[ENG.] Azazel - Lucifer's Son

9. The Sharpening

Sebastian didn't wait for me that day.

I stood there stunned for a moment, then wrinkled my nose in disapproval. With a shrug, I decided not to overthink it — I almost felt lucky to have a few hours entirely to myself, time I could actually use to sort through the tangled thoughts Stan had left scattered in my head like shrapnel.

I couldn't put together a single coherent sentence from what the professor had said to me. The whole walk home I turned it over and over, searching for a thread to hold it all together, but the only thing I could grasp was his certainty — and the sense of danger that had crept over my skin like a frost.

He was beautiful without any logic to it: the kind of beauty that hits you in the face like a gust of cold air. I described him to myself, and the comparison came naturally — like holding an ice cream cone on a summer afternoon, like a shower after an exhausting run — a simple, almost physical pleasure. Looking at him was a delight; feeling his gaze on me, his hands, was an ecstasy that scandalized every ounce of reason I had.

I turned toward Trafalgar Square, determined to invite myself over to Sebastian's for lunch and ask him directly why he had left me in the school parking lot like I was invisible.

His driveway was the same as always: the small, well-kept garden, the precise borders. It was January and the flowers hadn't come back to life yet — a shame, because Sebastian had always had a green thumb and a taste for beautiful things.

I knocked. The sound of wood against wood echoed longer than usual, until the door finally opened.

"Okay, explain something to me: why did you abandon me? I could've been kidn*pped, robbed, killed — who knows!" I launched in, going full dramatic and throwing my arms in the air like I was on stage.

He made a face, exhaled sharply, and let me in with an almost irritated air.

"Oh, come on, Jolie, stop playing the victim." His voice carried a studied calm.

I closed the door behind me and looked him straight in the eye.

"No, seriously. Why did you leave? You knew I didn't have my car." I crossed my arms and planted my feet on his living room floor like it was a battlefield.

Sebastian drew in a sharp breath through his mouth — a clear sign of annoyance.

"I figured you weren't coming out, and that Danielle would give you a ride home... or Stan." He said the professor's name with a smirk that had something disgusted in it, as if it left a bitter taste in his mouth.

"What's your problem, Seb? Why on earth would you think Stan would drive me home? That doesn't make any sense." I looked at him, surprised, curious — he had picked up on the same friction I had felt.

He moved toward the kitchen and sat down on a chair near the island — the one that always looked more like its own little kingdom.

"I don't like him, Jolie. I never have, not since the first day he walked into that classroom." His voice rose just slightly, the words landing more for his own sake than for mine.

"What makes you feel that way?" I pressed, suspicious and pushing. If Sebastian was reading him as a threat too, I wanted to know more.

"Don't lie to me, dragă — I know you too well. I know you feel it too." He moved toward the stove the way someone settles into a confessional.

I put on my best challenging expression, that go ahead and contradict me smile that always made him c***k.

"Yeah, okay. But a feeling can't cloud judgment. Objectively, he hasn't actually done anything to be condemned for."

I tossed my hair over one shoulder with a theatrical sweep.

"And besides, you i***t — instead of riding to a damsel in distress's rescue, you just take off?" I pointed at him accusatorially.

He blinked, exasperated by my theatrics.

"And what exactly would you have me do? Storm into the classroom and attack him?" He rolled his eyes.

"Well, if you're going to say 'I don't like Stan one bit'" — I quoted him directly — "then you shouldn't have left me alone. You should've barged in there like a bull and dragged me out." I ran a hand through my hair with the air of a romantic hero.

Sebastian let slip a half smile.

"You really need to stop reading so many romance novels, dragă — they're clearly getting to you."

I gave him a look that was threatening and amused at the same time.

"You'd better move the knives out of the kitchen, or I'm going to have a lot of fun using them for target practice." I smiled — sharp and a little wicked.

He didn't flinch.

"Speaking of which —" his voice shifted into something more serious, but with an undertone of nostalgia — "when are we doing a proper training session? It's been a while."

