beyond its reach.

Let her run until her legs give out beneath her, let her disappear and shield her frail beauties behind whatever piteous fortress she envisions proof against me. All it will earn her in the end is a front row seat to the ruination of everything she ever aspired towards beyond my omniscient rapture. A harsh pedagogical awakening to the truth of how insignificant her efforts were against the coming ravages of my desire.

By the time I reclaim her at last, she'll have sworn herself a hundred thousand lifetimes over to my demented service. My raving queen, broken, remade, and set to rule over the conflagration that will one day give way to the Andrachian ascendance at long last.

For there's only room for one godhead in the coming age of cleansing flame and rebirthed rapture. Only one will stand astride the funeral pyres of this impotent dynasty I've selected for oblivion.

I'll trample the very cosmos underfoot before admitting defeat against my fate. My destiny...and Natalie's as well.