SERAPHINA
An angel is here to save me.
Skin dark as midnight, kind eyes that are laced with concern; it’s almost like he melted out of the walls and picked me up off the ground.
The light above me is too bright. I’m freezing cold, my teeth chattering even as I feel my skin on fire. Feverish. A thousand hot pokers being stabbed into my side. Ignacio pressed a hot poker into my thigh once, when I asked to go outside to see the flowers. This pain is so much worse than that, and that was horrific.
I’ve never seen a man with skin like his before. Ignacio is Mexican, his skin bronzed from his ancestry, turned a richer brown by the sun. But the man standing over me, shining that horridly bright light that makes me recoil back into the pillow my head rests upon; he is the color of midnight, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen somebody more magnificent. I hear crying and realize it’s my own, as I lie sweat-slicked and writhing from the pain. I feel a pinch in the crook of my arm, something cold snaking into my veins, and a few moments later, blessed relief. My eyes grow heavy; limbs loose and soft, my fists finally uncurling. I suck in a breath, the warmth that flows through me similar to the feeling when Ignacio puts his tongue on me and I raise my hips involuntarily to the rhythm of his fingers. I look down at myself, still naked, covered in a white sheet, the middle section cut out to reveal my midsection, my arm resting on top with a tube running into it.
I stare in wonder, my brain addled, my thoughts slow.
There is a new person in my tower.
“Papi?” I say breathlessly, looking around the room as panic grips me. I can’t see Ignacio. There is a new man here and where is Ignacio? I turn my terrified gaze to the new man, the angel with the kind eyes, and wonder if I was wrong. Maybe he’s not here to help me.
Maybe he’s here to steal me. Ignacio always warns me that this could happen. If anyone ever comes into the tower I am to hide. If they find me, I must fight. If they take me away, I will surely die.
The world outside is a terribly place. A dangerous place. All these things I have been told, the very reason for me being locked away: for my own good. Ignacio saved me from certain death the day I was born. I owe everything to him. My life, my submission, my body, my soul. It is all his.
It makes sense, then, that I should fear the man standing over me, a sharp silver knife in his hand. Scalpel. That’s what it’s called. I read that once in a book. I have read so many books in my life, they all merge together into white pages, black words, stories pieced together in the dull cracks of sunlight that seep into my dungeon.
“Hey,” The Man says. His voice is like velvet, but low, commanding at the same time. I stop looking for Ignacio and settle my eyes back on my Dark Knight as he peers back at me, the scalpel now lowered, his expression grim.
I try to sit up. And… I can’t.
“My legs,” I gasp. I try to rise up onto my elbows to see what’s wrong with me. Something has to be terribly wrong, doesn’t it, because I can’t feel anything from my waist down. It’s like somebody has sawn me in half; cleaved me through the middle and stolen the rest of me away.
The Man puts a large hand on my chest, high enough to avoid my breasts, firm enough to glue my back to the—what am I laying on? It’s not my bed, that much I know. It’s hard and smooth. The table. I’m lying on the dining table, and I don’t have legs anymore.
“I gave you a spinal block,” he says, that rich voice curling around me like smoke. I’m terrified, yes, but something else, as well.
I’m intrigued. I’ve never seen another person before, not since I was a child. I wasn’t even sure they existed, to be completely honest. And, more than anything, I want him to keep talking.
“Who are you?” I breathe.
He takes his hand away, the slightest hint of a smirk tugging at one corner of his wide mouth. “I’m The Doctor,” he says.
Whatever stuff he’s given me; it starts to really seep into my brain. I’m feeling foggy, now. I’m floating. I’m falling. I can still faintly feel the pain in my side, but I’m oddly detached from it, like it’s someone else’s body, not mine.
“Am I dying?” I ask him. It would be sad to die now; when I’m on the cusp of adulthood, when Ignacio promised I would be able to leave this tower, when it will finally be safe enough for me to be without him, away from here. The Doctor shakes his head. “No. You might have, if you’d been like this much longer, but I’m going to take out your appendix. You’ll be fine.”
“Oh.”
He busies himself with different metal instruments; I don’t know any of their names. I watch his face, searching for some kind of relief, finding none.
“What’s your real name?” I ask, wincing as I feel the pressure of something pressing down over my torso. “The one your mother gave you?”
There’s no pain; but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel everything he’s doing to me. It’s an odd sensation. The world spins around me and I feel my eyes flicker toward the back of my skull. He’s so much more focused now.
“Are you cutting me?” I panic.
“Xavier,” the man says, probably trying to distract me. “My name is Xavier.”
“You’re cutting me. Where is Ignacio?” I whisper, my eyes full of tears. He would hold my hand and tell me everything is okay. He would lean down and blow warm air on my face to soothe me, like he did when I was a little girl. He would make me feel that everything was going to be okay but he’s not here.
“I’m not cutting you yet,” the man called Xavier says. “And I think he’s taking a call.”
Of course. A call. I bite down on my lip, trying to focus somewhere else, trying to pretend the rejection blooming under my skin isn’t really there. Ignacio would call me insolent if I dared to question him. He would pull my hair until chunks came out of my scalp, he would smack my thighs with his leather belt until blisters formed, he would push into my ass with no lubrication until I bled. His love is a cruel love, and I daren’t ask him to sit by me while this strange Doctor puts things in my spine and takes the feeling in my legs away and washes things into my veins that taste like an orgasm.
“What name did your mother give you?” Xavier asks me, flashing his teeth in what I think is supposed to be an attempt at a comforting smile. That’s what they would call it, in the books I’ve read. An attempt to put me at ease. But Xavier doesn’t understand that I was raised in the dark. I am the property of a man who does not give comforting smiles. I was raised by a man who gave teeth-bared smiles only before he sank those teeth into my pale flesh.
I blink rapidly; there are tiny beads of moisture stuck to my eyelashes, from my tears. “My mother didn’t give me a name,” I say. “Ignacio named me. My mother was dead before she could give me a name.”
“I’m sorry,” Xavier says, his smile gone, replaced by pity. He still doesn’t understand. I wasn’t raised on pity, either, and I don’t need his.
“It’s okay,” I whisper, staring at the ceiling, the only ceiling I’ve seen since the day I was born on this very floor. “I’ve never known any different. Ignacio named me Seraphina.”
“That’s a beautiful name, Seraphina,” Xavier says, as if testing it out on his tongue.
“It means fiery,” I say, as another wave of dizziness slams into me. “And Ignacio means ignite. He’s always saying it’ll be us who burn the world down together.”
“Huh,” Xavier says, apparently intrigued by my silly little life. “And do you want to burn the world down, Seraphina?”
I shake my head, my heartbeat picking up to a rattle as I hear Ignacio’s shoes on the steps outside. “I don’t want to burn the world down,” I reply, hoping Ignacio can’t hear me. “But I would like to see it.”
He nods, his face looking… sympathetic. I don’t need that, either. His emotions are useless to me, but I can’t pretend that I don’t like watching him as he tries to fit his expressions to my words. I’m about to open my mouth and ask him another question when a plastic mask appears in his hand, sweet-smelling air wafting from it as he places it over my mouth and nose.
“First things first,” he says, and I almost believe the kindness in his eyes is real and not a trick of the blinding light. “I want you to count back from one hundred. Let me fix you up. Then we can talk about seeing the world.”
I want to ask him if he’ll show it to me, but the world goes black. I don’t even get to 99 before I’m weighted down, a heavy stone at the bottom of a raging river.