Better off Red – Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

Rome. A very long time ago.

Lysette was sixteen, beautiful, and like all girls her age it was a curse. Like all girls from her walk of life, from her social standing, she was a servant to a higher purpose. That was how they put it, at least, the priests and politicians. Servant girls, they called them. A delicate term given to women they presumed to be delicate as well. Lysette was anything but. Three years now she had been a servant to the emperor, and she had not yet been broken. She didn’t plan to start now.

And these servant girls had it worse than any that had gone before them. Emperor Caligula was notorious, even now. His evil and depravity was legend in his own time. She could not imagine how such a man would be treated by history. And she, lucky her, was one of his favorites. The emperor was her age, or close to it, and yet his touch was that of a perverted old man. Most girls he would have once, tire of, and never look at again. If they were lucky. When the emperor found himself impotent with a girl, he would often kill them in order to try and improve his mood. It never worked.

She always wondered when it was going to be her turn. When he would finally tire of her. Night after night, she went into the grand hall with that thought running through her mind. At first it terrified her, the anxiousness of it. But experience has wizened her, made her see her situation more and more clearly each time. Now she did not fear such thoughts. If anything, she welcomed them.

That was the state of her life now. Each night she would go to the emperor praying for death, and each night it would not come. Each night she would feel sicker and sicker.

But she would not be broken. She would not let him destroy her mind to match his own. Not in this lifetime or the next.

Tonight was like any other night. She had been led down the hallway by the emperor’s men, always men with their thick sweaty hands gripping her bare arm too tightly until it began to go numb. They dropped her at the emperor’s feet as though she were a scrap of meat being thrown to a dog.

Caligula was accompanied by his sister tonight. Lysette had heard of their union, the way rumors spread around the palace, that the brother and sister that headed the state were much closer than siblings.

“You should be grateful, sweet servant,” Caligula told her, no doubt picking up on the visual disgust on her face. She tried as best as she could to hide it, but wasn’t surprised when she failed. “Not all whores receive such an honor as this. To be invited into the holy union.”

Sweet servant. It was what he always called her. Even after using her body, night after night for nearly three years, he didn’t know her name. To him, she didn’t have one. There was no doubt in her mind that he could not even conceive of her as a human being. In fact, knowing the emperor as well as she did now, she could see the delirium behind his eyes. She saw past the way he presented himself, beyond the face he wore over the truth, he mask he showed to the state. Lysette knew what he was. And she knew very well that he had never considered anything human, had never recognized a true reality of anything beside himself. The world around him didn’t exist, not really, it was a dream for him to bend and shape. Deep down, he truly believed nothing outside himself truly existed. And if it did, it was of a much lower species than he.

In some ways, this was the easiest night of her time as a servant. With his sister in the room, Caligula barely noticed her. Of course, when he did, he was doubly abusive, making up for a lack of attention. Like most men, he wore himself out before he could tire her. And then, in his vulnerable flaccid state, he would demand that Lysette turn away. “Don’t look at me,” he whispered, voice hollow and empty as the wind, “Or I’ll burn out your eyes.”

She took that as her cue to leave, but she was mistaken. The emperor grabbed her by the arm and threw her back down onto the bed, gesturing for his sister to leave. She left without a word. In fact, even when she stood beside her brother as he spoke to the masses, Lysette had never heard the sister speak.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Caligula said to her. “There’s one more round.” He grinned so wide that drool bled from the corner of his mouth. “And one more very special companion.”

He gestured into the darkness at the other end of the vast room. A form began to emerge, milky in the moonlight and almost glowing. At least that was what it looked like to her.

“This is a very special new girl I’ve found. I would like you to share in her,” he turned back to Lysette with that mad grin still glued to his face. “She is beautiful, is she not?”

Lysette nodded. In truth, she couldn’t take her eyes off the newcomer. The girl before her was older than she, but only by a few years it looked. Her face, though, looked ages older somehow. As if this girl had been around the world and back and lived to tell the tale.

Caligula ran a hand down the girl’s back. “She’s the only one that can truly give me pleasure,” he said, almost longingly. “The only one who can remind of the sheer, powerful pleasure of that first time.”

He took Lysette’s hand and pressed it to the new girl’s breast. The woman’s soft flesh was icy cold to the touch. She felt dead and yet here she was, alive, responsive, studying Lysette with world-weary eyes.

“After all,” the emperor said. “My first time was with a corpse as well.”