Target practice — arrows and knives — had been our tradition since we were ten. It was the ritual that had saved me after the day I lost everything.

The memory hit me with the force of a real flood.

My mother and father were separated in name only; they lived together for my sake, to keep up the appearance of a family. My father was a drunk who found in the poison of the bottle the courage to scream and to strike. My mother was under his thumb, and I had always felt like the cause of her resignation: she was afraid of social workers, afraid that if anyone intervened, they'd take me away. So she stayed. And I, a child standing still, should have done something. I didn't.

I watched her die slowly — the way memory gives it back to me: not with grim details, but with the nausea of helplessness. My father held her throat with a force that had the horror of something ordinary. I stood frozen — paralyzed by the survival instinct that, in that house, had always worked like a brake. I didn't cry, I didn't scream; I still don't know if it was courage or simply an inability to act. My mother, in the look she gave me just before she went out, forgave me for not stepping in. Maybe she understood that if I had screamed, he would have dragged her down with him.

I ran from my room that same night, through the small window. I ran barefoot across frozen fields to Sebastian's house, and from that point on my time became one long, continuous training: arrows, knives, courses, conditioning my body against the fear that one day it might resurface in that same bestial form.

We went out to hills and rocks, built shelters, invented drills. Sometimes we hunted — birds, wild boar. You learn quickly that blood has a way of consoling you and teaching you about life, if you take it into your own hands. Sebastian refined my technique: hours of shooting, the same motion repeated until you were sick of it, until the gesture became as natural as breathing. He always said the same thing: "You do it for your mother. For what she gave you. So her death won't have been for nothing."

When I came back to his parents' house — who took me in with a warmth I had never known — I slept badly, but I learned to hold the pieces together. My father seemed unaware, or drunk enough not to notice my absence. I often wished he would drown in his own ruin; that rage gave me the fuel to lift a blade, to sharpen an edge.

The first time I went back to that house after my mother's death, it was only to bring her body out. Without ceremony, we carried what was left of her into the woods; Sebastian and I dug a grave, made a cross from wood, and carved her name into it with our dusty hands. It was a makeshift burial, but it was ours — and it was a vow.

From then on, after every five shots I sharpened the tools, checked the blades, set my aim. It was caution, it was faith, it was law. And every now and then I brought wildflowers — or ones Sebastian grew in his garden — and laid them on the small hill where we had buried my mother. It was the only moment I allowed myself to fall apart and cry. He would stay there beside me, silent, a hand on my shoulder, making me feel like I wasn't alone.

Why didn't I report my mother's murder? There was no single simple reason. There was the very real fear that my father — with his violence and his street connections — could hurt me or take revenge on anyone who tried to get involved. There was shame, the humiliation of exposing to the light things the whole town suspected but never truly saw. And above all, there was my mother's plea. In her final looks she had begged me not to hand myself over to a system that might tear me away — the social workers, the procedures, the forced separation she feared more than death itself. She had asked me to hold onto that small scrap of normalcy that remained, and her request weighed more than any law. I was a child trying not to lose the only figure she had left, and I agreed. On top of that, I knew how hard it was to gather evidence in a house full of alcohol and silence — who would have believed a young girl if her father denied everything? So I stayed quiet — to protect what was left of my mother, out of fear, and because I believed no report would ever change a man already rotted to the core.

I bent over that memory the way you dig into a wound that needs to be opened. Sebastian watched me, his eyes full of that old, protective quality that made him seem older than he was — and a little more human.

"Whenever you're ready, we'll train," he murmured, in a tone that didn't invite argument but didn't feel threatening. "I'll take you to the range tomorrow?"

A smile spread across my face — tired but real.

"Tomorrow, then. And this time you don't get to run off on me, got it?"

He laughed softly and tossed me an apple.

"We'll see, Jolie. We'll see."

And as I sank the knife into the apple for an improvised snack, I felt the familiar weight of the metal in my hand: cold, trustworthy, ready. It was a small daily ritual that, like all habits forged in a storm, kept me steady.