Stained (N.R)

Chapter 40

The moment I woke up, I was staring face to face with a familiar mask. 

It was the ripoff version of Steve and Clint merged in one. 

What was she called again? The Taskmaster? I think that's what Melina referred to her as. 

She straightened, and raised her hand. 

I struggled against the bonds the held me in place, managing to break one open with a rune. 

Her raised hand didn't descend on me, but rather, she removed her helm. 

My actions slowed to a stop. 

The face was familiar, but it was also a face that I have never seen before. It was scarred, left with bruise coloured burn marks and red raw flesh where the wound never healed. 

But nothing could have changed her eye colour or her face shape. 

"Antonia?" My eyes widened in shock as I took in the scarred face of my stepsister. 

"Katyusha." Her voice was raspy, barely a whisper. 

She made a whimpering sound, as if she was crying, but there were no tears, no expression on her face at all.

She released me from my remaining bonds, pulling me up, her eyes staring into mine, empty.

The Taskmaster was Antonia, but I couldn't understand why. 

Melina had said Dreykov escaped without a scratch, so why couldn't he save his daughter too? Even if his daughter was hurt, Dreykov had the technology to heal her better than this.

I couldn't comprehend why Dreykov would turn his own daughter into a mindless monster, but again, perhaps it has something to do with her gender, with our gender. 

To Dreykov, no matter how smart a girl is, how beautiful, how strong, she was only a tool, a tool perfect in seduction, in letting men get their guard down, in decorating their pride. 

Girls are resources, he said. But of course, he would think that only because he is not a girl.

He was not, is not, and will not be the only man who thinks like that. 

The world was born under the hems of a woman's dress, but the world would not let her wear it with pride. 

Too short, too long, too showy, too plain...

Antonia was not a boy, she was not a male heir, and that, to some, was an original sin. 

Seeing Antonia, I understood something that had been a hard puzzle for me. 

Why didn't Dreykov train boys? They were likely to be physically stronger, faster, and have more stamina. Men had superior strength to women, it was written in genetics. 

Wouldn't they be better tools?

But Dreykov is a man himself, so of course, he would not see those of his own gender as tools.

Antonia.... I wanted to tell her how disgustingly wrong her father was, turning his own daughter into something so monstrous. 

If I were a boy, if she was a boy, would everything have been the same? I couldn't tell. 

She whimpered again, and now, I understood what she was trying to say. She was trying to tell me that she was still conscious, but nearly completely under Dreykov's control.

She was telling me to be careful of her father, of the things he would do to me if he had me.  

She was crying, but she couldn't even let her tears form, because her father was in absolute control of her body. She couldn't cry, because her father didn't give her glands the permission to do so. 

Her every cell was tied to a line of code, a command system. 

I raised my fingers to her forehead, drawing a rune, catching her as she went limp in my arms, watching as a tear finally fell from the corner of her eye. "Sleep, Antonia, and when you wake, we'll either be all dead, or all free."

Long corridors, endless rooms, blank eyed girls....

These elements made Dreykov's Red Room. 

The girls were like herds of hounds, first one, then three, six, they seemed to heed some kind of voiceless summoning and began to close in on me, biting on my heel. 

Every time I look back, I seemed to be peering into soulless eyes. 

What is a person without free will. 

Nothing.

No memories, no emotions, no response.

As last, they drove me through a set of heavy double doors, into the face of someone annoyingly familiar, his fingers tracing my Ilya's jawline, as if examining a prized piece of jewelry. 

He snapped his fingers, and Ilya's head went limp, her body still rigidly straight, like some robot with a loose wire. 

The widows behind me kicked me behind the knees, pressing on my shoulder as I involuntarily knelt in front of him.

 "Ah, my prized work, my proudest possession." He turned to me with a gentle smile, as if some twisted man hiding behind the mask of a priest. "You have come home."

What a disgusting home.

The place I was raised, the place I grew up in, the place where I learnt about the world, was built on one man's greed. 

It was built on his evil, and we were his puppets, dirtying our hands for him. 

I smelt a sickly sweet scent in the air, so artificially sweet it made me want to gorge my throat out.

"I heard that you are trying to get rid of the name I gave you, change your family name into something else, something that does not belong to me." He twisted a ring on his finger, and sighed. "But you cannot do that, little Katya, perhaps your new found... love... can. Perhaps the widows behind you can, but you cannot, you, and Antonia, you will always belong to me."

I bit down slightly on my tongue, trying not to let him get to me, but the nightmare-like voice continued, each syllable piercing me through like a sword. 

"You have always wondered why I let you escape," he continued. "You must think that it's your luck that made you encounter your 'people', the teacher you had who told you who you really were, taught you your magic, your machines, the things that I could never dream to do."

A tremble came within me, a electric current ran through my body as I shivered. 

"But now I can do what you do." He walked closer and put a hand on my shoulder, putting his mouth next to my ear. "Because you are mine, Katyusha, I had your mother, and now I will have you."

He drew back again, watching with satisfaction as my pupils dilated. "You were never my adopted daughter, Katyusha, I have always had great plans for you. Your mother would not teach you what I wanted you to have. She wanted to teach you rebellion against me, so I found you a new teacher, new friends, a new family. I planned your life, I brought you everything you have." 

He looked at me expectantly. "Now I will bring you more."