First Person POV Nick
"Cherry blossom...falling from the sky..." The song playing the last time I was here rotates like a turn table in my head as I feel the sharp bite of the cat-o-nine tails on my right bicep. Warm blood courses down my arm, and drips on my leg, on the floor. Drip, drop, drip.
"I'm...sorry...", I hear whispered near my ear. The demons are paid to play, not do actual physical harm to paying customers, at least not harm that leaves a mark. It was the female. Female sex demons are always more aggressive than male.
"What difference does it make", I whisper. The sharp bite of the whip or the sharp bite of Amalia's teeth. Her claws ripping tender flesh from hard bone. What difference does it make? Lilith's nails digging into my scrotum, feeling like she was going to tear off everything that identifies me as a man, the devil twisting my brain until my own thoughts become the enemy.
The Dark Lord...entering me, violating me, ripped and shredded, inside and out. Red and blood and dark and freezing and burning. What difference did it make? My dead Caucasian mother's sister spitting in my face when I showed up on her doorstep, five years old and helpless. "Half-breed", she hissed. But that term only reminds me what I'm trying to forget. Who I'm trying to forget. When lightning struck my heart, splitting it down the middle as I released Sabrina's hand and freed her from her attachment to a thing like me.
It hurts. It all hurts. But it's all a jumble now. I don't understand if it doesn't hurt; I will do whatever I have to do to keep hurting just to remind myself I'm alive. So I run my mind over the scar that is the memory of the way Sabrina looked when I broke her heart, the tears dripping down her lovely face when I hurt her. I irritate that scar over and over until it too starts to drip blood. What differences does it make?
An entire bottle of absinthe on an empty stomach. It would kill a mortal. For me, I begin to smile slowly as the darkness creeps up on me. I'm seconds now from sweet oblivion. I know my head won't hit the floor because the manacles around my wrists are chained securely to the wall. Just let it happen, I say to myself, maybe this time I'll actually die, and it will all be over. What difference does it make?
"Oh shit, he passed out", is the last thing I hear.